You may report it too.
I will share this with the team.
We always in this battle since we offer a free tier storage and there are always malicious people who want to scam someone, and use our linkshare service to distribute a malware…
We are blocking them as fast as we can, but I hope we will make the free tier a time limited, and make requirements to add a payment method to continue use a service, or at least for the usage of the extended features like linkshare.
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You could limit the number of linkshares someone can spawn and the number of clients that can open it for free tier.
Would it make sense for the free tier-only users to have linksharing under a different domain?
probably not: it will only confuse honest users, while spammers can simply register pro account with stolen credit card.
Please report it to us, if possible; we want to get harmful links taken down as soon as we can. Feel free to report also to other services if you think it would be helpful (to the world at large).
I’m a bit unsure what to do with this particular report, though. I see NextDNS is blocking link.storjshare.io, but I don’t see any specific problematic links. Do they provide any additional information?
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The module that blocks it is their proprietary “threat intelligence”. Being a DNS they can only act on a dns level: I assume they detected a few harmful links and added the domain to blocklist. There is no additional information other than the domain is now blocked by that module.
You guys need to reach out to them and explain what the domain is used for (and perhaps join forces in fighting the malicious actors. Maybe they will provide feedback on what triggered detection to you)
I’m not seeing any way to contact NextDNS regarding their block. I can @ them on Twitter or Reddit, or file an issue on Github, but it doesn’t look like any of those are super active. I’ve gotten the impression that they really don’t care if their blocklist is blocking too much, until a lot of users complain.
Still, I’ll try and reach out on Reddit, and see what happens.
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This ideas was considered a while back but it was decided that it was not the most efficient use of time and resources. This may change in the future but for now promotional efforts are in other directions.
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IMO, without a first-party user program, Storj may not become popular with regular users. At least this is how I see it:
Right now Storj is only available to developers, pretty much. The developers of various backup programs etc should add Storj support to their programs, then users will be able to use Storj. Great, but why should those devs do it? Their users do not demand it. And if some developer decides to add Storj support, he most likely just uses the S3 gateway negating the encryption part (because the gateway has to have your key). Doing it properly takes more effort and if the users don’t care, why do it?
From the user perspective, let’s say the backup program does support Storj as backend. It’s some unknown company/service, why choose it instead of something known, like Google, Microsoft or Amazon?
On the other hand, if Storj made a backup program (or whatever) that uses uplink (instead of S3) and promoted it to users, over time it may become known and popular, making the users demand Storj support from the developers of other programs.
For example, it should be possible to use Storj to back up a Synology NAS (it supports S3, so, no “full” encryption), but why would someone use it instead of all the other options? The only reason I see is if someone already knows about Storj (not a lot of people) and does not have a lot of data, so he can use the service for free.
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Duplicati has a native Integration that works on Windows, Linux and Mac. Regarding Backups it provides alot of features and therefore no other tool for this task is necessary.
If you want to shared files quickly, have a look at quickshare - it also works cross the three platforms.
For using storj as a harddrive, I tried to build a virtual drive but then found rclone, which does it much better. That one does not have a native Integration, though. But building a robust virtual hard drive is a though task, as I can tell. Rclone does the heavy Lifting.
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Storj is focused on gaining large enterprise customers. And we continue to add them and work with them every day. A large business can see significant savings switching to Storj DCS while maintaining performance and redundancy/security of their data.
As mentioned, there are many tools out there that support Storj DCS and more are being added all the time. As our footprint grows, so shall support in software to help manage the needs of our growing customer roster.
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Great. Yeah, now I know that there is some good software that supports Storj (and even more can be made to support Storj using the S3 gateway). However, how to convince, say, Duplicati users, to use Storj instead of Google, Amazon or Microsoft? Of course, if individual users are not the target customer then it does not matter.
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We’re a small business with limited resources so we are staying focused on adding large customers right now. If we assume that Storj continues to grow and add customers, our ability to expand the product’s reach will also happen.
In my experience, a software company may only add support for a different vendor if their customer base asks for it in significant numbers, large licensee’s ask for support to avoid having them switch to a competitor, or vendor pays them to support their technology. Right now, we would fall into the second category, that by adding more and more enterprise customers, software packages that want to appeal to those same customers will want to add support for Storj organically. Down the road, we may partner up with a vendor and/or demand for Storj will increase as it becomes more well known. But I would not expect to see million dollar advertising happening to make Storj a household name, at least not anytime soon. Even something as well known as S3 itself is only common in tech circles. The layman looking for a backup tool has no idea what S3 is, and Amazon has significant resources to advertise their technology, but like us they stay focused on bringing it to the attention of tech and business people who understand it’s purpose.
