A social storage revolution: Transporter

At the 12th Annual Storage Visions Conference, a partner programme to the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show, the winner of the 2013 Art of Storage award was a product that is in the verification stage and hasn’t been launched yet. In a curious contrast, this product is also crowdfunded, with the fundraiser having closed on the January 11, 2013. The company received 2.6 times its funding goal of $1 million from over a thousand ‘backers’, having achieved the goal barely 11 days after the fundraiser campaign was launched on Kickstarter.The ‘Transporter’, an attractively designed black obelisk, “is an online, but off-cloud social storage solution that delivers a completely private way to share, collaborate, access and protect all your files”. The device allows you to back up, store or share your data on your own terms without paying recurring subscription fees for cloud storage services. Companies hosting cloud services are in the position to monitor the data and metadata stored on their servers. By going off the cloud, users can control the level of privacy and data security they require. The company that made Transporter claims that the users’ data is always private. The Transporter uses peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing on the Internet to sync and share data but does not store it on any external server or cloud server. At the most, the data is locally cached on your computer if you choose to do so to improve performance. Your data is always with you except when it is being actively shared with someone else. Transporter devices communicate with each other using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.Now let’s get down to the devil called details: the Transporter contains a standard 2.5-inch HDD, of a capacity of 1TB. The device is connected to the Internet (Ethernet cable or wireless) at your home or office so that your data is accessible to you from anywhere in the world through an Internet-connected device such as a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Transporter works with Ethernet ports (RJ45), Wi-Fi networks (802.11b/g/n at 2.4 or 5 GHz) and commonly used security protocols such as WPS, WEP 64/128bit, WPA /WAP2 and WPA-PSK/WPA2-PSK. The Transporter is a SATA II device. It is backwards compatible with SATA III drives too and can be used with most laptops, tablets and smartphones. About a hundred devices are under testing and the final solution is intended to work as a hybrid network of Transporters and hard drives. The Transporter could work as a standalone product communicating with one or more Transporters, as also a service that enables data sharing with other types of devices. It is not clear yet if all the privacy and security features of the Transporter would work as purported in the case of direct communication between a Transporter and another device such as a desktop computer.

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