When reading this so many red-flag warnings popped up that I could not decide if they were deluded or frauds. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and sim

When reading this so many red-flag warnings popped up that I could not decide if they were deluded or frauds. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and simply guess that they are deluded regarding the storage savings they will eventually realize via de-dupe. Given that the founding team includes a bizdev guy, a marketing guy, and a sysadmin/ops guy I am guessing that they can put together a nice pitch and powerpoint, have some easy answers to the operational problems of competing in this space, and have a lot of hand-waving answers to the harder technical problems. The latter problem will probably end up killing them unless we are just seeing a PR dump in preparation for a pivot to being just another online backup company. One major fly in this whole "de-dupe" claim is that it will probably not even work out for them even if they did have some magic sauce to dance around the de-dupe/crypto conflict others have noted. The problem is that the files which users actually care about and want to back up are not the common files but the ones which make their data unique; it is not the mp3s or hollywood videos that matter, it is the data/content that each person has created that matters. If my disks crashed, my online and offline backups were corrupted, and I needed to rebuild my system I could get the common OS files in a hour, the mp3s and videos would take a few weeks of passive torrenting, but the pictures, home videos, and personal documents would be gone forever. It is these files that matter for a backup services, and they are not going to be something that you can de-dupe even if they were not encrypted. Back when the term "de-dupe" did not exist and convergent encryption was something we were inventing before the term existed the thought was that a backup service employing these techniques would enjoy a massive savings in storage costs -- it turned out that people cared less about backing up the data that was easy to de-dupe and original data was a much larger portion of what users uploaded than we expected. This was back when pics were a meg or two and personal video was low bitrate, now that even a mobile phone is dumping multi-meg pictures and you can get a HD video camera for a hundred bucks I cannot imagine how anyone would convince themselves that de-dupe is going to make any significant difference to the operational costs of such a service.