
One device, 1TB of personal cloud storage - blaze33
https://www.spacemonkey.com/
======
tckr
I was one of the kickstarter backers and I am quite disappointed in the
product … so far as I have dismembered the SpaceMonkey and the 2TB hard drive
now is part of my Synology NAS setup.

SpaceMonkey's features are at best rudimentary and only usable as a personal
cloud storage. Don't even think about working in a team (to be fair, the team
is working on sharing features).

The device used huge amount of bandwidth and made the network in my coworking
space unusable.

So today I can only recommend to look into a different solution …

~~~
antr
I too was a backer in their Kickstarter campaign. Due to the poor
communication, continuous delays, and uncertainty on pricing and ownership, I
requested a refund. I then bought a synology NAS, setup it up with raid 10,
vpn, and Amazon glacier backup. I couldn't be more happy with the decision.

Since then, SpaceMonkey got acquired... which I find fascinating.

~~~
tw04
Skip the glacier and use crashplan for backup. Cheaper, and better options for
restoring your data (like having a drive mailed to your house vs. pulling it
over the WAN).

~~~
jm4
Unfortunately, Crashplan doesn't work on a Synology box. Even if you are
willing to muck around in Busybox it still won't work because there is no
inotify support. The best you can do is sync your Synology to a PC and then
upload to Crashplan from there.

Support for S3 and Glacier is built in and very easy to configure. It's not a
major issue if you have a RAID setup because it's less likely you will have to
restore from backup. I've only had single drives go bad and I hotswapped them.
I would feel much differently if I had a single drive unit.

~~~
driverdan
That's untrue. Synology devices have supported CrashPlan for a while.

DSM 4:
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToSetUpCrashPlanCloudBackup...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HowToSetUpCrashPlanCloudBackupHeadlessOnASynologyNASBackupStrategies.aspx)

DSM 5:
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/UPDATED2014HowToSetupCrashPlan...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/UPDATED2014HowToSetupCrashPlanCloudBackupOnASynologyNASRunningDSM50.aspx)

~~~
junto
To be fair, this isn't a Synology package, it is provided by one guy who works
hard to try and get the Java Crashplan code to work on Synology. When Synology
upgrades the DSM it stops working. Check out the forums to see the pain points
people have to address to keep this headless client working:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=synology+crashplan+not+Worki...](https://www.google.com/search?q=synology+crashplan+not+Working)

It is a hack. There should be an official release from Crashplan or Synology.
Same for the other big backup cloud providers. If there was something better
and supported on Synology than Amazon S3 or Glacier, I'd personally be
prepared to get my wallet out. These companies are missing a big market of
Synology owners who are desperate for an alternative, and no I don't want to
use HiDrive.

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unwind
So, if it's "Only $49/year" (top of page) but also provides "1TB of personal
cloud storage for $10/month" (bottom of page), how many months are there in
their years? Do I pay per year, or per month? Is the hardware "free"?

Very confusing, and that took _maybe_ 20 seconds to find.

~~~
alenlpeacock
The confusion results from two different plans:

Plan A: buy the device upfront and own it. Price includes 1 year of network
backup service. After the first year, if you want to continue the network
backup, it's $49/year ($4/month).

Plan B: don't pay anything upfront for the device and lease it plus the
service for $10/month for as long as you like.

