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It's cheaper. Why? Because people have spare disk and spare bandwidth. It's also more likely to survive a major war if it's redundant enough. Is it better for

It's cheaper. Why? Because people have spare disk and spare bandwidth. It's also more likely to survive a major war if it's redundant enough. Is it better for serving hot assets, no. Is it better for storing a massive amount of raw data that you need occasional random, indexed access to? Maybe. Edit: Also, less regulatory concerns since in theory nobody knows who is paying for it. This is probably it's biggest weakness, to be honest, since it could be used to spread child porn.

jaredklewis 9y ago
> It's also more likely to survive a major war if it's redundant enough. If there is a major war, international Internet will be one of the first things to go. In that scenario, having your files spread out across the world is a major negative. If you want the data to survive a major war, bury an external hard drive.
- richardknop 9y ago
  Yes I don't really understand the war argument. If there were a massive war (like a world war scale not some conflict in Middle East), the first thing Russia/China would do is cut underwater internet cables. Most nation states would probably block outside internet access to avoid propaganda during time of war. I think I would have bigger concerns than whether I could recover my files stored online. For cases like this I'd much rather trust just a simple USB stick or external drive which I could carry with me in my backpack and backup important files there so I don't have to rely on internet.
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    No, it's not like that, blocking internet access would cripple nation states' economies too much to even be able to fight a war. But censorship even without a major war requires centralization of control over the internet, which introduces a country-wide weakness that makes the internet unreliable to the point of complete blackouts, like during anti-government protests. Furthermore even a small conflict has an impact on the supply of electricity in the country which also could make all storage nodes there unavailable for prolonged periods of time. There are a lot of other weaknesses too, like not that many countries even have good global internet connectivity and cyber attacks could shut it down entirely.

jaredklewis 9y ago

> It's also more likely to survive a major war if it's redundant enough. If there is a major war, international Internet will be one of the first things to go. In that scenario, having your files spread out across the world is a major negative. If you want the data to survive a major war, bury an external hard drive.

richardknop 9y ago
Yes I don't really understand the war argument. If there were a massive war (like a world war scale not some conflict in Middle East), the first thing Russia/China would do is cut underwater internet cables. Most nation states would probably block outside internet access to avoid propaganda during time of war. I think I would have bigger concerns than whether I could recover my files stored online. For cases like this I'd much rather trust just a simple USB stick or external drive which I could carry with me in my backpack and backup important files there so I don't have to rely on internet.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  No, it's not like that, blocking internet access would cripple nation states' economies too much to even be able to fight a war. But censorship even without a major war requires centralization of control over the internet, which introduces a country-wide weakness that makes the internet unreliable to the point of complete blackouts, like during anti-government protests. Furthermore even a small conflict has an impact on the supply of electricity in the country which also could make all storage nodes there unavailable for prolonged periods of time. There are a lot of other weaknesses too, like not that many countries even have good global internet connectivity and cyber attacks could shut it down entirely.