Don’t forget about Filecoin for important backups, guys

Don’t forget about Filecoin for important backups, guys. You can even store data for free under certain circumstances.

Please note that Filecoin 1) does not offer any SLAs → no guarantee your important backups will still be there when you want to restore them 2) no default encryption 3) the user has to decide how many copies they want to store to hopefully make sure their important files don’t get lost, and I would assume this will not be part of the “free storage” offerings.

Meanwhile, Storj DCS offers 1) SLAs 2) default encryption 3) automatically is multi-region by default at no extra cost 4) Free Account offers 150GB storage and egress, with no time limit 5) To date, has never lost a customer file in production.

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Yes, yes. I know. Filecoin is sucks and scam, Storj rules forever. :smirk:
Trust me, I’d like to contribute dosens of terabytes to Storj as SNO, but I can’t. In Filecoin I can. So I earn there, that’s it.

You did not get the main point - your files with a high probability will be lost on Filecoin, if you do not pay.

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It seems that your knowledge of Filecon is somewhat superficial. Nevermind.

No, I have lost a lot of files using IPFS. My links all broken. The storage in Filecoin is based on IPFS, so…

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We don’t doubt that you can earn money with dozens of terabytes of storage offered to Filecoin. However, that was not what you were initially referring to, you were asking people to trust Filecoin with their important backups. It is unlikely that those terabytes you shared with Filecoin and get paid for will be occupied by a significant amount of real customer data any time soon, due to the reasons cited above.

If you have any evidence to the contrary, please show links to 1) their SLA 2) code that shows that files are encrypted by default 3) statistics showing not only how many exabytes miners are offering to the network, but how many of them are actually filled with real customer data 4) the section of the Filecoin ToS that states how much data a customer can up and download, and from how many replica hosts, before they get charged.

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I won’t argue that filecoin doesn’t have its uses. But you just happened to pick pretty much the worst one here. Due to the use of replication (and not erasure coding) redundancy is expensive to achieve. Since there are also no mechanisms to repair, you can never be sure of long term file availability since availability can only get worse, never better. And additionally, the last remaining miners storing a file could potentially extort you with exorbitantly high egress fees. This makes filecoin mostly useful for more fleeting data that is needed short term. It’s never going to be great for long term storage. And nobody should be entrusting important backups to filecoin.

You flipped the script here. I thought we were talking about using it for backups? :wink:
But great, if that works for you, that’s awesome. I’ve looked into this myself and decided against it due to the sky high hardware requirements and sizeable collateral. It would have required a massive upfront investment I’m not willing to part with. Storj allowed me to start without spending a single cent, which is why I am here at all. And ended up paying enough that it paid for some HDD expansion as well.

I’m always open to look at other projects, but Filecoin isn’t it for me.

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IPFS is local file storage made available to the network (or not).

There’s not really any way to lose IPFS files unless one uploads the file to a pinning service and that pinning service decides to unpin the file. Filecoin is essentially an agreement to be a pinning service.

I don’t participate in Filecoin, but I do run many IPFS nodes. IPFS is the base storage system for several independent audio-visual cloud services. It’s a reliable datastore. Version 0.12 greatly improved the deduplication of data in the filestore.

The files in the IPFS filestore are not encrypted, but there’s nothing stopping one from encrypting before adding the file to filestore.

Here are two files, one encrypted and one not encrypted posted to a folder via a pinning service on IPFS:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYjrGmau3PBw68N78FrNhtTbjxANDcUy3yvmDLf7iATGH

The PGP encrypted file is symmetrically encrypted with password ‘beast’

gpg -d - > image.png
  • copy/paste the encrypted message
  • enter the password: beast

EDIT:

This one liner is a little easier:

curl -s https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYjrGmau3PBw68N78FrNhtTbjxANDcUy3yvmDLf7iATGH/Untitled.png.asc |gpg -d >image2.png


It’s certainly possible to design a feed into and out of an IPFS datastore for encryption of the stored data.

