Can you make a desktop app such as icloud/box etc

  • Love the idea and the tech
  • I know this app is built for big businesses
  • I feel like features can be added for it to be used for individuals too.
  • Even businesses use things like box that use simple click and drag to share files etc.
  • Too much friction right now to use tardigrade via the cli
  • I’m a developer and I stopped using because it’s too much effort. There’s no way I can convince my friends and colleagues to use this.

Just my two satoshis

Best of luck in the future.

Welcome to the forum @Steven-Chang!

Thanks for the post :slight_smile: I like the drag-drop feature too. Since you are a dev would you be interested in making such app.

Not entirely true. Anyone can use it big/small/medium businesses/individuals.

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Hi nerdatwork,
I’m going to try out the other decentralized storage apps first and go from there.

I think they all have their positives and negatives but I just wanted to give my feedback to all decentralized apps, not to be negative, but to give a user’s perspective to try to help out.

Developing an app is a bit commitment and not something I’d go into unless I had all the info and tried everything first.

I do like that tardigrade,io lets you pay with fiat and has set prices instead of their native token unlike sia coin, which I found to be a point of friction. However I have not tried Sia or File token, or swarm or whatever else is out there properly.

I was just thinking that if the ui/ux for tardigrade with a drag and drop was easier, I probably wouldn’t even bother trying the other ones as my objective for using a decentralized storage was fulfilled and the price wasn’t that much of a concern.

Thanks

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Before you move on, the S3-gateway comes with a minio web interface, which may serve your needs. The setup isn’t yet as simple as a desktop app, but I think as a developer you would have no trouble getting it up and running and from there on the web interface is pretty simple. Additionally, after setting up the S3-gateway, you could connect to it with many of the already available S3 desktop clients.

As for the other projects you mentioned, they are very promising, but unfortunately currently not at the same level of maturity that tardigrade is. As of now, tardigrade is the only decentralized service backed by corporate level SLA’s. You should of course still check them out and see for yourself, but I think you’ll find that as of right now they can’t really keep up with Tardigrade.

That said, I did vote for your idea. I think having a simple interface with a simple installer could help a lot more people try this thing out.

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thanks for your suggestion @Steven-Chang
it will be interesting to see where this conversation goes!

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Update

  • I set up rclone sync to tardigrade thanks to the very helpful
    Aleksey Leonov from tardigrade.
  • After a bit of set up I had it running.
  • It was decent enough but still had to go via terminal and I realised I’d have to run the sync via terminal every time I wanted it to happen. I made this easier for myself using mac automator but still wanted to see what was out there.

Swarm
I had a look into Swarm and it was more builds and and use of command line etc and poor ui/ux on their website so I bailed on it without trying it as I though Tardigrade was already set up and felt more comfortable with Tardigrade in terms of documentation and support (Aleksey was lightning fast with the replies.)

Filecoin
Filecoin is still in testing so moving on.

Sia
My Theta coin value went up over night so I sold some of it for usdt so that I could swap it to sia coin to give that a try. I’m mentioning this not to brag about my theta coin going up, but just the psychology of what it took for me to justify putting more money into another alt-coin.

I set up a rent contract on their desktop app and it is currently setting up contracts right now… It’s already been several minutes… (Much prefer the speed of tardigrade)

  • Also the initial sync of Siacoin (downloading their blockchain) took over a day.
  • Rent contracts were set up and I had selected my first file to upload which was taking agessss to start up again :frowning: so I started to read the FAQ.

In the FAQ ( Sia Renting FAQs - SiaSetup ) I read some very concerning things:

1. Contract numbers fluctuating greatly:
"uploading a folder of several large video files (~15 GB each, ~400 GB total). Eventually our uploads stalled as described in the topic below, we quit Sia by allowing it to shut down properly, and then when we re-opened Sia we instantly had about 40 more contracts than what Sia reported we had before we shut down, and our allowance was completely eaten up by contract fees…

…The files we used were only test files, but this is obviously concerning nonetheless and is a great example that Sia is still a product in development and should not be used for critical data. We made the development team aware of our issue, but initial reports for Sia v1.3.2 indicate the issue still exists. We’ll update this topic when we believe the issue may be solved."

