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Online Storage With a Twist

Posted by timothy on from the wiseacres-will-volunteer-to-store-porn dept.

mssmss writes "For a long time, I have been looking for a way to securely store my files online without being tied to a single vendor — whose survival my storage depends on. It looks like Wuala has a way to do this, according to this story in the Economist. They use donated disk space of users to scatter your encrypted files over multiple computers."

4 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Nice idea by Hyppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's like RAID for online storage.

    Sounds great, but what happens when a massive worm outbreak occurs?

  2. Single point of failure by houstonbofh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "For a long time, I have been looking for a way to securely store my files online without being tied to a single vendor â" whose survival my storage depends on."

    And when the master server that knows where all those little pieces are goes down, you are still without your data.

  3. Hmmm.... by Facegarden · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hmm... sounds good. I'll donate 2TB of space each from multiple computers at different locations and between all of them i'm bound to have two critical pieces of your files, then all i have to do is shut them all down! Muah haha haaaa!

    And actually, what would happen if a major disaster shut down all the PC's in a major metropolitan area? Does the service provide enough redundancy that even if everyone in silicon valley went offline, my files would still be safe? I'd rather know where my data is.

    Also, slashverteisment? The concept is interesting but the story doesn't bring up the more interesting issue of privacy, it seems like just an ad.
    -Taylor

    --
    Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
  4. The lack of access control by apankrat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > I don't think I want to be liable for the data that someone puts on my PC

    I don't want random people's data on my disk. Period.

    I was a beta tester for Wuala and the lack of access control to my donated disk space was the biggest issue. I talked to their CTO and suggested to have an option of donating the space to specific peers only, which should've not been hard to do given they have the social grouping support in place already. He didn't see an issue with wildcarded access though, so they were not planning (nor in fact did) anything about it.

    --
    3.243F6A8885A308D313