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 …
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.
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).
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.
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:
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.
Crashplan works fine on Synology boxes, and there's more than one way to get it installed. Crashplan has an official guide (iirc), and there's packages on the SynoCommunity repositories that can be installed through the App Center.
Crashplan doesn't have any native integration with Synology NAS devices, but there are a few relatively painless ways to get their Linux backup agent running on a Synology device.
Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you, tckr. Since initial delivery, we have made some great strides at reducing bandwidth usage. Just to be clear, we only hear about this being a problem for users with really small uplink bandwidth. As a co-founder at Space Monkey, I've subjected myself and my family to living with Space Monkey on this type of a link -- I have the lowest tier DSL connection available from my ISP in my own home and run Space Monkey there without problem currently.
We have recently delivered shared folder functionality via the web client, and are working on shared folders for the desktop as well. I've been personally using a beta version of desktop shared folders for collaboration for over a year. We want to make sure we nail this experience before releasing it more broadly.
Thanks for backing us early on! Hope you might give us another look at some point in the future.
Event with cloud storage costs approaching $0 we need a product like SpaceMonkey. I still admire your approach and I will keep up to date with your progress.
I'm also one of the Kickstarter backers. The device's bandwidth usage indeed interferes with normal usage of the network. When I contacted support, they told that they wouldn't add a lower bandwidth cap setting.
I had to disconnect it months ago and the device has been stored since then.
The device needs around 400kbps of uplink capacity currently, though we are working to lower that.
In my own home, I'm on the slowest DSL tier that my provider offers, and only have 700kbps upstream. Space Monkey works fine here, and I can still do dual Netflix streams while it is running. Some users will have to manually adjust their bandwidth settings in environments like this.
That's a number we hit on experimentally. Constraining bandwidth below that, currently, causes the network backup part of the system to perform very, very poorly, resulting in your data not getting out to the system in any sort of reasonable timeframe.
This is in part due to factors that we have some control over and can tweak to allows less capable links to make progress (and we're hard at work on this) and partly due just to plain old physics: if you want to be able to push N GBs of data to the network, with some redundancy factor R, and allowing for self-healing of locations that may leave the network due to failure or otherwise H, and also allow some amount of access from other devices in the cooperative network, in some given timeframe T, there's some math that indicates how much bandwidth is needed theoretically, even with everything optimized.
The good news is, I believe we have some wiggle room here to optimize out still.
Not everyone lives in a well connected city; I live in a rural area and we can only dream of 400kbps currently. It's a problem which will not be a problem in the future, however they have been saying for many years now that 'soon' it will all be different.
>>I was one of the kickstarter backers and I am quite disappointed in the product
If you are going to throw out this statement please give specifics: Did they miss milestones? Did they promise certain features and not deliver on them?
I tried to point out some of the perceived flaws of SpaceMonkey in my post.
A specific problem is that the ability to copy files with LAN speed to the device turned out to be true only for small files. If you have gigabytes of files you can mount it as a network drive in linux and have around 32MB/s write speed.
On Windows and Mac the client will cache files in a temp folder and copy the to the device. So you can't just unplug your laptop and leave immediately but have to wait for the sync to finish … that is some functionality they promised in the kickstarter campaign.
And I experienced problems with the offline mode where you are supposed to use the SpaceMonkey network to retrieve your files if your device is offline. This didn't work in my case.
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.
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.
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.
First thing I read: $49/year. Last thing I read: $10/month. No further clarifications. Not something that evokes trust, esp. when backers are saying they've been shouting about this for months. Even in stating "Plan A: buy the device upfront and own it" - ok, how much is that?
Yeesh, I missed the monthly charge. What legitimate reasons other than pure profit would they need to charge a non-trivial monthly charge? Unless they are completely failing to sell enough devices to accommodate the distributed storage, they aren't having to store the data themselves. At most it seems they just have to have servers to facilitate the distributed coordination.
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).
Seeing the discussion around disk42 (Saas version of seafile) 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Taking care of your own backups" involves moving drives off-site, like having a backup buddy you can swap drives with once in a while. Unless you do this frequently you're always at risk of losing considerable amounts of data.
Suffering a calamity that causes you to lose everything in a physical location is rare, but it happens. Floods, fires, or war do happen. Having encrypted backups in the cloud means a lot less will actually be lost in that case.
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.
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.
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 …