If you care about your data, do you at all times have a current copy stored on an off-site location?

• Yes: Good for you! Is it automatic, affordable, hassle-free? If yes, please tell us about it! If no, read on…
• No: you are at a risk of losing your data! Read on …

… but I have RAID …

We make it as easily as possible for you to both manage your precious data locally and enjoy the security of an off-site backup, protecting you from catastrophic data loss due to calamities:

• fast (access speed only limited by your hardware and local network speed)
• private (local, end-to-end encrypted)
• large storage capacity (only limited by the storage space on your NAS/server)

Bonus features:

• your own domain under yourchosenname.raindrop.earth through which you can always reach your own network (dependent on your own requirements and settings)

We are working with priority to add the following core features:

• synchronise your photos from your mobile device with your  
• synchronise your contacts from your mobile device with your  
• (temporarily) share selected files from your backup with others

It is our goal to empower our members ultimately to become completely independent of the BigTech clouds they force upon you especially if you want to conveniently synchronise your private data. It is our aim that you shouldn’t have to use the clouds with questionable privacy of the fruit, android or windows companies to conveniently handle data on multiple devices and to ensure you have secure backups at all times.

To make    technically possible, we define several requirements to which our members must adhere:

• you have a NAS or home server that
  • is permanently running
  • is permanently connected to the internet
  • has at least half¹ of its storage capacity available (i.e. not in use for your own data)
  • has at least a total capacity of 2 TB
• you have an internet flat-rate² with a speed of at least 16 Mbps
• your internet connection (router/modem) is permanently switched on and connected to your home network (or at least your NAS/server)

We see some shortcomings with existing cloud storage and backup solutions.

Most cloud storage providers store your data in data centres so you can (securely) access it over the internet. Basically that’s it.

Most cloud backup providers store your data in data centres and provide more or less convenient backup software to automatically backup the data from your device (computer, laptop, smartphone).

There is no strong guarantee whether or how your data is encrypted at their storage location and who could access your data in case you do not take care of encrypting the data yourself before you upload it.

To maintain (backup) copies of large amounts of data in a data centre is not cheap, hence the above solutions typically cost (much) more than approximately US$5 per Terabyte (TB) per month. Additionally, a data centre constitutes a single target (in principle), or, if they go out of their way to have distributed backups you are probably paying a premium for that (typically double or more the cost mentioned before.)

“Free” plans offered by some large storage providers are typically limited to several tens of GB and in some cases come as a package deal where you agree to have them use your private data (looking at you BigTech)

  offers you

• real distributed cloud backup (i.e. not stored in data centres¹)
• your data is not only stored encrypted but also highly fragmented, providing an additional layer of security not possible in centralised solutions.
• a completely automatic and convenient way to backup your NAS or home-server
• a way to save storage cost in return for sharing your excess storage space
• a community of people who prefer privacy, freedom, independence from BigTech
• truly decentralised storage of your data
• lower cost on average per TB data remotely backed up.

We know we are using some terminology that might need some explanation…

Node

A   Node is the NAS or (home) server where you installed the   App. We sometimes also say ” Node” when we refer to the software permanently running on this NAS or server, which is basically what you see as the   App.

App

This is the ” Node Interface”, which you can access by pointing your web browser to the NAS where you installed . (Use the port you were told at the end of the install procedure, usually 18601, e.g. the full address would be something like http://mynas:18601).

NAS

Network Attached Storage: an appliance used as a “private file server” in your private network, which you can access from your other devices when logged in to your local (home) network. This is ideal to easily share files or cooperate on information amongst people that also log in to your local network with their device(s).

We use the term NAS when we mean the device on which your data is stored and our   Node software runs, it can also be another type of (home) server.

Share

A share is a “shared Folder” on your NAS. You can configure it usually via you NAS’s user interface. It will be visible on your local network, e.g. when you navigate to your NAS in your favourite file browser, you should be able to see its contents.

The one managing your   Account (Account Owner) can usually define access permissions that allow or prohibit other users from accessing the share and its content. The Account Owner is responsible for making sure that the contents of the share are included in the backup set if so desired.

In the   App you can define (under System > Shares) whether a share should be included in the backup page where you choose the content of your backup.

Backup

This is the central purpose and function of the  . A backup is a copy of data you have selected that you don’t want to lose. I.e. if something happens to your primary data, you can rescue the content by restoring it from the backup. A backup often also has “history” functionality, meaning you can restore previous versions of a file that you have overwritten. This can also be an effective tool against Ransomware Attacks. Note that an effective Backup Retention Policy is needed if you want to leverage this functionality effectively.

It is usually recommended to carefully select the data you want to backup, by also not backing up data that is not valuable or easily replacable. This is necessary if your backup capacity is limited (it always is!) and you want to sensibly keep historical data thereby consuming more backup space.

Backup Plan / Backup Set

A Backup Plan is a definition which data to backup and when. In our system the when is a regular interval you define, and the backup will be automatically executed by the   Node. The Backup Set determines which data is backed up, i.e. it is a selection of files on your NAS.

