This service is for pinning files on IPFS. Say, for example, that someone wants to publish a paper that they want to always be available (even if a government tries to take it down). IPFS helps by making distribution p2p, as anyone who accesses the file can also redistribute it until it expires from their cache.
Pinning removes this expiration, and serves the file forever. Eternum provides that service, making sure the file will always be on at least one node, and thus always accessible.
It's not really comparable to Dropbox or S3 at all.
Our marketing currently assumes you're familiar with IPFS, as I don't think the service will be too useful directly if you aren't. Maybe we should change that, though.
Another avenue for this is, for example, what IPFessay (http://ipfessay.stavros.io) does: it publishes a file on IPFS and then invites you to click a link to Eternum to pin it, even without knowing how IPFS or Eternum work.
If a file is so obscure that nobody has ever wanted to read it, and it was only on one node, and that node also stops serving it, then it leaves the network until someone puts it back in.
From my understanding it's more like web hosting with IPFS than file storage with Dropbox. You could put up an HTML web page and instead of running your own IPFS node in order to let people access your site, they run it for you.
Pinning removes this expiration, and serves the file forever. Eternum provides that service, making sure the file will always be on at least one node, and thus always accessible.
It's not really comparable to Dropbox or S3 at all.
Our marketing currently assumes you're familiar with IPFS, as I don't think the service will be too useful directly if you aren't. Maybe we should change that, though.
Another avenue for this is, for example, what IPFessay (http://ipfessay.stavros.io) does: it publishes a file on IPFS and then invites you to click a link to Eternum to pin it, even without knowing how IPFS or Eternum work.