Hotmail/Gmail as network storage?

<a href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/20/0316226&tid=95&tid=162&tid=109&tid=218">Hotmail is apparently boosting their storage limit to 2GB now,</a> which got me thinking: what about using free email accounts as a distributed network storage system? Perhaps not terribly practical, but might be a fun project. Encrypt your data, break it up into chunks, and distribute it among any number of free email accounts. Sure, you suffer the overhead of base64 encoding, but free is free.

I'm sure it wouldn't take long before MS/Google would start blocking the messages, though...

Brad
Friday, August 20, 2004

(sorry about that folks...forgot about the no-HTML tags)

Brad
Friday, August 20, 2004

Uh... some of us have been doing this for a while.

I actually have a cron job at work that tars & gzips my mysql database and emails it to my gmail account once every 3 days.  On all of the other days, it just goes elsewhere on my local network.

It's only a couple megs each time and Gmail automatically groups the messages together, so I have a complete and growing archive of my data.  I'll probably start wiping the oldest ones, but I won't have to worry about it for a few more months.

KC
Friday, August 20, 2004

Actually with all the other players upping the ante, gmail's 1gig is starting to look peanuts.

Ogami Itto
Friday, August 20, 2004

Are the other players really upping the ante though, or are they bluffing? We know that Google have the platform to support their offering.

John Topley (www.johntopley.com)
Friday, August 20, 2004

And you think Yahoo and Microsoft don't?

www.MarkTAW.com
Friday, August 20, 2004

hotmail just went to 250meg for free, 2 gig for about $20 a year.

John
Friday, August 20, 2004

No company has the platform available to support all users actually using 1gig, let alone two. It's just an advertising scheme based on the fact that most users will barely ever use 10MB.

Andrew Cherry
Saturday, August 21, 2004

Google's competitive advantage is their platform i.e. their petabyte file system, their 100,000+ servers, their redundancy at entire computer level rather than component level and their custom software to manage that lot.

John Topley (www.johntopley.com)
Saturday, August 21, 2004

Andrew Cherry: "10MB should be enough for anybody!"

Universe: "Andrew Cherry is as wet behind the ears as his name suggests."

Poppin the Cherry
Monday, August 23, 2004

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