I pay for dropbox for dedicated storage. it will be there. How long until the first stories of people not being able to get their files back out of BT Sync.
Also they don't talk about the hidden cost, that I assume you have to use a lot more of your HD to store other people's stuff and a load of your bandwidth.
Remember this system works by using all the clients as the server farm. And for that kind of system you need more redundancy than normal, so you're probably paying many X gb in harddrive space what you are storing on it. Want to store 10gb on it? got 30 or 40gb to spare? if not, stick with trusty reliable no hidden costs dropbox
That's what I thought it was, too, at first glance. It would be some gnarly math to figure out how to make the storage reliable, since clients could arbitrarily connect and disconnect at any time (carrying a portion of your data with it). I suppose it would be an algorithm similar to RAID, except that there would be an algorithm that would detect damage, such as not enough backups online for a certain time, and the risk the data would no longer be available, and then in response create another RAID node.
Bandwidth could be an issue, too. Maybe clients could get bandwidth and storage karma, if they accept a lot of data from other users and a lot of changes to that data.
Interesting idea, anyway.
Edit: maybe you could even sell your processing power for karma, too. And maybe even extract that karma to sell/trade/give to others.
Remember this system works by using all the clients as the server farm. And for that kind of system you need more redundancy than normal, so you're probably paying many X gb in harddrive space what you are storing on it. Want to store 10gb on it? got 30 or 40gb to spare? if not, stick with trusty reliable no hidden costs dropbox