I’m thinking of using Storj because I’d like a trustless solution. Are there any other good alternatives in the decentralized or Web3 space?
decentralized cloud storage
isnt that kind of an oxymoron?
Torrents kind of are that.
personal backups over torrent? and who would download that?
They’re saying that torrents are a form of decentralized cloud storage, not that torrents would be a viable means of decentralizing your own personal backups.
Isn’t that basically SyncThing? I thought it was BitTorrent under the hood.
Similar but no, Syncthing does not use bittorrent or the bittorrent protocol.
Though if you’re curious Resilo Sync (formerly Bittorrent Sync) is similar to Syncthing and does use bittorrent.
No. Why do you think it is?
“Cloud” infers centralized consolidation of resources in a datacenter. A PaaS, for example.
“Decentralized” infers any number of running instances of something that are not tied to any specific vendor, infrastructure, or location.
Cloud can be distributed, but not decentralized since the underlying controls of the infrastructure are themselves centralized.
“Cloud” simply means it’s on other people’s machines.
That is not what that term generally means. Somebody COULD be running their own cloud platform, but if you’re speaking to a large group of people and you say “Cloud deployed”, they understand that to be deployed to a Cloud Provider on a secured platform and location (AWS, Google, Azure…etc).
We don’t say “cloud” in engineering anywhere without meaning this. We may refer to a non-colocated deployment of something as “edge” or “off-site”, but never “cloud”. There isn’t a single engineer on this planet who would ever confuse “deployed to cloud” to mean somebody’s basement.
The name cloud comes from depiction of “somewhere on the internet” in network diagrams. I don’t know what corporate environment you’re in but you’re using the term incorrectly.
Lol, okay, bud. Not only are you absolutely wrong and seem to have no professional experience with this whatsoever: search engines, engineering blogs, Wikipedia, history, and every other known source of truth on this disagree with you, yet here you are arguing anyway. Amazing. 😎
I don’t know, but allow me a soft rant about the ‘distributed’ part;
Couldn’t selfhosters try to ‘organize’ and share these burdens ? Why pay for external cloud backup, or anything, when selfhosters can just help each other storing parts of others backup. Then everyone have an automatic back-up.
The tools seem to be there, but Its like there are all these super-skilled infra-structure selfhosters that know everything about self-hosting solutions, but they lack the self-organizing ability to sollve these typical - and a bit trivial, lets be honest - problems in a full p2p style. The result looks to be that all self-hostings solution above the threshold of an average individual selhoster, have to be done in the cloud, and everyone is ‘siloed’ in their own mini data center.
But, with existing tools, AI and a little imagination, it shouldn’t be too hard to ‘organize’ a little (though here) design a self-hosting p2p backup solution from existing tools. …or a solution for most of the other cloud services we still rely on…
But maybe its something else ? …to me, it just seems unnecessary for a high expertise self-hoster community that - when combined - are an absolute gargantuan cloud-service infrastructure …to still have such basic capacity issues (no offense meant to op, or anyone!), and still have so high reliance on cloud services. Seems odd to me…
when selfhosters can just help each other storing parts of others backup.
That’s essentially what Storj, Sia, etc… are for, they’re decentralized storage systems where users can contribute storage to the network which automatically distributes data over all the ‘hosters’.
Not sure this is what you are looking for, but syncthing is for self-hosting and it’s Peer-2-Peer. I use it to synchronize my important documents and photos across my devices, it has options for encryption and file versioning.
Syncthing is the 3 in my 3-2-1 backup strategy. It enables me to maintain 3 copies of my files: desktop, phone, NAS
I recently started a “backup ring” with my buddies who have their own servers too. It’s just folders synced over sync thing, each has their own folder, and we put stuff there that we want to access even in case everything I own burns out. Works pretty well so far.
Siacoin.
I really wanted sia to take off. I wouldn’t trust it yet though.
I have used it before and it worked just fine. Just don’t use it for PeerTube 😅
“personal” and “trustless” seem sort of at odds here. you want personal data, so you want personal storage.
what I recommend, if you have the time and energy, is to find another self-hoster you trust and be “backup buddies” with them. set up remote file storage on both your networks and send your backups to the other person’s server.
if you can’t find another self-hoster, then find a friend or family member you trust and mail them your backups on a physical disk.
Don’t forget to encrypt your backups before sending them, just in case… Better be safe than sorry
Problem is you need a way to decrypt that shit with memory loss and a burned down house.
Bitwarden
You can encrypt using a memorable password you can remember.
Don’t use storj. I used to recommend them, but they have instituted a $5 minimum charge to have an account. The tl;dr is that they are interested in B2B, not individuals.
I’ve moved over to Tigris.
Announcement: https://forum.storj.io/t/new-minimum-usage-fee-starting-july-1/30057/1
Here’s a follow up to the drama: https://forum.storj.io/t/a-follow-up-on-the-new-minimum-usage-fee-and-a-request-for-feedback/30089
Hit up the /r/storj for more drama if you dare to look at Reddit again :puke:
Oh, that’s disappointing. I was thinking of eventually using Storj as a second s3 endpoint for backups in addition to Backblaze.
Why did you choose Tigris over the cheaper B2?
I’m doing the archive tier which is cheaper than B2
I see.
Tigris pricing table for those who are interested:
Component Standard Tier Infrequent Access Tier Archive Tier ** Archive Instant Retrieval Tier Data Storage $0.02/GB/month $0.01/GB/month $0.004/GB/month $0.004/GB/month Class A Requests: PUT, COPY, POST, LIST $0.005/1000 requests $0.005/1000 requests $0.005/1000 requests $0.005/1000 requests Class B Requests: GET, SELECT, and all others $0.0005/1000 requests $0.0005/1000 requests $0.0005/1000 requests $0.0005/1000 requests Data Retrieval Free $0.01/GB Free $0.03/GB Minimum Storage Retention - 30 days 90 days 90 days Object Notifications $0.01/1000 events published $0.01/1000 events published $0.01/1000 events published $0.01/1000 events published Egress (Data Transfer to Internet) Free Free Free Free For reference B2 is $0.006/GB
You could check out IPFS, the OG.
If you set up something like Garage with borg with a bunch of other people you could create a network where you essentially swap hard drive space to ensure you’re all backed up.
But I think Garage assumes very high trust with your fellow hosts, so this doesn’t scale beyond direct social connections.
Filecoin showed promise as a nearly free option. I used to be a storage provider. Met a lot of other storage providers at conventions. The people involved were pretty alright. I haven’t interacted with the community in a few years though. Biggest problem I saw back then was a lack of a user friendly means of storing and retrieval. That might have changed now.
Whatever option you pick please make sure you encrypt your data before you send it off.
Thanks for sharing! I’m looking into Filecoin and I’ll be sure to encrypt before uploading.