Plan A is the only service available directly from the website currently, and
we need to clarify the copy on the webpage -- thanks for pointing out to
confusion.

~~~
gregd
As a Kickstarter backer too, we've pointed out to you guys for _months_ that
your pricing scheme was confusing and didn't make any sense. You haven't
cleared it up any since.

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mrb
I have been watching Space Monkey for a while... I love the concept of local-
to-your-home-network storage made easy to use and easy to share anywhere, even
on devices outside your home network. This easily beats any cloud service when
it comes to synchronizing speed because I can sync at 1 Gbit/s on my GbE
network, vs. the ~10 Mbit/s uplink of my cable Internet.

There is also Pogoplug [1] which is a superior idea IMHO: the user provides
his own USB hard drive(s). This reduces the price of the device and gives more
space flexibility: you can connect any size and any number(!) of drives via a
USB hub. There is another company doing something similar to Pogoplug, but I
cannot remember their name at the moment. Of course the downside of Pogoplug
is that there is no backup. But for my own needs, I would prefer Pogoplug's
trade-off (unlimited storage & no backup & no constant Internet traffic)
compared to Space Monkey (1TB limit & automatic backup & constant ~400kbit/s
of traffic background to the SpaceMonkey distributed network).

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/5/2910802/pogoplug-
series-4-r...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/5/2910802/pogoplug-
series-4-review) (I link to a review because the company's main website does
not do a good job of describing the product:
[http://pogoplug.com/devices](http://pogoplug.com/devices))

------
blaze33
Seeing the discussion around disk42 (Saas version of seafile)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8739094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8739094)
I thought it would be a good time to repost the space monkey link (not that
I'm affiliated nor a user) to see where we are in terms of distributed storage
protocols now.

Some q&a I had with their co-founder:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996053)
(parent discussion mostly about an alleged kickstarter scam)

~~~
notum
Actually Space Monkey was discussed before as well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5564546)

While the fragmented/distributed backup approach is cool and useful some
people might not like paying $50 for the privilege of seeding other people's
files with their bandwidth.

~~~
blaze33
Thanks, I hadn't seen this thread before, I was actually thinking that an open
protocol would allow you to have a fast/reliable/etc. backup in exchange of a
share of your local storage.

Obviously if it's phrased like I'm paying to have other people use my
bandwidth, that's a big issue.

~~~
ansible
A few years ago, when Dropbox was starting to get popular, I was thinking of a
similar scheme. You would pay for the device, and then you would get X% free
cloud storage as long as it was online. Some people would prefer a fixed up
front cost and no monthly fee.

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cabirum
"So, what a wireless speaker has to do with cloud storage?" — my first thought
after opening the website.

"Oh, its not wireless"

"And not a speaker."

------
zhte415
So, the storage and distribution model is a bit like FreeNet, distributed
across other devices, but everything is private, no sharing?

~~~
alenlpeacock
Everything is private, every user has a unique key associated with their
account, and every object (file and folder) has unique, individual encryption
keys generated for it.

Because of the way data is encrypted, the system supports sharing at the file
and folder level without granting access to other data in a user's filesystem.

------
akerl_
I admit to being confused by their security statements. Is the OS and code
running on the device open sourced? Given that it looks like the device is
handling the encryption, and I got the device from them, I don't see any
publicized way for me to verify that any encryption is actually happening.

------
RyanMcGreal
> Whether you use an iPhone, Android, Mac, or Windows, we have you covered.

Does it support Linux?

~~~
cefstat
The page [https://www.spacemonkey.com/tour](https://www.spacemonkey.com/tour)
mentions under Linux "Alpha access by request".

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thedangler
I want to try this one.
[https://www.lacie.com/ca/products/product.htm?id=10597](https://www.lacie.com/ca/products/product.htm?id=10597)

~~~
alenlpeacock
One of the reasons Space Monkey exists:
[http://www.infoworld.com/article/2856553/cloud-
storage/you-c...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2856553/cloud-storage/you-
cant-buy-a-cloud-at-best-buy.html)

------
kolev
People continue to abuse the term "cloud" these days...

------
rehemiau
[http://sherlybox.com/](http://sherlybox.com/)

I'd say sherlybox is a better deal

~~~
serf
[http://pogoplug.com/devices#pick](http://pogoplug.com/devices#pick)

a top end pogo plug with a 3TB drive would be cheaper and more capable
(usb3.0/sd card/user choice in HDD), or you can save fifty bucks if you don't
need multi-user support.

