We wrote several articles about Cloud Computing and cloud Storage. Symform, a company founded by Parerit Garg and Bassam Tabbara (Ex-Microsoft Employees) has arranged an unique way to give 100 GB of Free Cloud Storage to the Customers and Partners. Most other online Cloud Storage providers offer 2GB or 3GB for free, this looks great.
Wow! Free Cloud Storage of 100 GB ?
Wait, you have to contribute 150 GB of your Hard Disk drive to get this 100 GB Cloud Storage. As Dong Ngo rightly said at cnet, their claim that it is the first service to offer this kind of Free Cloud Storage Sharing service. So, calculate your cost of Bandwidth, electricity and most importantly you must be aware that your local hard disk is being accessed by a third party application to get this free Cloud Storage.
So how this Free Cloud Storage works?
After initial sign up. you will be able to download a .net based application to synchronize your data and use the Free Cloud Storage.
Practically, you can not control the bandwidth this Free Cloud Storage application will suck from you. You can not stop the service of Free Cloud Storage application from task manager either, this Free Cloud Storage application will run with Administrative privileges like a system application.
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So, will I use this Free Cloud Storage?
You are asking us whether you will use this Free Cloud Storage? We will say to stay away from this Free Cloud Storage application and Free Cloud Storage service. The reasons are:
- It seems the company does not have proper infrastructure to provide a great deal or Free Cloud Storage, you can
easily understand the situation if your hard disk has lots of virus, malware and you “donate” your 150 GB space as a part of ” Free Cloud Storage application” using their .Net based app. - Google Storage and Google appspot offers blob based storage, enough for storing images and static files, kind of Free Cloud Storage.
- Rackspace and other standard brands offers Cloud storage that is really not too steep and have excellent security.
- Microsoft itself offers Sky Drive to store your data. It is not true “Cloud Storage” still we can think it as Free Cloud Storage, as you are seeking something for free.
- With Dropbox Free Cloud Storage, you can increase your quota by referral system.
About Abhishek Ghosh
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I’m using Symform. Try it out and get up to 230GB free. use thi referral: 10GB for each referral: Refer your friends and help them protect their data and get 10GB for every friend who successfully starts using Symform. 20GB by moving fast: Get your account fully configured within 24 hours after registering. total: 230GB.
I tried out Symform for about a month. I contributed a full 1TB in order to get 500GB of storage. The software was fairly easy to set up and depending on the bandwidth you have, the configuration tool allows you to specify throttling for certain times of the day. The web portal is friendly, reasonably easy to navigate, and seems well-written.
I let it run for many many days. As I checked back on the web portal I found some of my files were shown to be backed up. It seemed like it was making progress. But thereafter the numbers would just stay the same, and I saw several little yellow warning signs saying “errors encountered, transfer will resume shortly”, or something to that nature. As far as I could tell everything was set up correctly. I did see the encrypted files that were downloaded to my system, about 70GB worth, so that part seemed to be working.
I did a few friendly back-and-forths with customer service but in the end I just decided to pull the plug. No new files were being backed up for many many days and I gave it plenty of bandwidth. It is a great idea and exactly what I was looking for, but I didn’t feel comfortable that I could ever really retrieve all of my 500GB back from their virtual cloud in a reliable fashion.
Perhaps it works better for those with less data, 10GB-20GB or so.
Thank you very much Dan for sharing your first hand experience with very nice detail.
I meant to update this forum quite a while go.
About a month later I tried to make it work again. I re-installed and configured it all again.
It did start to work as expected. I’ve been using it for over a year now with no problems. I back up about 300GB of data. So far, so good.
I haven’t yet tried to recover it.
Your first comment on November 15, 2012 at 9:08 pm
Its great Dan to hear from you again. Its unbelievable that almost a year passed but you remembered the website !
Thanks a lot for the feedback and its quite nice to keep the users updated by testing free things (or less costly things) in this way. Unfortunately, very few ever provides any feedback.