Online backup services have traditionally been all about storing files from lots of users in a single, large data centre. Which is fine, but can be expensive, as there’s a lot of costly infrastructure to maintain.Symform takes a more distributed approach, spreading its data around the hard drives of other Symform users. And with that meaning the service is more about managing this distribution than the data itself, the company can offer you up to 200GB of cloud storage space at no cost at all.
While the idea of storing your files on other people’s PC’s may sound a little insecure, the reality is very different. Your data is encrypted locally, then shredded into fragments and spread around the network, which arguably makes it more secure than a regular online backup service.
The system has considerable redundancy, too. There’s always the possibility that an individual PC will fail, or be turned off, or the owner might have just uninstalled the client, but that’s not a problem. Symform generates so many extra “parity fragments” that it would take 33 device failures before you’d run into any issues.
If you don’t have a problem in principle with this form of peer-to-peer backup, then you can get started with Symform just by installing the client. There’s no need to contribute any space up-front, as every Symform user gets 10GB for free. And the service client itself is easy to set up: just point it to the folders you’d like to sync online, and it’ll get on with backing them up for you.
Should you need more space later, then the simplest option is just to contribute excess local space of your own (click Device Type, check “Contribute storage space…” in the client). There are some conditions here: your system needs at least an 80% up time, for instance (the website has more). But if you qualify, you’ll get access two thirds of whatever you provide (so offer the service 150GB, you’ll be able to use 100GB).
Of course while this isn’t directly costing you anything, it will mean you’re sharing your internet connection to a degree, as Symform will need to upload and download data (the client gives you some control over its use of bandwidth, but this could still be an issue). And just allocating a large chunk of extra drive space is likely to have an adverse effect on your PC performance.
Is it worth it? For us, probably not. If you do need cheap online storage space then there are plenty of options elsewhere. SkyDrive +100, say, gives you an extra 100GB for $50 a year, without you having to give up any bandwidth or control of your system (other than normal uploading, anyway).
If you’re on a really tight budget, though, Symform does provide an easy way to get plenty of cloud storage space at zero cost, and that may make it worthy of your attention. Take the client for a spin, see how it works for you.
Photo Credit: Sergej Khakimullin/Shutterstock
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