We (Space Monkey) intend to make the device usable on its own, without the Space Monkey service, for people who purchase the device and don't want to continue the service. It's unclear as yet how close we'll be able to get it to a turnkey NAS solution, but at least it'll have Linux installed and you'll be able to SSH to it, use the drive, install whatever software you need, etc.
No. Although being a distributed network with similar reliability and availability and performance requirements, there are some similar technologies/approaches at play.
Hundreds of devices storing small files on your one hard drive could be more iops than the device can handle. Does Space Monkey account for other users potentially killing the performance of a single device?
These are totally valid concerns. The average home internet upload cap, especially in the US, is not very generous. But the idea with Space Monkey is that most of your ongoing data access will be directly from your own device. If you're at home already, that will be especially fast. If not, it will be slower, but we're still able to watch movies in remote tests over a crappy home DSL uplink.
Other people's upload bandwidth only needs to come into play if your device isn't available: its hard drive breaks, it gets stolen, your house burns down, etc. In that case, yes, getting all of your data back probably will be slower than you want it to be, but you will get it all back.
Regarding redundancy, be assured that Space Monkey can provide much better numbers than RAID-6. We do assume that a decent percentage of devices will have poor network uptime, and we want your data to be available and redundant even in the face of that, even if the "fancy algorithms" take more processing power on the devices than we would need otherwise :).
(a) I think that's the same problem that all consumer devices have that "phone home" for updates; game consoles, TiVos, smart TVs, VoIP phone adapters, etc.
(b) If all you need is archiving of your stuff, and you don't want ongoing fast access to your movies, music, photos, etc., then sure. Glacier is probably a better fit.
Yeah, Space Monkey is a business, and we hope to be able to make at least some money off the whole deal in the end.
But also yes, there are nontrivial ongoing costs to keeping the network working and working right. For example, we need dedicated online servers to allow NATted devices to talk to each other, coordinate storage use, and deploy security patches and bugfixes, and we want to add more features over time.
The encryption is done on the device. Other people's devices (obviously) won't have your encryption key, but since Space Monkey will have a web interface to get at your files, you can tell that Space Monkey will have access to your key.
Regarding durability, the Kickstarter page mentions:
Q: Is my data safe?
A: Yes! Super safe. Here’s why: when you put files in
Space Monkey, you not only have a copy of everything on
your Space Monkey device, but each file is chopped up into
tiny pieces, encrypted, then stored to dozens of locations
outside of your home, in such a way that even if half of
those locations were destroyed, all your files would still
be safe.
We (yeah, I work there) are gonna be taking the reliability and privacy of the network VERY seriously; no one would want to use a storage service that loses your data.