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General users are price-driven. Storj already has a huge price advantage over other similar solutions, like B2 or Wasabi, but a lot of users have OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox storage already available and paid for as part of their business/school/family subscriptions; you can’t compete with that. Yes, using these *drive services as a backup target for CAS type storage is a horrific idea, but it’s free if using underutilized space that has already been paid for anyway, so people do it.
If you are talking about AWS, GCS and Azure – users who know these words will do research and invariably discover B2, Wasabi, Storj, and many other smaller players. And will pick storj, because it’s objectively best choice for the purpose. (It’s already happening, at least judging by duplicacy forum)
But they are already a minority of a minority. As Knowledge said above, with the limited resources it makes no sense to market for that minority of people. Most are already onboard and it doesn’t matter anyway because there are very few of those.
It’s actually in the interest of those backup apps vendors to market storj support to their customers – hey, if you switch to our product X you will get access to a high performance low cost distributed storage! And it does not matter if “storj support” is just a pre-defined S3 URL, like iXSystems did. Marketing is marketing.
Hence, what storj is doing is the right approach – don’t deal with end users, and focus on B2B and market appropriately.
(And lastly, nitpickings, but I can’t stand every time someone mentions duplicati, let alone in the beginning of the list. Uses who voluntarily chose to use duplicati, are a lost cause, no amount of marketing will change that. They use an app with no stable version, that is crashing left and right corrupting datastore on slightest hiccup, on its native platform. Did I mentioned it has no stable versions? 1x is eol, 2.x is permanent beta. On other platforms, where mono is required, it’s even worse. It’s plan unusable trash. Why people use it? It’s free, appears in the top results (because it’s free and every one uses is – backup app is a backup app, why pay for one backup app when another is free?!) and they don’t do research, and haven’t’ lost data yet. They are not going to be paying for storj or any other cloud solution regardless of how much marketing is done. /rant.)
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I believe endusers will grow very rapidly to a huge data addin, when they search and find an official app, made by Storj, mantained by Storj and downloadable from Storj’s website. If you want to backup your stuff with Storj, you don’t go looking for third party apps, you don’t trust those. You trust Storj. And even you guys sais third party apps ar s…t.
You already have all the backend you need, you just need a frontend, a GUI for 5 major platforms: Windows, Ubuntu, MacOS, iOs and Android. You don’t have to support every distro or OS outhere, just the majority of installations, and those 5 covers pretty much 99% of enduser devices.
How hard can it be to design a GUI, an app, with so many tools and AI assisted coding, available today? Internxt had like 2-3 guys and the app was very decent and was working. The backend was crap, but the app, for doing the basic file upload/download, was enough for majority.
I believe a team of 5-10 people is more than enough for this project.
Ah, you say you also need people in the support department; you are halfcovered by this existing and great forum. And a wellmade FAQ/Guide will cover everything.
So, beeing a small business of 60 people is not an excuse in my opinion. If this enduser market wasn’t worth it, why every competitor offers apps for it?
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The consumer market requires a separate company to develop and support it.
We receives tons of support tickets related to the simple Buckets view in the Storj web console. The app will at least double it.
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How about outsourcing?
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Well, someone said Duplicati supported Storj, so I used that as an example. I use Bacula to back up my Windows computers and my own scripts to back up Linux servers and VMs. All my backups are local.
OK, let’s assume someone figured out that such a service exists and wants to use it. If I type backup to storj into Google, the first result I get is Storj website where it describes that Storj can be used for backups and has a “sign up” page. We know that just signing up for the service does not allow one to make backups, unless you count manually uploading files using the Web UI.
The second link is about Duplicati. If what you say about it is correct, then the user may not have a great experience, however, at least this links to instructions on how to make Duplicati work with Storj.
Third link is about Hashbackup, which is a CLI program so normal users are not going to use it.
Fourth link is from Storj website saying how great the service is but in no way saying that I need a separate program to use it, but it also talks about RPO/RTO so it’s not aimes are regular users.
Next is Restic, but it’s also CLI, so normal users are not going to use it.
Next is Arq. Finally, a backup program that regular users would use that also supports Storj. The program costs $50 though, so it’s paying for the storage service and then paying for the program to access the service. Still, better than nothing.
And last is a reddit thread asking the same question.
After that there are instructions and videos on how to make Synology NAS backup to Storj (for those who have a NAS for something other than backups).
So, so far, at least from what Google showed me (I know the results would be different for other people) there isn’t as much information/marketing about using Storj for backups by regular users. Maybe a Storj branded backup program (free, but only works with Storj service) would help, maybe it would cost more to develop than bring in money. Maybe it would be worth it to have a list of programs that support Storj on the website? “You can use our service to back up your files by using one of the programs from this list”, something like that.
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