Tencent offers a cloud storage account with 10TB free space

Good idea...but is the computer necessary?

Seems like just another piece of hardware in the chain that you need to make sure is working and keep running all the time. (Even if it is a Pi.) Can't you just get routers that feature ports for external storage? That way it would be a lot easier to make sure they're always online, and you're not powering an unnecessary unused device.

 

I'm not sure. I haven't looked into it extensively, but I've never seen a router that does a good job as a NAS. Plus, you need a way to run the BTSync software. This computer could serve other uses too (media server, etc). There are many scenarios where it's good to have a computer on the network that's always on. The rest can sleep.

 

Decent points. I suppose a Pi isn't exactly that big of a deal anyway. If you can get away with everything you just mentioned running on just one of those, I'd say that's a nice setup.

 

Well, the QQ app is still in Chinese, and there doesn't appear to be a way for it to display English.

I did get the 10TB -- the site is in English, but there's a PDF that's in Chinese -- and I think stuff can be uploaded directly to it from the PC and not just from a smartphone.

 

You already uploaded 10TB of data?

 

Where in my post did I ever say I uploaded anything, I just said I got the 10TB..?!

 

You did, did you?...

From the article linked in the OP:

"you don’t get all the storage at once. Instead, Tencent will increase your limit as you use it. To begin with that means you’ll get 1TB of space. Once you go past 500GB of data stored that limit automatically increases to 2TB. The same happens at 1.5TB of data stored where the account limit increases to 3TB. And so on until you reach the real limit of 10TB."

So...

Did you upload 10TB of data, or did Tencent change it's policy with your account...or did you just make the whole thing up?

 

And as you can see from the screenshot, the article is wrong!:

 

...or could it be that the meter is just theoretical? One way to test it...try to upload a file (or series of files) larger than 1 TB and see what happens

 

I don't have TB of stuff, I'll upload what I can.

EDIT: Well, it fails on big files, even though there's a choice when you click on "Upload" for bigger than 4GB.

EDIT2: Looks like it only allows you to upload smaller files, not sure what size. May try uploading again with a bigger file using Firefox. But at this point, I doubt that it'll let a bigger file through regardless of what browser is being used.

EDIT3: Well, with Firefox I was able to copy the error that shows in Chinese, and use Google Translate to translate it, and the error that shows up is: 文件过大 (File is too large), yet see "EDIT". Will try uploading something just around 1GB in size, if that doesn't work, will try smaller than that.

 

http://youtu.be/1ytCEuuW2_A

 

Well, I uploaded an MKV that was just over 1GB, it seemed to upload it almost instantaneously, but the icon within shows it as an ASF, but when you click on it to download it, it sees it's an MKV:

 

Hmm. Well it does say that it increases once you hit 500GB, so it may be that you'd never actually experience a "lack" of any of the advertised space.

Now one just needs to learn Chinese (and not care about them having access to your data )

 

I don't have any important 'data', I'm not working, so all I'd most likely use it for is graphics, like the ones in the screenshot, that I can get made into tshirts.

 

Most of the web interface seems to be in English, though.

Access to online data is expected, so you just encrypt as best you can.

In that regard, I like Tahoe-LAFS because you get both encryption and redundancy. Least Authority is selling S4, pre-configured Tahoe-LAFS storage on Amazon S3. Everything is encrypted locally before upload. With some work, it might even be possible to use both Amazon and Tencent for storage, and maybe even cloud storage in Russia etc, to distribute trust and ensure against collusion.

In that regard, are there any reliable Chinese VPN services? Routing a VPN chain through Russia and China would complicate things for NSA etc