Kickstarter: Spacemonkey (1 Viewer)

[Otis]

Anyone else sign up for/get one of these? Link here. It's basically a 1TB backup drive that also is 1TB of cloud storage -- you dump all your stuff on it at home, and that stuff is available to you anywhere, anytime.

Backed this one a while ago, finally got it yesterday. Cool in theory. Struggled a bit to get it set up, but I think that may be be cause my Verizon router wasn't playing nice with it. Once I got it running, it was simple and worked great. Started a major upload of all our photos, and went to bed.

Woke up this morning and the thing is dead.

Cool in theory, ungood in implementation. We'll see what support says. Just curious if anyone else has gone in on this thing.

I'll fry my motherboard and listen.

 

[Otis]

I see this was a big hit.

 

[Dr Oadi]

Sp they sell me a hard drive looking thing for $200 that I move my 1tb of pron onto for $49 a year? What's not to like!

 

[SacramentoBob]

I don't see the big selling point. It's an external hard drive that contains a cloud backup solution. The website makes a big deal about the "speed" of the backup, but the speed to the cloud is the important one and is limited by your internet connection. Just buy a computer with a big hard drive and pay for a subscription service. I guess the big selling point is the price. I'm paying $250 a year for 250 Gb of space, but they'd only charge $50 for 4x that much space. They'll probably be bankrupt in 2 years.

 

[Otis]

I don't see the big selling point. It's an external hard drive that contains a cloud backup solution. The website makes a big deal about the "speed" of the backup, but the speed to the cloud is the important one and is limited by your internet connection. Just buy a computer with a big hard drive and pay for a subscription service. I guess the big selling point is the price. I'm paying $250 a year for 250 Gb of space, but they'd only charge $50 for 4x that much space. They'll probably be bankrupt in 2 years.

Yeah it's an external HD with a cloud backup, and which you can easily access from any device, anywhere. It's a pretty simple interface and works great. I was on the market for a cloud backup anyway, and the price on this is great.

I dumped about half our stuff onto it (still need to get my wife's photos and one last backup hard drive onto it), and we're using almost 2% of the 1TB. Once we get everything else up there we'll still be under 5%. Should last us a long while, and I feel a whole lot better having all our kid photos, wedding photos, etc. up there now.

 

[Das Boot]

I don't see the big selling point. It's an external hard drive that contains a cloud backup solution. The website makes a big deal about the "speed" of the backup, but the speed to the cloud is the important one and is limited by your internet connection. Just buy a computer with a big hard drive and pay for a subscription service. I guess the big selling point is the price. I'm paying $250 a year for 250 Gb of space, but they'd only charge $50 for 4x that much space. They'll probably be bankrupt in 2 years.

Yeah it's an external HD with a cloud backup, and which you can easily access from any device, anywhere. It's a pretty simple interface and works great. I was on the market for a cloud backup anyway, and the price on this is great.

I dumped about half our stuff onto it (still need to get my wife's photos and one last backup hard drive onto it), and we're using almost 2% of the 1TB. Once we get everything else up there we'll still be under 5%. Should last us a long while, and I feel a whole lot better having all our kid photos, wedding photos, etc. up there now.

Post #1 didn't sound like it went so well, it sounds like now you like it?... I'd like to find something like this to stick with as well.

 

[Otis]

I don't see the big selling point. It's an external hard drive that contains a cloud backup solution. The website makes a big deal about the "speed" of the backup, but the speed to the cloud is the important one and is limited by your internet connection. Just buy a computer with a big hard drive and pay for a subscription service. I guess the big selling point is the price. I'm paying $250 a year for 250 Gb of space, but they'd only charge $50 for 4x that much space. They'll probably be bankrupt in 2 years.

Yeah it's an external HD with a cloud backup, and which you can easily access from any device, anywhere. It's a pretty simple interface and works great. I was on the market for a cloud backup anyway, and the price on this is great.

I dumped about half our stuff onto it (still need to get my wife's photos and one last backup hard drive onto it), and we're using almost 2% of the 1TB. Once we get everything else up there we'll still be under 5%. Should last us a long while, and I feel a whole lot better having all our kid photos, wedding photos, etc. up there now.

Post #1 didn't sound like it went so well, it sounds like now you like it?... I'd like to find something like this to stick with as well.

Yeah, day 1 it seemed to shut off -- I don't know what I did to it, maybe it was just the power cord being loose or something. Customer service was really good -- they immediately sent me a UPS label that I could print to ship it back for replacement. Turned out that before I boxed it up I gave it one last try... it powered it up and worked no problem, and has ever since.



Spent the last two days uploading our bajillion gigs of wedding photos, my entire photo collection, and every other file I have and care about for the most part. Still tracking down our last external hard drive that had some old stuff and kid pics on it (can't seem to figure out where we put it...), and then have to figure out how to get all of my wife's photo collection from her iPhone up to it. Once we do, we'll have everything that's in digital form and that we care about all stored on this thing.

