The Labs team is developing an experimental backup app to test more native use cases for Storj. We would love to get early feedback from select community members on the user experience, and help finding bugs.
For anyone who is interested in participating we are asking you apply via this form. Selected applications will receive an invite to a testing Slack channel and an access URL.
This seems to work quite well already. Uploading was a bit slow.
I am just wondering are these files stored on Storj or on IPFS or both? Because I get displayed a IPFS link for download. Could that be the reason why it upload is slow?
Everyone who registered has been selected to join the testing program. You should receive an invite to join a Slack channel so that you can get instructions and provide feedback directly to the team. If you registered, and did not get an invite let me know so I can fix it.
I’d assume the backup app is designed to be for non-technical end users, not developers, as a showcase that Storj can be used for this kind of applications?
In my experience, a lot of these backup apps perform very slowly. Typically compressing data before encryption/transfer, sometimes doing pattern matching, and then throttling. The fact that Backblaze mentions throttling and having them mail you a USB drive to get your data back as an option tends to lean, in my mind, towards a very slow process.
But maybe it is “blazing”, I have no idea. I am just skeptical because ones I have tried in the past with “unlimited” storage have had very narrow and slow transfer speeds.
You could probably run this service using Storj as a backend storage provider and run a profit. Sure, there will be customers who cost more than they pay, but these services make a profit on average. There will also be many customers who just backup the documents on their laptop at which point almost the entire payment is profit.
Of course backblaze has the added advantage that they use their own storage backend and nobody else is trying to make a profit of them, but I would bet their customer base would still turn a profit if the data was stored on Storj.