Comment by jbattle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbattle | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

here's what you do - design a beautiful cube that has a few ports (USB, firewire, whatever). It should also connect to the local wifi network. It'd ship with Dropbox-like software so synching files to it over the home network is dead simple.

Then, you make some sort of lifetime guarantee that you'll keep up with changes in storage and interface technology. Guarantee that the thing will be later upgraded to seamlessly translate people's wedding photos to the next big image format. Guarantee you'll keep it forward and backwards compatible to future OS updates. Guarantee it'll work with future phones and tablets, etc.

Maybe even build in some kind of automated off-site backups in case of fire, theft, flooding.

If you made it simple, and if you earned people's trust that this is really an investment - I think you could really clean up with local home storage.

Syncing over the home network wouldn't be enough; one of the big features of Dropbox is that you can sync devices anywhere. Eg: my phone, my office PC, and my home PC all share the same Dropbox folder.

Since we're not all IPv6 yet, the cube will need to set up a secure tunnel out of the home network to a public endpoint, probably on a server run by your company. All syncing would have to go through that server, preferably with end-to-end encryption so the server can't access the data. (It can still be captured for offline cracking, though.)

Exactly the product I had in mind. I think you can get customers by selling the box and also by providing a subscription model to backup/replicate the user data. Ideally this box should use a well documented and open API and code so you can sync it with other "vaults" providers or even with other boxes. I would pay a lot for a service like this.

Edit: typo.

This product exists- its called space monkey. http://m.spacemonkey.com

FreedomBox: https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com