Tencent offers a cloud storage account with 10TB free space

-http://www.geek.com/apps/tencent-offers-a-cloud-storage-account-with-10tb-free-space-1569151/

With strong encryption, why not?

One problem is that their site is all in Chinese

-http://www.weiyun.com/act/10t.html?WYTAG=weiyun.portal.index

Edit - If you click the Android or iPhone buttons, Google translate will explain how to register. But I don't see any PC option

Maybe a Chinese speaker will help us out here

 

There are quite a few English options...

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=2237384&postcount=13

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=2237655&postcount=16

 

That's true. But none of them are offering 10 TB storage for free.

 

Hi, all:
looks like this way:
Tencent's offer is limited to Mobile platform only,
furthermore, there are firefights among few heavy-weighted players, such as 360, kingsoft, baidu etc for free CLOUD storage offerings.
I would stay at side line to wait it out --to see who is emerged after all dust settle down.

 

Thanks.

Going through 10 TB on a smartphone would take a while.

Actually, now, I wonder... What would be the storage requirement for uploading 24/7 from Google Glass? I'm also reminded of SimStim I wonder what that would require.

 

1) 50 GB is pretty substantial, and would more than cover what most people need. (If not, you could always create multiple accounts)

2) I originally didn't recognize that as "TB", which leads me to the next point...

3) That sounds too good to be true. I'd be interested to read through all the Chinese fine print and find out what the catch is. The sheer size is a red flag enough, but then you've got foreign site of a sketchy country with a shady government and a huge black market... Seems to me to be more risk than it's worth.

If I need that much space I'm paying the $4.95/mo for unlimited from a reputable English-speaking firm.

 

Indeed

I get that they're just saying that for publicity.

Still, 10 TB doesn't cost all that much, and very few would ever get close, so there's little risk.

 

I wanna stick Google glass onto a balloon with helium in it. I want to set my Google glass free and it will upload a video for me so I can see its adventures. Or maybe better yet. I strap some small fans onto the balloon and make a remote control, silent Google glass balloon drone. I can then film girls sunbathing. When I'm done, I can fly it home.

 

@mirimir and @JackmanG
Just couldn't agree more.

 

...you...realize you don't need Google Glass for that...right?

 

But but..... Google Glass makes it so convenient, the video is uploaded to the cloud as I stream it so those fond moments of bikini babes are never lost. I call it, the Glass Balloon - Eyes In The Skies.

 

You are paying for NSA servers. Not that Chinese are any better but at least the Chinese won't dig up dirt on you and send you into a slammer (unless you live in China that is).

 

Sorry, Charlie...

1) NSA owns all the cloud storage in the English-speaking world? I find that hard to believe.

2) $4.95/mo...unlimited storage...and I can easily encrypt anything I send to it. I still think I'm getting the better end of the deal.

 

I've been thinking more about 24/7 video uploading. Uncompressed HD video requires about 11 GB/hr. With compression, it's about 2-3 GB/hr. But there's a tradeoff between CPU requirement for better compression vs network throughput and storage requirement for less compression. There's also the CPU requirement for encryption.

At 2 GB/hr aka 0.5 hr/GB for highly compressed HD, 10 TB would store about 5000 hr aka about 200 days. So you'd need a new free account every 6-7 months.

Vision is by far the highest throughput sense, and I believe that the bitrate is less than for HD, so those estimates are probably relevant for total sensory recording. I wonder how much non-sensory brain activity adds to that.

 

#3 - Absolutely.

Who is doing the $4.95 a month unlimited right now? I looked at the two links and all sounded familiar but I missed seeing unlimited at $4.95 a month. That sounds like a very sweet deal as long as it's not just a promotional deal that jumps to $49.95 in three months.

 

One other thought...

Make sure you stay away from fly-by-night storage resellers. It's all the rage right now. Of course, to take that literally you'd have to stay away from most all of them as they all resell the storage from Amazon, RackSpace, etc. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the ones that are almost like multi-level marketing. They set-up shop through LiveDrive.com, or something similar, give incredible deals, make money reselling themselves, take the bonuses and - disappear. If you've never heard of a cloud storage provider and especially if they have too good to be true deals or sell it relatively cheap upfront, do a little research.

 

I don't trust cloud storage, generally.

What would be really cool, though, would be using a bunch of cloud storage accounts as Tahoe-LAFS shares. You'd need several local storage proxies, which looked to Tahoe-LAFS like VMs with storage, but which actually buffered and interfaced with the cloud accounts.

 

The two that immediately come to mind are

https://www.crashplan.com
https://www.backblaze.com

Notice the baseline month-to-month is $5 and $6, respectively, but you can bring both of those down below five bucks with a longer contract.