Works great, interface is easy, and now I can get any file or photo of ours from any device anywhere. And I know it's all secure.

So yeah, I guess I went from crap review to great review overnight. Really like it. I needed a cloud service anyway, and the price here is competitive compared to others; I also like having the drive here in my house for local fast access. I also thought 1TB was going to fill up fast. We're still at like 2%. Should be all set for a long time...

 

[Otis]

I don't see the big selling point. It's an external hard drive that contains a cloud backup solution. The website makes a big deal about the "speed" of the backup, but the speed to the cloud is the important one and is limited by your internet connection.

The speed is actually nice. I'm uploading all our stuff over our Wifi network to the device. That's what matters. It can then, on its own time and at a slower speed, back it up to the cloud, and it doesn't get in my way or leave me waiting. So ultimately I like the model of having a drive here on our Wifi network that is mirrored up in the cloud. I think it makes a lot of sense.

I realize you could just go out and buy a 1 TB hard drive and network it locally and then pay a separate cloud service to back that up to the cloud, but I like this all-in-one solution, works pretty simply and easily.

Now the main issues I'm going to have going forward:

- Figuring out if I can connect to it from my Chromebook and otherwise figuring out how to, on a regular basis, sync files on my Macbook that I care about with what's on the Spacemonkey (I guess I could just put a shortcut to a folder on it on my Mac desktop and dump my usual random stuff on there...)

- More importantly, figuring out if there's a way to automatically backup my wife's photos from her iPhone, and my photos from my Galaxy Note, to the Spacemonkey automatically. As to the latter of the two devices, I think all of my photos are all automatically going to Google Plus Photo storage automatically, so I may be all good. It's my wife's iPhone crap I'm more concerned about. We'll see...

 

[NutterButter]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

 

[SacramentoBob]

I think their pricing model is based on people using about as much space as you do or less. Which is pretty reasonable because I doubt most people have more than 50Gb of stuff they want to back up. Just did a quick look at newegg and a good 1TB external hard drive goes for $80-$90.

So their model is, prepay for a year's worth of space that's equivalent to 250Gb, use 1/5th of that and continue to use ~ 50Gb or less for us to be profitable.

 

[Otis]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

 

[Abraham]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

I gave a free 55gb Dropbox account, a free 50gb box accojnt, and three more of the box accounts I can give away to anyone that wants one. Had a thread here for that last week.

 

[Otis]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

I gave a free 55gb Dropbox account, a free 50gb box accojnt, and three more of the box accounts I can give away to anyone that wants one. Had a thread here for that last week.

Not bad. How the heck do these other services get off charging a fee if all of these things are free?

 

[Abraham]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

I gave a free 55gb Dropbox account, a free 50gb box accojnt, and three more of the box accounts I can give away to anyone that wants one. Had a thread here for that last week.

Not bad. How the heck do these other services get off charging a fee if all of these things are free?

People still pay for tv even though it's not hard to watch for free. Same with music, etc.

 

[NutterButter]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

Its a 15 GB limit. You have more than 15 GBs of photos, docs and emails? That's a lot of photos. Videos can go onto youtube.

 

[Das Boot]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

I gave a free 55gb Dropbox account, a free 50gb box accojnt, and three more of the box accounts I can give away to anyone that wants one. Had a thread here for that last week.

PM sent, thanks for your offer.

 

[Paulymaggs]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

I gave a free 55gb Dropbox account, a free 50gb box accojnt, and three more of the box accounts I can give away to anyone that wants one. Had a thread here for that last week.

Not bad. How the heck do these other services get off charging a fee if all of these things are free?

Because of marks like you.

 

[NCCommish]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

I gave a free 55gb Dropbox account, a free 50gb box accojnt, and three more of the box accounts I can give away to anyone that wants one. Had a thread here for that last week.

Not bad. How the heck do these other services get off charging a fee if all of these things are free?

Because of marks like you.

Well I wouldn't use Dropbox personally. Security is kind of sketchy IMO certainly not for work despite their advertising. Free isn't always great.

It should be mentioned that the way SpaceMonkey works is via P2P sharing. So Otis you have someone else's data residing somewhere on your device. It's supposed to be encrypted but all data transferred like this claims to be encrypted. Credit card companies have to pass PCI compliance standards and they still get hacked. Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

 

[SacramentoBob]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

I gave a free 55gb Dropbox account, a free 50gb box accojnt, and three more of the box accounts I can give away to anyone that wants one. Had a thread here for that last week.

Not bad. How the heck do these other services get off charging a fee if all of these things are free?

Because of marks like you.

Well I wouldn't use Dropbox personally. Security is kind of sketchy IMO certainly not for work despite their advertising. Free isn't always great.

