Symform - Free* online backup service

So did you pay attention to that part where it says “add more free storage to your free plan with contribution”?

From your past comments and posts I am not too assured of your knowledge in this area, so I’ll try to challenge your claims:

  • MaidSafe is also a middleman (middlemen?). If not, can you speculate on reasons people invested in MaidSafe and where can the profit come from if not from the spread of what users give and get? I’m not saying it’s not going to be a good deal for everyone, I’m just challenging the notion that there’s nooone in the middle and yet magically MaidSafe is supposed to come out of this with pockets lined up more than before.
  • With these guys it seems I need to give 1TB to get 500GB. WIth SAFE network I will need to wait 6 months or more to earn 500 SAFE, or I’d have to now spend a ton of BTC to buy enough MAID to store 500GB on SAFE network (use a calculator and calculate for yourself).
  • A 3 letter government agency can kiss my ass. My files will be properly encrypted.

Symform is a backup app, while SAFE is more than that.
You made a poorly argued case that Symform is different from SAFE, which is something noone questioned.

I hope not the kind im thinking of :neutral_face:

How can Maidsafe be a middleman, with what takes place on the SAFE Network? Will they be able to collect a fee?

[quote=“janitor, post:21, topic:6171”]
With these guys it seems I need to give 1TB to get 500GB.
[/quote]Hmmmm If you give 1TB to get 500GB, doesn’t that mean that you lose 500GB? or do I have math problems?

[quote=“janitor, post:21, topic:6171”]
WIth SAFE network I will need to wait 6 months or more to earn 500 SAFE, or I’d have to now spend a ton of BTC to buy enough MAID to store 500GB on SAFE network
[/quote]500 Maidsafecoin costs $7 right now, that’s not really a ton of BTC

[quote=“janitor, post:21, topic:6171”]
My files will be properly encrypted.
[/quote]It doesn’t matter if everything is encrypted, if the app disappears from your phone/appstore, good luck with getting your encrypted files back. With the SAFE Network, it will be a harder task, because they have to let a protocol disappear.

Yes, the network is supposed to create coins out of thin air and a percentage goes to MaidSafe, who sells it on open market.

You have IT problems. If I need 2TB of capacity for off-site backup, I can pay for that by donating 4TB to the network and that’s a good deal.
You’ve been on this forum for a while so you should know that’s how the SAFE network is supposed to work (actually you need to donate 4x (not 2x) and then have to get GET to earn SAFE to be able to buy storage - many months of waiting and uncertainty).

500 MAID buys you 500 MB, not 500 GB. [@happybeing: this is speculation, not the price of SAFE storage, because storage costs will be calculated automatically by the network based on supply and demand, as will farming rewards, so it’s complicated and we’ll have to see how this works! ]

Maybe. I already said I would consider Symform for backup of my data. It wouldn’t be my only copy, so that doesn’t worry me.

Profit from apps they’re creating and will in the future?

What is this @janitor?

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In a couple per posts @janitor you’ve stayed from facts to speculation presented as fact.

I’m referring to the “you need to donate 4x (not 2x)” when does to various factors we don’t know what the ratio will be, or how the SAFEnetwork pricing model will compare. And to the point @Melvin refers to about MaidSafe: you appear to say they take a cut, whereas the plan is for this to go to any and all core devs, and it is evident that MaidSafe are trying to reduce dependence on them rather than use this as a revenue stream. My understanding is that their aim is to earn from from app development and other sources (not necessarily related to SAFEnetwork).

Please don’t make incorrect or speculative claims about SAFEnetwork without making this clear. All you need to do is say “I expect” or something like that before them. Alternatively, please “Reply in new topic” and back them up.

Okay I chose the words poorly, hoping to make a point that’s easy to understand for Eddy.
Of course coins would be created for storage provided by the farmers, but a percentage goes to investors, doesn’t it? And unless the coins are at some point sold, in the very long run all coins would end up in investors’ pockets.

Again no. Your attempts to simplify things are too say the least misleading.

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@janitor - I’m stealing the word, “freetarded”.

Bitcoin, friggin’ bitcoin has like eight devs working on the core IIRC. I know maidsafe nigh has to play dumb for legal reasons, but the users don’t. We know full and well that big money will be made by the dev team on account of being the main contributor to the network code in the early days and using their early adopter advantage to acquire relatively massive amounts of safecoin.

On-topic: I think the app needs it’s own crypto-currency to get people on board in the long-term. Once people learn that they can get paid to contribute resources to safenet/storj, the sell to resource contributers becomes a lot weaker.