AltDrive is another one. They actually have some interesting plans to choose from. Even Carbonite has a $60/yr plan (although it's limited to one computer).

Granted, these are "backup" services, so depending on the provider you might run into some restrictions or at least obstacles as to how you can get your data uploaded...but cloud storage is cloud storage. (Other aspects, such as how you access it, etc...are other aspects.)

Diino offers unlimited backup and 100 GB of extra storage for $49/yr, for example.

I'm sure there's more than a few more.

In what sense?

 

Ahhh....I hadn't thought about Diino in years. A Swiss company, too.

Thanks.

By the way, for anybody interested, Box (the old box.net) is finally rolling out "Personal PRO" plans that offer 100GB of storage and 5GB max file uploads for $10 a month. I've had a Box account since beta days and they have come a long way with how you can manipulate files on the server. For example, you can finally play music with their own music player, great iOS app, etc. They've always been strong in utilizing files for business use via faxing from the service and other things. Lately, it looks like they're to make a play again for the Joe Consumer market.

 

I don't trust cloud storage in the sense that my account (or the provider) might disappear without warning. For example, a provider might nuke all accounts that contain encrypted data, under pressure from some TLA.

 

Yeah I thought about Box, but figured the storage was too low for our discussion here. The file manipulation is a good angle though, so I suppose that might make the higher cost worth it for some people.

ADrive is another that starts paid plans with 100GB (but at $2.50/mo or $25/yr ) And that's only if their free 50GB isn't enough.

Bitcasa is another good looker...unlimited space, unlimited device sync, infinite file version history, for $10/mo or $99/yr.

I'm not sure about online manipulation, but it's advertised as essentially an online external HDD that never runs out of space, so you can use it for "storage or backup", so it can at least be used as an all-access storage server. Plus they claim encryption such that "only you can access". (Granted I outlined the pitfalls in that here, but it's still a nice extra to have.

As linked in the other thread I referenced above, there's these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_services

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_hosting_services


And if we're just interested in streaming music,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_music_lockers

 

That's an interesting angle, and a concern I hadn't considered, but I'm thinking it hadn't occurred to me because it's incredibly unlikely.

First of all, it would be a liability and PR nightmare. We're not talking about a secure email service with a couple hundred thousand users, where the expectation is simply private and secure email communication. We're talking about a business where the entire service is data storage...as in, "you keep my stuff safe and allow me to access it."

In most cases, the service is advertised specifically as a "backup"...

I can't imagine any possible scenario in which a cloud storage provider of any reputable size would essentially do the exact opposite of what its entire business is all about. (Unless of course it was some kind of Lavabit-secure cloud storage in which it was made clear to users that their security was priority number one, and at the slightest sign of trouble their stuff would be wiped.)

(And I assume by "under pressure" you mean something like the Lavabit situation in which the company owner voluntarily shut everything down so as not to be complicit in spying on his own customers...not that some TLA would try to force a company to delete accounts...as I assume the latter is least likely of all.)

But even supposing hell froze over and something like that happened, I would hope you wouldn't be using cloud storage as your only storage. I get the impression most people use it as simply a way to access their stuff from multiple locations...or at the very least, an off-site backup. I'm not sure I know anyone who keeps only a single copy of their stuff, and retains that copy in the cloud. (Other than their email, and maybe their iTunes purchases, of course.)

The odds that the storage provider would wipe your account are low enough, but the odds that you'd lose your online backup and then your local drive before you could back it up again somewhere else...seem almost as low as a TLA forcing a company to wipe accounts.

 

I do use them to provide large datasets to clients. But for my offsite use, I just use portable USB drives. If I were travelling internationally, I'd use cloud storage rather than carry stuff.

But I still don't trust them for backup. I like to have my backups on real hardware in some secure location, such as a safe deposit box about 100 Km distant.

Also, I typically use far more data than I could upload in any reasonable time.

 

Have you guys considered a creative solution with BitTorrent Sync? I'm in the process of setting up a home-grown cloud storage solution with a couple family members. Each of us buys a 2TB hard drive and sets it up with a computer that's always online (a Raspberry Pi plugged into the router or whatever). Then we each set up our own personal folder on all three drives. All of my files are stored locally on my external drive (encrypted of course) and then synced read-only using BTSync on the other 2 drives. They have the same deal. All we had to do was buy a 2TB drive and now I have a copy locally, one across town, and one in another state. No monthly bill and no untrusted third party.

http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html

 

...because it takes virtually no time to travel to a bank 100km away, gain access to a safe deposit box, secure it again, then travel 100km back...eh?