It should be mentioned that the way SpaceMonkey works is via P2P sharing. So Otis you have someone else's data residing somewhere on your device. It's supposed to be encrypted but all data transferred like this claims to be encrypted. Credit card companies have to pass PCI compliance standards and they still get hacked. Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

So it's basically cloud storage via bittorrent? Awesome.

 

[Das Boot]

It should be mentioned that the way SpaceMonkey works is via P2P sharing. So Otis you have someone else's data residing somewhere on your device. It's supposed to be encrypted but all data transferred like this claims to be encrypted. Credit card companies have to pass PCI compliance standards and they still get hacked. Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

:unsubscribe:

 

[Otis]

It should be mentioned that the way SpaceMonkey works is via P2P sharing. So Otis you have someone else's data residing somewhere on your device. It's supposed to be encrypted but all data transferred like this claims to be encrypted. Credit card companies have to pass PCI compliance standards and they still get hacked. Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

:unsubscribe:

Really? It's all encrypted. If someone is so desperate to hack into my wedding photos and see them, hey, knock yourself out. There's Aunt Lucy. Boy did she get loaded.

 

[Otis]

Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

Um, you might want to call your ISP and shut off your internet service.

 

[Das Boot]

It should be mentioned that the way SpaceMonkey works is via P2P sharing. So Otis you have someone else's data residing somewhere on your device. It's supposed to be encrypted but all data transferred like this claims to be encrypted. Credit card companies have to pass PCI compliance standards and they still get hacked. Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

:unsubscribe:

Really? It's all encrypted. If someone is so desperate to hack into my wedding photos and see them, hey, knock yourself out. There's Aunt Lucy. Boy did she get loaded.

I don't really think that anyone would hack it, or even find it worthwhile to attempt, but I'm not crazy about that model.

I haven't researched options much yet, so maybe I'll circle back to it if it's far and away the most economical and is reliable, but I'd rather not use P2P if possible.

 

[Otis]

It should be mentioned that the way SpaceMonkey works is via P2P sharing. So Otis you have someone else's data residing somewhere on your device. It's supposed to be encrypted but all data transferred like this claims to be encrypted. Credit card companies have to pass PCI compliance standards and they still get hacked. Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

:unsubscribe:

Really? It's all encrypted. If someone is so desperate to hack into my wedding photos and see them, hey, knock yourself out. There's Aunt Lucy. Boy did she get loaded.

I don't really think that anyone would hack it, or even find it worthwhile to attempt, but I'm not crazy about that model.

I haven't researched options much yet, so maybe I'll circle back to it if it's far and away the most economical and is reliable, but I'd rather not use P2P if possible.

It's really just a handful of 1's and 0's to some dude in Milwaukee. Given everything you do online on a daily basis, and the data you send over the web, this is the least of your problems.

 

[NCCommish]

Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

Um, you might want to call your ISP and shut off your internet service.

UM that's why I have a firewall. Which this device puts a huge hole in since you have to let it speak to whomever, whenever. That is a huge potential problem. Oh and is this drive connected to your home network? Does it have access to your computers, phones, etc.? Lot more than pictures to steal when you think about it for a minute.

 

[Otis]

Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

Um, you might want to call your ISP and shut off your internet service.

UM that's why I have a firewall. Which this device puts a huge hole in since you have to let it speak to whomever, whenever. That is a huge potential problem. Oh and is this drive connected to your home network? Does it have access to your computers, phones, etc.? Lot more than pictures to steal when you think about it for a minute.

Yeah, now they can hack into my home phone line and listen in to my conversations with my MIL. NOW I'm screwed.

 

[BoltBacker]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

Flickr gives you 1TB for photos and I think they have apps for all the devices. I also like the fact it's been around forever and will not go out of business anytime soon. I use that for all my photos(it also makes it very easy to share certain photos). I don't think it does videos though since never shoot video.

The big email services give you enough to backup all your documents imo.

 

[NutterButter]

The only thing I need to cloud backup up is photos, some short video clips and maybe some docs. There's plenty of free options for that. Anything else can just be backed up to an external hd locally.

Are there plenty of free (and good) options for storing 50GB of stuff in a cloud backup? Most of the ones I've seen are pay services. I believe my Google Drive limit is 15MB, so that wouldn't work for all our stuff.

Flickr gives you 1TB for photos and I think they have apps for all the devices. I also like the fact it's been around forever and will not go out of business anytime soon. I use that for all my photos(it also makes it very easy to share certain photos). I don't think it does videos though since never shoot video.

The big email services give you enough to backup all your documents imo.

Christ, that should cover it.

 

[Otis]

Realized today that there are Android and iPhone apps for Spacemonkey. That was the last missing link for me. Set those apps up on my Galaxy and the wife's iPhone. Just like that, it autosynced all our past photos and going forward will autosync all current photos to backup to our cloud and Spacemonkey. Totally sweet.

