What is Reddit's opinion of
Symform?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
➔ Symform website
By popularity on Reddit, this Service is:
10 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
it's already very possible and it has been for years with mono. my company ships p2p storage software written in C# and using the mono runtime for linux, mac, and various NAS devices. mono is pretty sweet.
No catch, does "absolutely everything" and "even more" than you can imagine.
Unlimited for free to another computer (even headless vps server) or unlimited $60/year to the cloud.
http://www.code42.com/crashplan/
OR
http://www.symform.com/how-it-works/free-storage/
OR
If you've paid the $$$ for 100TB of storage, I'm surprised you're balking at the price of tape. Anyways...
I do daily/weekly incrementals of my important data to a local fileserver with enough disk capacity to hold everything. From there I encrypt monthly full snapshots and dump them to a free cloud backup service Symform. I don't backup anything I could just download again... so my backups are only 400GB (of which I keep 2 monthly copies in the cloud service at all times).
I could probably dump to the cloud more often (i.e. every 2 weeks) but that's a lot of data push out at typical consumer upload speeds.
I'm very paranoid when it comes to backup and I take no chance.
For all my Mac machines, I back them up on two time capsules. For my Linux machines, I back them up once with rsnapshot + rsync to evbackup.com and a second time encrypted with tarsnap to tarsnap.com (which uses Amazon cloud storage)
I also do another encrypted backup to the cloud using Symform
I then have a local RAID-5 with 2-redundant-disks that's used once in a while through USB2 / Thunderbolt to back up all my machines at home.
Symform http://www.symform.com/hipaa-compliance/ has all the policies and procedures for HIPAA compliance very well laid out.
I have also used iBackup in the past for HIPAA-compliant backups, but your mileage may vary with them. Some of the sales reps will know what you are talking about, some won't, but they are the cheapest I've found.
I've played with it some, it's pretty cool. Though it's not actually "unlimited", if you start putting terabytes of data on there, they'll charge you for it. My brother looked in to it for possible business use at the company he works for (He's head of IT there). He came across a pretty interesting option though.
Here's some of the features:
- Free storage as long as you contribute empty hard drive space. Every 2GB you contribute gets you 1GB of free cloud storage. This is great for people with 500GB hard drive's that only use 100GB of it.
- It's completely decentralized unlike all other cloud storage, so no government agencies can order the company to hand over any data.
- Your data is compressed into encrypted chunks and spread out over hundreds of computers, each with unique keys. So, for someone to access your data, one user would need to track down where all of your data is, then collaborate with a minimum of 32 other users just to get one complete chunk of it. THEN they'll have to be able to decrypt EACH chunk which would take forever. It's basically the most secure system out there, and it's free.
- I haven't played around with it, but I'm told it has a good interface and works on pretty much all devices, similar to dropbox.
I'm really sad they decided to kill the one differentiating feature that was also an extremely smart and valuable part of their service. They basically shot themselves in the foot.
The best alternative I've found so far is SymForm:
from their FAQ:
> We don't require data centers to store data. We are aggregating the millions of computers all over the world (they become Symform “devices”) that run power 24/7, have excess local storage capacity, and have reliable Internet access. In short, we decided to create the world's safest, most cost-effective cloud storage by allowing customers to exchange cheap local storage for more valuable cloud storage.
Can you explain how you set this up? Or perhaps provide a link? This is something I'm extremely interested in doing.
I just recently set up symform by dedicating a chunk of my NAS so that I can get free off-site backups. Pretty cool, but very slow and not compressed (or so it seems).
worked in SEA for 8 years (almost no surfing) at microsoft then left to join a start up. After a few years at the start up i moved to SD to work remotely and i've been surfing whenever i want since. such a good move!
I work for Symform.
Here's some info on the backend technology: http://www.symform.com/resilient-storage-architecture.aspx
The FAQ's also have some good detail: http://www.symform.com/faq.aspx
And this FAQ specifically goes into great detail about how we process and distribute data: http://www.symform.com/faq-how-symform-processes-and-stores-data.aspx
If you want more info I'd be happy to answer specific questions.