"Also keep in mind that Sia is still in development, and still has occasional bugs. At this time, you should never store critical data only on Sia."

"2. Can I download my files from Sia on another computer, i.e. if my renter computer crashes?

Yes, but only if you’ve backed up your Sia local data files that contain your renter contract and file metadata. A current limitation of Sia is that the internal data files are required to retrieve files from the Sia network. Without these files, you will lose access to your data on the network. If you’re renting storage on Sia, you should also back these files up separately and outside of Sia so that you can use them to access your data in the event your computer crashes or you encounter any other issues.

A further complication is that these files are only valid if you back them up after you last uploaded or downloaded any data from Sia. Any time you interact with the Sia network, you need to back up your metadata files again afterwards. For this reason, Sia is only recommended for cold storage at this time.

This limitation will likely be removed in the future with the introduction of file sharing, but for now it’s an important detail to be aware of because most users assume data stored on the Sia network is safe and can be retrieved from anywhere like any other type of cloud service by just downloading Sia again, when this is not necessarily the case."

Outcome: Siacoin looks extremely unstable and is still in development mode right now and I"m a bit dissapointed that they didn’t make this a lot clearer. I feel like Storj is more focused on their tech than their tokens whereas Siacoin is the other way around.

I have decided to sell my Siacoin and convert it to Storj because the proof is in the pudding. Storj / Tardigrade have a ways to go when it comes to mass adoption (desktop app needed) but I think you guys have the best intentions and the most stable tech so far and I will continue to use and promote.

Best of luck

Steve

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My experiance with rclone was not about the command line. I would like to have a backup of my important files maybe once per year. Command line works great for that.

What I am missing in rclone is:

  • Deduplication. I am storing a lot nodejs folders and I would guess half of the files are stored more than once in different projects.
  • Compression. Source code files and log files can be compress very good.
  • Create one big blob for many small files. With rclone I have to pay about 10% more because I am storing too many small files. I need an app that combines these small files into one “zip” folder and manages it that way.

Restic might be a good extension on top of rclone. I will try that next.

You might want to test out the rclone webUI? GUI

I would recommend to take a look on https://documentation.tardigrade.io/how-tos/backup-with-duplicati
Of course, it uses the S3 Gateway as a backend but it can help you with all outlined problems.
The rclone more like a OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox experience - you just put what you want in to the synchronized folder and it’s done.

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I love to see when people do their homework! Thanks for reporting back on that as it might be helpful to others as well.
As I mentioned before, your outcome doesn’t really surprise me, but it’s always good to confirm it personally.

Just one note: Luckily with Storj you don’t have to worry about storing synchronizing and backing up the metadata yourself. But do keep in mind that you need to keep your encryption pass phrase save and backed up as nobody can recover your data if you lose that.

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@littleskunk, I’ve given restic a shot over both the S3 gateway as well as the native rclone uplink and have published my results in the following thread. Combined with restic-runner (with minor modifications), I find restic works very well for my workflow and I think it could be a good fit for source code + logs backups. I’d be curious to hear your experience with this method.

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Update about my experience with rclone:

Hey guys rclone has been working pretty decent but I found that here and there it would crash my internet connection and even my macbook as a consequence of my brave browser freaking out from the situation.

It seems to be a common thing as per:

so I had to set a bwlimit:
rclone sync --progress ~/Desktop/***** *****:****** --bwlimit 0.125M -v

oh and if anyone wants my mac automator ‘Run Applescript’:

on run {input, parameters}

  tell application "Terminal"
    activate
    delay 1
    do script "rclone sync --progress ~/Desktop/****** ******:**** --bwlimit 0.125M -v" in front window
  end tell

  return input
end run

Let me know if you need any more info

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I would expect upload errors especially with bigger files. Somewhere in our code base we have a few hard coded timeouts that should kick in if the upload speed is to slow. It should work fine for files that are small enough to get transfered even at low speed within the timeout.

From my observations I would say as long as you have at least 50MBit/s upload speed available you should be safe. If you have around 30MBit/s you might get a few errors or maybe you are lucky. With less then 10MBit/s I would call it a challenge to upload a bigger file.

thanks for the update @Steven-Chang

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