Free Cloud Storage for Your Business -- If You're Willing to Share

You already know the importance of cloud storage for backing up data, sharing important files, and so on. You also know that if you want more than a few gigabytes of space, you'll have to open your wallet.

For example, services like Dropbox and Mozy give you a paltry 2GB. SugarSync is a little more generous with 5GB of free storage, but for a lot of businesses, that's not nearly enough.

Enter Symform, which offers 100GB of free cloud storage for businesses.

I know what you're thinking: "Yeah, right, what's the catch?" There is one, of course, but for some businesses it's probably relatively painless: To get your free 100GB, you must devote 150GB of local storage (i.e. space on your own hard drive) to Symform.

Interesting, no? What you're effectively doing is contributing to the company's distributed network, which allows it to provide inexpensive (and virtually limitless) storage without the need for pricey data centers. In other words, users are the data center.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. So that means your data is actually getting stored on other users' hard drives? That sounds insane on a couple levels. First, what about security? Second, what happens if someone's system is down? Does that mean your data is unavailable?

Symform addresses these and other questions on its FAQ page, but I'll give you the upshot: the service employs 256-bit AES encryption to keep data secure, then relies on a specialized "redundant" storage architecture to prevent data loss:

Symform's Cloud Control constantly monitors all the devices in the Storage Cloud. When it detects that a particular computer has failed, it automatically triggers regeneration of the fragments that were stored on that computer and repopulates them elsewhere in the network. The system prevents data loss by self-healing automatically. In fact, with Symform the right 33 devices would have to simultaneously fail for data loss to occur. Compare that to a traditional data center using a RAID-5 configuration where just 2 simultaneous failures would result in data loss.

Personally, I'd have no trouble making do with 100GB. As for blocking out 150GB of space, that's no problem, either: my 750GB primary drive has room to spare, and even if it didn't, I could pick up a 1TB external drive for as little as $50.

What are your thoughts on Symform? Does 100GB of cloud storage for 150GB of local storage sound like a fair trade? Are you concerned about data security/availability despite the company's assurances? Hit the comments and let me know what you think of this unique-sounding storage solution. Oh, and if you want to hear the company pitch the product in a silly video, here it is:

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