Space Monkey: Easy Cloud Storage at Home

Most people, myself included, hate having to delete anything form their personal computers or cloud account. And we are constantly looking for affordable ways to increase our data storage space. Hard drive storage may be an accessible option but it is not enough, as we also want to access our data online wherever and whenever we want to. Space Monkey, a new personal cloud subscription service, may be able to help us with that.

The project was recently launched on Kickstarter under the slogan “taking the cloud out of the datacenter,” and that is precisely what it intends to do. The Space Monkey cloud storage service comes with a hardware device which is actually a 2TB drive. You can fill one TB on this hard drive, while the other is allocated to the storage system.

And that is where the Space Monkey is truly innovative: how it handles and stores your data. Traditional cloud services send your information to a single datacenter that has multiple servers. But this storage service breaks your content into tiny pieces that are then encrypted and stored on other Space Monkey devices, you guessed it, on that 1TB of space that you won’t be able to access.

This means the Space Monkey devices will actually create a network-based datacenter for all the stored information. The whole network relies on how many Space Monkeys are out there, and the data transfer sped increases further as the network grows. Thanks to the included 2TB drive, the transfer speed is already significantly higher than with other cloud storage services, up to 60 times faster.

This storage system means you will be able to access your content anywhere in the country, even if parts of the network are down, as it might happen during a freak storm or hurricane, for example. But the technology can also raise some concerns on whether it is safe to store part of your data, albeit protected by the Advanced Encryption Standard, on other users’ devices. Can we be certain that those users won’t try to hack the encryption?

Hopefully the Space Monkey manufacturers will be able to address these concerns, as we would really like to see the project take off. At first, it will be destined for consumers, but in the near future it could be used by small businesses as well. If successful, it will become a tough competitor for other cloud storage products, given its more than attractive price of $10 per month for 1TB of storage.

[Image via Gizmodo]