From acquisition to closure in 23 months
Long live the cloud!
Well, maybe not that long...
Storage firm Quantum bought the Symform cloud consumer/small business file sync and share business in August 2014 – and is going to close it down on July 31. It has gone from acquisition to closure in 23 months. Why? According to a Quantum FAQ: "Quantum is discontinuing the Symform service due to its strategic business focus …
It was always a bit rubbish, but worked great as an essentially free 2nd tier backup. Suggesting DropBox, etc., as an alternative is nonsense though...that's like saying renting a car is an alternative to carsharing...My primary backup is Google, I'll look at S3 as my secondary now unless anyone else knows any other P2P backup solution?
P.S. I would have loved to have a fully open source option that ran off the bittorrent network, but the resiliency you would need for that would probably have needed higher than a 2:1 sharing ratio...
Now that clouds are starting to burst, we should at least bout of good weather - has anyone noticed how poor the weather is this year since the push for cloud ??
I think though that there are some large clouds still left, so we can expect some black storm clouds and a really good downpour before the sky finally clears.
Even before Quantum purchased Symform the writing seemed to be on the wall as it had a wide range of limitations that did not seem to be getting addressed. Once Quantum was in charge it got even worse as nothing happened.
I moved across to hibiC, which does the job of syncing files to the internet and between systems at very low cost. So all in all its good enough.
The customers' ability to restore their data from the cloud during the last months of June and July is (probably) dependent upon those same customers leaving their distributed nodes up and running.
It's like banking - the whole system works, so long as the depositors keep their money in the banks. But if there is a run on the banks, and the depositors take all the money out early, the bank cannot demand back the money from creditors (e.g. people who have mortgages) over a certain term.
Personally, the moment I heard the news I shut down my Symform nodes and moved to another service.