My cloud is your cloud

For all our concerns about Facebook, privacy, oversharing, its psychological effects, the tripling of its ad revenues in Q1 of 2016, we all still use it activity (well 1 in 7 of the world does, at least). One of the features a lot of people are irritated by is the “memories” feature that reminds you what you posted on a given day in the past. Usually, it’s a photo you snapped or a now irrelevant update, but today, there was a picture of sea thrift I’d shot 4 years ago and an update about a blog post I wrote six years ago on peer-to-peer file storage, not file sharing, storage…

Now, journalists are often criticised for not following up on news stories, so when this popped up on Facebook I thought I’d take a look to see if there were anything fresh. And, of course, there is. I knew there was P2P cloud backup has been around for a while, there was probably something on offer at the time of my original blog, but certainly more now. It gives you a distributed way to host your files that is putatively more bandwidth efficient than simply storing everything in one place on DropBox or the (as of 1st May) defunct Copy.com (b*st*rds, I had 365 gigabytes of accumulated free storage on that site).

So, here are a few P2P cloud storage/backup services that appeared in a very quick search. I haven’t checked them out personally yet but do take a look and let me know if you think they’re worthy: Symform, StorJ, CloudMe, Cubby, Infinit, Sia.

Pablo Valerio reckons P2P cloud storage has several advantages for individual users (although doesn’t seem to recommend it for corporations):

“Data is stored and replicated in multiple locations and different countries, but divided into smaller pieces. This ensures data integrity while making it difficult for hackers to obtain a copy of the entire file,” he says. “The ability to download data from several sources simultaneously increases network speed,” Valerio adds, a point to which I alluded above. He also points out that, “International users get better performance by accessing data from locations in different regions.” The key benefit, however, is consistency and presumably privacy: “It is more reliable because no single location stores the entire file, and no single company is responsible for it. Even if the provider (or tracker) stops working it will still be possible to retrieve the information.”