[smrtinsert]

Trust the cloud they said, it's always there they said.

In all seriousness, the need for local, speedy, transparent and ubiquitous data redundancy is still there and if anything growing.

Consumers want a 'refrigerator' of data - be it documents, photos, etc. Buy, set and forget.

Huge opportunity there.

[ChuckMcM]

I tend to agree with this. Local broadband access is good enough, and IPV6 spread widely enough, that you could make a network accessible data fridge that lived in your house work. Using the cloud for offline encrypted backups only.

To work though it will require some exceptional simplification and product engineering.

[ghaff]

I'm very cautious about exposing my home network to the Internet. I can't really see putting my primary data storage on a system that's fully exposed if some critical vulnerability is discovered. I need everywhere access to a pretty small portion of my data.

Even given properly managed encryption one has to assume the system could get wiped which makes other backup regimes necessary. As you say, hard to get bulletproof. Not that most people are bulletproof today.

[ChuckMcM]

I think you are right to be cautious. It would be an interesting paper to read on the attack surface of a 'cloud storage provider' versus the attack surface of a single appliance.

In an earlier life I managed the implementation of system software on an Internet appliance. Later I worked in a team that implemented the system software in a storage appliance. It is a challenging thing to get right for sure. As with most things you can't really get to perfect. But I do believe you can get to "good enough" which is to say that for a large swath of the population I believe it is possible to build a dedicated storage appliance that you could leave connected to the Internet 24/7 and its systems would not be compromised.

And if you worked with applications that currently use 'cloud storage' so that your data is always available to you anywhere you have net access, I expect you could limit cross application vulnerabilities. You would do that by brutally simplifying what could be done on the appliance to the bare minimum, not even an OS as many would define it.

The advantages over the current notion of 'cloud' would be three fold, one your appliance would never withdraw its API and make your application unusable, two it would never be possible for a third party to be served an NSL which would give access to your data without you knowing about it, and third there would be no "giant bucket of user credentials and information" honeypot that once compromised at the cloud server would force a massive re-validation exercise on you and possible other issues with a re-used password.

I know from experience that attacks directed at an appliance stand out. That helps in making defense easier.

[joshmn]

> Consumers want a 'refrigerator' of data - be it documents, photos, etc. Buy, set and forget.

Synology comes close. Their current marketing strategy doesn't seem to be focused towards the 98% of consumers though.

[superkuh]

It won't work because ISP are slowly but steadily turning home internet connections to one way flows. It starts with data caps and ends with IPv4 exhaustion and every single account behind Carrier NAT.

The type of internet where anyone could host and interact freely with other parts of the internet are already past. People just haven't realized it. It'll be Internet TV.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Or just sucky upstream - my local cableco, Wave, has a 1Gbps DOCSIS3.0 service - except the upstream is a paltry 10mbps - that's a 100:1 down/up ratio.

[0xffff2]

My solution to this is a cheap Linux VPS. It's still "in the cloud", but I think simple VPS hosting is much less likely to go away or change drastically than more complex cloud services. It seems like co-location would be even better, but I have no idea how that would work for individuals looking to host a single server. I've always assumed it would be prohibitively expensive.

[dx034]

Good for HN folks but no option for 99% of the population. For them, Dropbox or Google Drive are the best and most secure option at the moment.

[avh02]

I've started using backblaze's b2 for this sort of stuff

[Karunamon]

Basically, AWS S3 without transfer fees. It's near perfect, but has the slight negative that your image may get linked on a popular site (or maliciously downloaded) and suddenly you owe thousands through no fault of your own.