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by brownbat 4902 days ago
The article seems to be pulling in two directions on MEGA:

1. It's identical to Dropbox (or spideroak, or tarsnap, etc.)

2. Its only viable use case is piracy.

These two claims seem at odds...

If nothing else, it's Dropbox where I get 50 GB of free space. If Dropbox can be legitimate and viable, I don't see why this can't (once they work through some kinks and get a good client).
5 comments
ricardobeat 4901 days ago
No, he is saying it cannot compete with DropBox/box.net/etc - those are very good products that focus on cloud storage/backups, not 'secure' sharing of files; and the only way for it to make money is through it's affiliate program, which is very likely to cause legal trouble.

Right now it is not competing with DropBox at all, since it doesn't offer client apps or effortless syncing.

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Angostura 4901 days ago
Oh, I like Dropbox a lot. But you know what? For 50GB free, I'm willing to put up with a bit of inconvenience.
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Sami_Lehtinen 4899 days ago
Well http://adrive.com has offered 50 GB free for several years. If they want to make news, they should offer much more.
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toomuchblah 4902 days ago
It could be legitimate but it will be an impossibly hard fight if they can't use piracy as an incentive and a short one if they do.
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chmars 4902 days ago
1/2 OT:

50 GB of free space?

According to https://www.dropbox.com/pricing, the default is still 2 GB of free space and up to 18 GB with referrals.

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Game_Ender 4902 days ago
He is saying that Mega = DropBox with 50GB of free space, not that DropBox gives you that space.
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berntb 4902 days ago
50 GB free at MEGA?! That can't be viable.

Consider: If you can write an rsync-variant with the API, then movie pirating will pay for the Internet population's backup system...

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AnthonyMouse 4902 days ago
>50 GB free at MEGA?! That can't be viable.

Why not? The cost of 50GB of live storage is not that high anymore. Doesn't gmail provide something like that much now already?

If you upload data and no one ever downloads it then there only has to be one copy in one datacenter on the entire internet, which not very expensive. And if you upload data that tons of people are accessing all over the place, they'll have to cache it closer to the destination and that will cost money, but then it generates ad revenue and pays for itself.

Moreover, I don't think anyone with a brain will be using it as a backup solution for anything important, because I highly doubt they'll provide you any kind of service level agreement. It's almost the opposite of a backup: If you upload something then it highly likely gets distributed to the world, but if they have a serious hardware failure (or have another encounter with corrupt law enforcement officials) then your data might go away at random sometime and have to be re-uploaded.

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garretruh 4901 days ago
As for free Gmail storage, it is ~10.0926 GB as of 2:35 CST. At least according to the Gmail sign-in page.
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berntb 4901 days ago
Can MEGA really be free for e.g. tens of millions using a few GB of bandwidth/month to backup their video diary logging?

That is not an unrealistic scenario in a few years.

(I'd do backup to MEGA for my personal stuff, if I could at the same time use a couple of similar (free) services in parallel. Then lack of 100% dependability isn't a problem.)

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superuser2 4901 days ago
It doesn't have to be. Uploading that much data would take upwards of 900 hours (!) on my fairly-typical residential cable connection (18m down/128k up). Those of us without fiber at home will never come close.
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