Data Backup Digest

Space Monkey is a relatively new start-up company from Utah. The company used Kickstarter to attract funding for their project, originally beginning with a $100,000 goal, but eventually amassing nearly $350,000.

While the industry continue to make a push for cloud storage, Space Monkey claim that if you have vast amounts of data then it is too costly and takes too long to use the cloud. That’s because a lot of cloud providers will cap transfer speeds as they cannot afford unlimited bandwidth. Space Monkey claims to overcome these issues.

A Space Monkey is a funky looking device that can store 1TB of data and is available in white and black models. The data you store on the device is stored locally and on an encrypted shared network. All of this data can then be accessed from wherever you are from any device.

All of the data you back up to your Space Monkey is then broken up into 40 pieces of data. Half of them are erasure corded and the other half are parity pieces. This means that the individual devices create a network-based data centre. The data is sent out to geographically diverse locations. This means that if a disaster occurs in one part of the country, your data won’t go down with it.

Accessing your data is quick, too. According to Space Monkey, you can transfer data 15-30x faster than competitors like Dropbox, Google Drive or iCloud. Each device has its own network connection, hard drive and CPU, meaning that the network resources scale perfectly and you won’t suffer network slowdown if there is a huge increase in users on the system. The company claim that even when you aren’t on the same local connection as your device, you’ll still get speeds as quick as or quicker than traditional cloud services.

Space Monkey offers mobile apps for both iOS and Android. These support auto-upload of photos and videos, meaning that you don’t have to worry about transferring your data over each time you create it. That’s all done automatically. You can view all your files and do everything you’d expect with them, like share, rename, move or delete.

Space Monkey fully integrates with your operating system. Files that exist on the device will show on your computer as if they’re local, which means that you don’t have to dedicate part of your existing hard drive to store your cloud data on. Desktop clients are available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. They all look swish, clean and easy to use.

Space Monkey is currently only available in the United States, though international orders will apparently be available in the near future. The first year of your subscription costs $199, plus $19 shipping, which includes the drive. After this you will be able to renew for $49 per year. Although it is a large cost upfront, if you use the device over a long period of time then you’ll be making great savings over some of the competing cloud services out there.