Now basically everything we have in electronic form is safe and sound, and it all works easily and automatically as I had wanted.

 

[Zasada]

Been using my 10.5TB home server as a cloud server for years now. Run Plex off of it for streaming media anywhere. FileZilla FTP for easy transfers. TeamViewer for remote computing. It's also the backend for various XBMC installs I have around the house and my default uTorrent machine for media "sharing". DoubleTwist handles wireless media syncing with my Android devices. NetGear Genie acts as an airPrint server for my wife to print from her iOS devices.

Welcome to this decade, Otis.

 

[Otis]

Been using my 10.5TB home server as a cloud server for years now. Run Plex off of it for streaming media anywhere. FileZilla FTP for easy transfers. TeamViewer for remote computing. It's also the backend for various XBMC installs I have around the house and my default uTorrent machine for media "sharing".

Welcome to this decade, Otis.

Oh yeah, that sounds easy.

"See honey, just open up a terminal window and start up Filezilla FTP, then telnet into your TeamViewer and from there just do a copyall command in the root directory and, wham, just like that, all the pictures from our daughter's recital will be safely on our backup server!"

 

[Zasada]

Been using my 10.5TB home server as a cloud server for years now. Run Plex off of it for streaming media anywhere. FileZilla FTP for easy transfers. TeamViewer for remote computing. It's also the backend for various XBMC installs I have around the house and my default uTorrent machine for media "sharing".

Welcome to this decade, Otis.

Oh yeah, that sounds easy.

"See honey, just open up a terminal window and start up Filezilla FTP, then telnet into your TeamViewer and from there just do a copyall command in the root directory and, wham, just like that, all the pictures from our daughter's recital will be safely on our backup server!"

Yeah, TeamViewer allows you to use a remote PC as though it were local. So I guess if you know how to use a PC, then you know how to use TeamViewer. Sure, FTP might be a little higher-up on the IT totem-pole but for anyone that wants the full solution (media, files, sync), a home server is the only thing that gets you there.

 

[Otis]

Been using my 10.5TB home server as a cloud server for years now. Run Plex off of it for streaming media anywhere. FileZilla FTP for easy transfers. TeamViewer for remote computing. It's also the backend for various XBMC installs I have around the house and my default uTorrent machine for media "sharing".

Welcome to this decade, Otis.

Oh yeah, that sounds easy.

"See honey, just open up a terminal window and start up Filezilla FTP, then telnet into your TeamViewer and from there just do a copyall command in the root directory and, wham, just like that, all the pictures from our daughter's recital will be safely on our backup server!"

Yeah, TeamViewer allows you to use a remote PC as though it were local. So I guess if you know how to use a PC, then you know how to use TeamViewer. Sure, FTP might be a little higher-up on the IT totem-pole but for anyone that wants the full solution (media, files, sync), a home server is the only thing that gets you there.

I hear you. It's just not the kind of thing we use -- I don't care about saving movies or massive media collections. My main use is just making sure all the pictures we take, and any important electronic files we want to keep, are easily and quickly accessible from our home, secure and backed up, and available to us wherever/whenever want. This Spacemonkey thing has been the easiest solution I've found for our needs. There's probably a cheaper way to do it through dropbox or something, but this seemed like a pretty easy way to get to where we needed to be, and works great.

 

[Grace Under Pressure]

Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

Um, you might want to call your ISP and shut off your internet service.

UM that's why I have a firewall. Which this device puts a huge hole in since you have to let it speak to whomever, whenever. That is a huge potential problem. Oh and is this drive connected to your home network? Does it have access to your computers, phones, etc.? Lot more than pictures to steal when you think about it for a minute.

Yeah, now they can hack into my home phone line and listen in to my conversations with my MIL. NOW I'm screwed.

You have conversations with your MIL on the phone? I don't think I've ever talked to my MIL on the phone even one time. And we get along fine, it's not that.

 

[Otis]

Not sure I like the idea of me being connected into a large network where I have to share with people who I don't know or trust.

Um, you might want to call your ISP and shut off your internet service.

UM that's why I have a firewall. Which this device puts a huge hole in since you have to let it speak to whomever, whenever. That is a huge potential problem. Oh and is this drive connected to your home network? Does it have access to your computers, phones, etc.? Lot more than pictures to steal when you think about it for a minute.

Yeah, now they can hack into my home phone line and listen in to my conversations with my MIL. NOW I'm screwed.

You have conversations with your MIL on the phone? I don't think I've ever talked to my MIL on the phone even one time. And we get along fine, it's not that.

On very rare occasion. 2-4 times a year.

 

[Otis]

Well after returning it once for a fix, I've got it back (after they had it for weeks for repair), and it's got another problem. Can't recommend this. Do not buy. YWIA