There are advantages to IPFS’s datastore model and deduplication along with the ability to run things such as private clusters which can manage pinning for a network of nodes… that just couldn’t really be done with Storj. If an entity controls the servers, IPFS can be tuned to work better than something like git.

Storj and IPFS are not drop-in replacements for one another. Some things would be better with IPFS and some better with Storj.

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I’m agree with that. Just I do not trust IPFS anymore :slight_smile:

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Filecoin doesn’t have a repair service. Your backup files will slowly erode and at some point, you can’t download them anymore.

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For the deep dive crowd… adding a link to a detailed research paper on various p2p architectures including IPFS and Storj:

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FIlecoin does not store based on IPFS, it is however IPFS compatible using Data CIDs for locating data.

Filecoin requires a massive enterprise level server as well as a huge bandwidth pipe…

https://docs.filecoin.io/storage-provider/hardware-requirements/#specific-operation-requirements

Storj and Filecoin are on different planets. It’s not even worth comparing the two from the service provider standpoint.

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I know exactly what Filecoin requires, I have a node (using a ThreadRipper) with 100TiB of data on it. Let’s just be accurate here.

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That’s several thousand $$$ more than an 8TB drive attached to a RPi 4.

Sure Storj can run on the Big 'uns too. However, the requirements for running a Storj node are more reasonable for the average home based tech enthusiast… This is partly due to the robust error correction running on Storj.

Filecoin is down something like 90% in value from its high in March 2021. I suppose it might be a good buy… but my personal thoughts are that it’s in the process of good-bye

EDIT:

Filecoin Miner 30 day stats:

https://filfox.info/en/stats/miner

“It’s dead Jim…”

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You are right, Storj is suitable for home based tech enthusiasts, Filecoin storage providers are not.

Let’s use some real world examples, I built my first Storj node in Dec 2019, I now have three in total, with a total capacity of 35 TiB and storing almost 16 TiB. I have earned a little more than 1,600 Storj tokens worth more than $2,000. (I have not bought or sold any since day one. I took a spare computer I had and spent around $750 on the three HDDs I needed. Running Storj is simple and almost set and forget.

My Filecoin node started with a single (used) Ryzen 9 CPU and 128GB of ram and five HDDs in June 2020. I since added a high end ‘sealing worker’, more disks (170TiB) and a dedicated market node. I think my total spending for these three machines is around $20,000. Since the launch at the end of August 2020 i have earned FIL tokens worth the mid 6 figure range in dollars. I am a hobbyist in this regard as the “Big 'uns” use EPYC CPUs with enterprise hardware usually in the hundreds of thousands of dollars as they rake in a small fortune.

Let’s be accurate about token value. When I got started with Storj a single token was around $0.11 reaching a peak of $3.91 in March 2021. It is now worth $1.33. When I got started with FIL a single token was around $12 reaching a peak of $237 in March 2021. It is now worth $21.60. So if we look at decreases from all time high, Storj has lost 76% and FIL about 90%.

I am not a crypto trader, I own a lot of crypto I have mined over the years, focusing on the current price is not important to me. But perhaps some other metrics are important rather than prematurely announcing the death of a utility token/crypt system. Should we look at decentralized storage networks and how much real data is being stored, as well as overall network capacity? Or perhaps we should look at the growth over time in stored real data and network capacity.

My point is let’s have an honest discussion and not cherry pick data that ignores the facts. Storj has quietly brought in a steady but slow stream of tokens for me, FIL has allowed me to quit my full time IT job and work for a quickly growing Web3.0 startup.

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I really don’t understand why the customer who is storing files would pay $100000 to store a couple of hundred terabytes on your servers
Also I am quite jealous of your success

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No, most data storage right now is free. There is an initial incentive layer that rewards storage providers for storing data in the form of block rewards.

So where exactly is the value coming from then?