To me, it sounds very similar to just using some sort of revision control system.
I keep my home directory in revision control on dreamhost (svn now, but meaning to upgrade to git) to keep my three desktops and laptop in sync (plus a pretty web gui for doing stuff remotely).
And, for media, several years ago I put together 8 250G drives into a RAID5 (with 1 hot spare) giving me 1.5TB of storage. It was fairly impressive at the time ...
I think the biggest problem with the idea of a 'storage cloud' is the lack of ubiquitous bandwidth/internet access ...
It would be amazing to have network access be so pervasive that we didn't need iPods with storage - they could just access our 'cloud' of media from anywhere in the world. I don't know much about EM - would something like that even be technically possible (ignoring the feasibility issue for a moment)?
I don't think you'd absolutely need ubiquitous internet access if the underlying "cloud" was based on a network filesystem that supported disconnected operation. So some files would be synced/cached locally. And then when you went off-network you'd still have access to (some of) them.
that still doesn't solve the problems of different devices having different capacities.
For example, my entire music collection is ~100GB (on my file server at home). On my laptop, I can afford to devote ~40GB to music, and on my iPod I can get ~30GB. The only way I can think of to solve this sort of problem (i.e., guarantee that I always have access to the song I'm looking for) is to have network access. And then I get 'synchronization' for free since all my data is in one place anyways.
I have a Mac Mini at home with 2TB of attached storage (mirrored RAID to 1TB).
I use Offline Files to keep a copy of my data on all my laptops (including VMWare Fusion for my Macbook). For my laptops with smaller hard drives, I keep less stuff available offline.
It works perfectly - I couldn't function without it, and the redundancy/convenience is awesome. Having a Mac Mini I can then use as a media centre as well is a nice bonus. Cost the same as buying an embedded Linux solution too (such as a Thecus box).
I keep my home directory in revision control on dreamhost (svn now, but meaning to upgrade to git) to keep my three desktops and laptop in sync (plus a pretty web gui for doing stuff remotely).
And, for media, several years ago I put together 8 250G drives into a RAID5 (with 1 hot spare) giving me 1.5TB of storage. It was fairly impressive at the time ...
I think the biggest problem with the idea of a 'storage cloud' is the lack of ubiquitous bandwidth/internet access ...
It would be amazing to have network access be so pervasive that we didn't need iPods with storage - they could just access our 'cloud' of media from anywhere in the world. I don't know much about EM - would something like that even be technically possible (ignoring the feasibility issue for a moment)?
A guy can dream ...