Product Review: Symform Cloud Backup

Interesting product: Symform Cloud Backup.

A couple of months ago, I figured that a product like this had to exist, so I Googled for “peer to peer RAID” and found Symform. According to Forbes, the product was created by two ex-Microsoft software engineers, and it is now owned by Quantum Corporation, a business with a long track record (for tech) and a fairly solid reputation.

I looked over the web page and thought it was interesting, so I decided to try it out. I’ve now been using it for free for a couple months and I have successfully used it to keep files synchronized between two PCs and the cloud, including copying files between the PCs, synchronizing files between PCs, and restoring deleted files.

Here’s how it works:
When you sign up, you get 10GB of storage for free. You can increase that without limit by contributing your own storage to their cloud. The “payout rate” is 2 to 1. For every 2GB of storage that you contribute, you get back 1GB in cloud storage. I have contributed 350GB, so I have a total of 185GB of cloud storage. I am currently using about 81GB of that. There is also a subscription service for people or businesses who don’t want to contribute storage. There is no limit on the number of folders to be backed up.

Folders that go to the cloud are encrypted using “military grade” AES-256 encryption, then broken up into blocks. Blocks are split into 64 fragments, which are updated with redundant parity information, then distributed to 96 random devices in the cloud. This is known as RAID-96, a network based extension of hardware based RAID disk protection. If a node holding your data goes down, the cloud automatically reconfigures itself to restore your redundancy. To compromise your data, an attacker would need to find and break into 64 random machines scattered around the globe, and then manage to decrypt the AES-256 encrypted data.

The only drawbacks I’ve noticed so far are that (i) the initial synchronization took a fairly long time. Several days, as I recall; (ii) the web interface is clunky; and (iii) in order to contribute, your PC needs to be available 80% of the time, and network speed needs to be 512 Kbps up and 1MBps down (or 1M/2M if you contribute more than 1TB). There are additional requirements if you donate more than 3TB.

Overall, I say, “thumbs up.”

Download here