
With Plug, Create A Personal, Subscription-Free Dropbox With Your USB Drives - iProject
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/10/with-plug-create-a-personal-subscription-free-dropbox-with-your-usb-drives/
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EvanAnderson
Here's their Kickstarter: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-
guys/plug-the-brai...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-
the-brain-of-your-devices)

They mention in the "The Tech" section that they're doing a VPN between the
"Plug" and clients and that they've gotten it to punch thru "any main NAT &
firewall we tested" and further say "it's decentralized when possible" but
don't go into any more specifics. I'd like to know what their mechanism is for
resolving the Plug's public IP address. Presumably they'll be running some
dynamic DNS servers or some proprietary location protocol but since they make
a point of saying they're not a subscription service I am immediately dubious
as to how they plan to continue to finance running those servers.

This entire class of products just makes me sad. It would be really neat to
live in a world where the bandwidth (and lack of transfer quotas) actually
existed that would permit us to take advantage of the exceedingly cheap large
storage devices that we can purchase and put on our home and business
networks. I don't see that world existing any time soon, at least in the
United States.

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bytelayer
I'm guessing they're running a reverse SSH tunnel through their own servers
which your devices then connect to to get to your hard drive. Probably
connecting to a common port such as 80 or 443 to avoid any issues with
firewalls.

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zedpm
From their Kickstarter: "With Plug, we invented a technology to transfer files
instantly. No matter their size, no matter their number."

I hate to see an interesting project make silly claims like that. Whatever the
truth of the matter is, it won't match what they seem to be implying.

~~~
adrinavarro
They likely mean sending an authorization to your files instead of the actual
files.

Which is very, very silly as a claim.

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rexreed
How is this similar to or different from PogoPlug?
[http://pogoplug.com/devices](http://pogoplug.com/devices)

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unsignedint
Not sure how this is better than BitTorrent Sync
[http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html](http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html).

BTSync runs on many NASes, and $40 Raspberry Pi.

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yoda_sl
Looks in some way similar in concept of File Transporter from Connected Data:

[http://www.filetransporter.com](http://www.filetransporter.com)

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mlschmitt23
Reminds me of Pogoplug.

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rexreed
That's what I was thinking. The only issue is accessing PogoPlug as a file
system. I had to access it as root and create a Samba share, but it's not very
reliable. I have one of the older PogoPlugs (pink).

~~~
mlschmitt23
Me too! I ran into the same sort limitations, eventually hacked it into some
sort of linux server. I've probably still got the pink guy at the bottom of
some junk box somewhere.

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codereflection
If it's true that they've gotten it to punch thru any main NAT & firewall
they've tested it's already ahead of Bitcasa, who STILL hasn't added proxy
settings to their client.

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acadien
What is the advantage over dropbox? My dropbox app already automagically
uploads photos taken from my phone. Am I missing something?

~~~
WalterSear
No monthly fee for unlimited storage.

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salibhai
Does Plug provide any redundancy or "RAID" like features?

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mayneack
Looks like you can pay $5/month to do it on their servers. No idea on the
purely local solution

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Davertron
I didn't see anything about them having their own servers, but they do mention
you can use something like BitCasa or Carbonite along side Plug, which run
about $5/month for unlimited backups.

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webwanderings
Wait, so I have to keep my computer ON (the one which has this USB device
connected) and I am supposed to feel I am using Dropbox?

I could do a whole lot more if I could keep one of my computer ON 24x7x365
without using a $69 device.

~~~
EvanAnderson
The computer with the USB devices connected is the "Plug" itself. It's just a
tiny embedded server w/ a USB device port on one end and wired Ethernet on the
other.

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captiva12
how different it is from TonidoPlug? TonidoPlug also provides personal cloud
sync.

