Symform - Free* online backup service

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41

I just received the first megabyte of data from Symform (1.3 MB, to be exact).
That entitles me to about 650 KB of backup space on the network :smile:

Edit: I got 20 MB now. Itā€™s coming in periodically (network traffic stops and starts, maybe due to new backups or simply network churn).

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42

Short-term I can see their business model working, but in the long term, say 5-15 years, I think that there will be tech companies with their own cryptocurrency, and tech companies that are out of business. The sheer amount of mass collaboration that is incentivized with crypto-currencies backed by strong services just will not have an equal.

43

I canā€™t tell whether Oracleā€™s business model is going to work 10 years from now (and 10 years ago many were saying Oracleā€™s finished). You may be right. Weā€™ll see.

In the meantime, unlike Storj (which doesnā€™t have a working product - the biggest difference) Symform doesnā€™t let one use their service to make money - any contributions can be reclaimed only in their backup service. Itā€™s less convenient, but it eliminates all payouts which is great for Symform as it largely relieves them from the need to use a cryptocurrency.
They could accept bitcoin payments, but since most enterprises need to receive invoices and contact Support, thereā€™s little need for anonymity and cryptocurrency.
Sure, they could use a 3rd party API to also accept cryptopayments, but right now thereā€™s little to no need for it. Itā€™d only be a distraction at this moment.

44

After running this for 2-3 weeks:

  • Iā€™m contributing 2 GB (only, for testing purposes).
  • I havenā€™t tried to backup or restore anything, I am mostly concerned about network utilization because I donā€™t want to have it disturb my usual browsing habits.
  • Since about a week ago itā€™s stopped filling up my system and itā€™s currently utilizing 1.3 GB out of 2 GB (kind of weird, but maybe thereā€™s too much capacity out there).
  • While it was filling up, Iā€™d get 30-50 KB/s, now itā€™s using 0.5-2 KB/s, probably just reporting in to the mother-ship.
  • To be honest I expected more churn, to say the least. And I saw a fair amount of outgoing traffic before (up to 50 KB/s), so maybe that was when a ā€œwhaleā€ provider dropped off or some other stuff was going on.

Related to churn, since Symform doesnā€™t give you coins, you can either provide your space for free, or get paid in the form of getting 50% of your space for online backup. The first group is probably small, so I would explain the low churn by the fact that most contributors have something at stake (their online backup). With SAFE we are told farmers will have their reputation at stake (make your own conclusion which approach causes less churn).

I havenā€™t tried to see what happens if I put online 1 GB of data and then lower my contribution from 2 GB to say 1.5 GB (it shouldnā€™t be possible, but in order to test Iā€™d have to try). (2 GB is the minimum to contribute, by the way, so the example is not possible, but hypothetical). I would imagine the service checks your utilization of the network and disallows going below 2x of what you use.

Thatā€™s about it. All in all itā€™s not a bad idea if you have a system with some 200 MB of free RAM and few GB of unused disk space. But is it more convenient (for backup; not for ā€œappsā€ or whatever) than having few hundred GB free on Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.? Probably not. Maybe the best target for these guys are small businesses with few TB of data, but that requires a lot of bandwidth to fill up, so who the hell knows.

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