No one ever said they won’t make money in the future. Janitor’s statement was false and that’s why I asked what he meant.

and using their early adopter advantage to acquire relatively massive amounts of safecoin.

About how much?

8 people * $50K = $400K/year.
I don’t want to research who pays them but I think they get some funding from the Bitcoin Foundation and similar donations from companies who use bitcoin to earn money part of which can be spent on development.

Symform takes a cut in HDD space. You donate 100 GB and get 50GB. I am still migrating my data from one disk to another so I can’t say if the 50GB is usable or before their RAID protection is applied, but I assume it’s after, i.e. you use 66.7 GB of the 100GB you donated to them.
Then they have 33.3 GB * 0.667 = 22 GB, so that’s the amount of usable capacity they can sell to other people.

There’s no coin except US$ in there. The approach is quite similar to the SAFE Network (when used for backup), just without Safecoin.

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I’m assuming that Symform only has private storage. Is there any kind of public data type networking system?

Symform is actually doing somethign very similar to SAFEnet – they are breaking up the data into chunks, encrypting it and storing it on ‘traded’ hard-drive space around the globe. I’m sure they have some of their own hard-drives that they used to bootstrap their network, but they are taking advantage of users hard-drive space just as SAFEnet intends.

Their system is however centrally managed, unlike SAFEnet which will be fully distributed. So encryption keys are stored with them and if they get shut-down for whatever reason, the data, which may remain intact, will likely become inaccessible.

Looks very like how Safe works and is patented too, which may need looking into as another “risk to Safe”. Looks like a Microsoft/Amazon version of Safe really. My worry has always been the Big Boys just nicking the tech and building on it, as I very much doubt massive legal battles can be afforded by Maidsafe. A related attack would be for Govts to encourage use of the "friendly/legal version of this type of tech.
The frequently asked questions section is interesting and hints at possible system requirements for sustaining Safe Network…maybe? The patented bit appears here:

"Symform has developed patented technology that is more redundant and secure than the centralized data center approach. We assume that all Symform devices are insecure and unreliable. This is the basic foundation of our architecture. We address this by encrypting the data using the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) at source. We then divide the encrypted data into blocks. Each block is then shredded in 64 equally sized fragments. Then, we add 32 parity fragments to every block using an error correction algorithm called Reed-Solomon. This results in 96 fragments with built-in redundancy and security where any 64 can be used to reconstruct the block. These 96 encrypted fragments are then distributed randomly to 96 devices within the Symform Cloud Storage Network. We call this patented technology RAID-96™.

It would be interesting to compare patents I think…Just out of interest, hypothetically, say Microsoft/Amazon infringe Maidsafe’s patent - are Maidsafe in a position to do anything about it? I’ve no idea really, but it’s a concern.
This ties into the "risks to Safe Network thread, but not sure how to link. :smiley:

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14 posts were split to a new topic: Early demand, and effect on storage costs, after launch

They can rent storage servers in several locations around the world, and the rest can be provided by users.
If data can be lost only if 1/3 or more chunks is lost, they would not need to provide much more than 2/3 of capacity by themselves.
If they implement QoS or tiers they could send the paying customers’ data only to their own servers, and non paying only to peer-provided storage.

I was trying to point out how the maidsafe will be the group of people netting the dev rewards for a long while, despite the their expressed intention for the opposite to happen.

If bitcoin is anything to go by, if the project does what it’s suppose to do, I’d say It’ll be worth some serious **** you money.

@janitor I mean that Symform will need to set up a cryptocurrency that works with the program that is paid out to the storage providers instead of free space, since safenet and other projects effectively does that.

That would be interesting,
I imagine most people are okay with bartering their space and bandwidth in return for service, but there may be a small or large group of crypto enthusiasts who would like to get paid in BTC.

But at the same time this group would constantly bitch about the fact that Symform holds the encryption keys…
Maybe it’s better for them to stay away from cryptocurrencies as long as they want to keep their current approach to encryption.

Was that aimed at me? I’m not bitching about this fact, I merely pointed it out as it’s one of the relevant differences between the two systems … is it not?

I’m talking about Symform’s positioning. Enterprise backup s/w can take encrypted backup, so they don’t care if Symform owns the keys for the 2nd round of encryption that happens on Symform. It’s a huge market and the lowest tier that actually matters to P2P backup providers.
The crypto backup market isn’t relevant to Symform. There’s no reason why they should care what crypto users think. That’s all.