Hi,
my first post here. I did skim through the forums so I hope I’m not asking a question already having an answer.
I would like to know whether one could use cloud-based drives for farming.
We’re talking about personal accounts(no big datacenter) but would allow a 7/7 and 24/24 uptime : like Megadrive, icloud drive or such the like.
Hi @isafe welcome,
It’s not possible to farm through a cloud drive (to my knowledge), but it will be possible through a vps though. You need an operating system to run your vault on.
thanks.
Sorry for the ignorance, but what’s a VPS?
That’s a virtual private server (basically an operating system in the cloud, like windows or linux).
Virtual Private Server (cloud computing)
If you use cloud storage then the delays retrieving data would mean you could never retrieve a chunk before every other vault already retrieved it and delivered it. I’d say your vault would be classed as too slow and be ignored by the section.
neo said it all 
Yep, as per the above, it is very likely that latency will be the key factor in well performing vaults. This means a machine with dedicated hardware… you can shave a few ms by having it in a well-connected datacenter, but if you lose that back to unresponsive I/O then you’ll be perpetually late serving data vs others in the same region with snappier setups. I imagine that a dedicated server running a vault-docker instance would work though.
So the ideal would be a VPS having internet access itself, without having to go back and forth with the personal home-based internet connection, right ? Do such solutions exist?
That may give you the fastest responding vault, but also the more expensive one to run. You are paying for the VPS and storage and bandwidth.
For the home vault that might respond a little slower you are paying almost zero cost to run it since the vault is running on your computer that is already running. The vault is using spare resource. OR you could run a very cheap SBC+Disk at home using a few watts of power
So the VPS might earn 20% more coin over time than the home vault, but the VPS costs might and likely be more than that 20% and you actually earn less than the home vault of similar size.
But running a home vault with cloud storage is going to not work because of the lag/delays doubling or trebling the time to respond and earn little or no coin or even be rejected by the network as a vault.
ok, thanks for clearing that up.
Do we have any idea of the bandwidth running a home-vault might take (I mean, I don’t want to have it choke up my internet connection) and if this can be regulated through (SAFE-) software?
We will find out in Alpha 4. That is when we will be running home vaults again. And real data for bandwidth usage etc will be gleaned from that. Also if bandwidth is an issue there are plenty of bandwidth limiters for windows and linux where you can limit an applications use. It may even become part of the node/vault package (hopefully)
ok, forgot to ask about the above : what’s the name of that animal spelled out ?
Another issue (I’m just adding this one to the existing post) : do we know whether there will be any compression (possible, mandatory, automated) of the 1 meg chunks before upload ? It would surely speed up the process I guess and would help out with storage space capacities.
All data is encrypted → no compression possible.
yea, but how about before the encryption process or even simultaneously ?
You could of course store a zip file on the network… but you will still encrypt it before uploading. Encrypted on safe/in your vault, encrypted on every node that touches it, only after you download again can you decrypt it.
Single Board Computer. Some call them Computer sticks that you plug into any hdmi port and add a sd card or USB disk.
Well, in order to reduce latency, it does make sense to me to zip or 7z or whatever these chunks of data. It might even be a added security layer (like personally password protecting your zip file before sharing) against evesdroppers …
If you are the one uploading data then compressing it before you submit it for uploading reduces the size and thus bandwidth usage.
But if you are retrieving a chunk from the vault then there is no place for compression to occur. It will be the size of the chunk that was supplied to be stored.
Self encryption is encryption and effective against eavesdroppers
ok, so basically like a raspberry pi, right ?