Backup Retention Policy

This is in broader terms part of your backup plan, and its definition and enforcement are your own responsibility. It simply means how many historical versions of backups do you want to keep and with which time-interval. Effective values differ case-by-case, and are a trade-off between backup capacity and how far you want to travel back in time regarding old data versions.

Backup Capacity

The total capacity you have available to store your backups on. For the    this is synonymous with Rain،storage, as we also like to call it.

Online Status / Audit

To make    work, two conditions must generally be satisfied:

1. Your   Node must be online (switched on and connected to the internet)
2. Our software must be running and reachable on its external address

This is regularly checked (audited) by our Satellite, to ensure that the    continues to operate smoothly for all members. MOVETOFAQIt also enables our system (initially via the   App but in case of sustained problems also per email) to inform you if there is a problem that requires manual intervention.MOVETOFAQ

If you experience frequent outages or have a misconfigured router, this will result in an offline-status or a bad audit score if you leave it untreated, which ultimately degrades your membership.

Satellite

This is a server running on our infrastructure that coordinates the communication between the   Nodes of our members.

The main idea of    is to enable you to share your excess storage space in return for getting a convenient possibility to backup your data remotely with high privacy and security, while remaining independent of centralised cloud providers.

Technologies

We achieve this by leveraging several open source projects, notably storj for distributed storage and kopia as a backup backend. Some of the features delivering the added value of    compared to using these or similar technologies yourself:

• we combine the two functionalities storage and storage sharing of storj under one, easy to manage account (we manage our own infrastructure, our member’s accounts have no relation whatsoever with any services provided by storj)
• we offer a convenient interface to manage and monitor fully automatic backups from your permanent on storage (e.g. NAS). This is very practical because
  • you don’t have to worry about keeping your other devices, e.g. main computer(s), turned on, but your backup schedule will be reliably executed.
  • you have a clear central location for your personal data (and the data of e.g. family members if so desired)
• we offer a convenient method for disaster recovery of your data from remote backups
• we help you leverage your local storage solution (e.g. NAS) to include the single most needed (but usually not offered by others) functionality to automatically perform offsite backups
• we help you install all this functionality on your NAS, which is far from trivial since most NAS have quite limited customizability
• we offer a maintenance-free Dynamic DNS solution included in all    memberships for free, that you can use to your liking (i.e. not only for    operation). It is based on OpenSource PowerDNS, and we will open-source our update server after an internal security audit as well.

OpenSource

The external technologies employed by    are open source. To comply with the various (open source) licences, we take care to:

• make modifications or dependencies to external projects publicly available on our github¹,if so required by their licence
• consider how functionalities are integrated (e.g. fork/modify, link as a library, communicate via a network API)
• try to give back to the community by submitting improvements to respective projects (this sometimes lags behind during the startup phase due to our limited development resources in relation to the required effort to submit improvements with sufficient quality)
• consider to open-source also most of our own developments, where it makes sense in terms of generic usability for others or community audits/contributions. (For some parts of our code this will take some time due to aforementioned reasons.)

The Technical (in a nutshell)

Follows soon

The main issues to address to keep your data safe are security and redundancy:

Security

Data that is transmitted over the network from/to your NAS or server is encrypted using encryption keys that only you have. These keys are generated based on the data you input yourself during registration and only stored on your NAS, within the configuration data of the   App. The data allocated to member nodes is additionally encrypted with their storage keys, so it is impossible for somebody else to impersonate a peer that is storing a chunk of your data. (And since it is also not possible that any such data injected by a third party is in fact consistent with the expected data, it would fail any integrity checks as well.)

Therefore it is both not possible for an attacker to modify the data you have stored in your    and not possible to access it over the network. (The only way a hacker could access the data on you NAS is by actually breaking in to it and access it directly, which has nothing to do with  .)

Redundancy

Redundancy is necessary to guarantee sustained availability of data, when any member leaves the    (irrespective the reasons) or is unreachable, and other member’s encrypted data pieces that are stored on their node become inaccessible over the network. When our coordination satellite detects that a node disappears, it will automatically start orchestrating repairs. That is, the remaining nodes will re-distribute other redundant copies of the affected data pieces such, that in the sustained absence (or disappearance) of the discussed node, there will always be more than one redundant copy of each piece somewhere in the  .

This is the reason why the total storage capacity of the    must be larger than the sum of the data that members store in the    from their point of view (roughly by a factor of 2.7 for statistical reasons). This is also the reason that depending on your membership level we ask you to contribute more of your storage than you are storing in the    yourself, because only in this way we can be truly sustainable on the long term without relying on centralised storage in data centres.

RAID is a solution that serves the availability of your data in face of a disk failure, it is not a backup solution.

If you are using e.g. RAID1 in a home network, you will lose your data if

• both your disks fail (e.g. if it drops, burns, drowns)
• your NAS is stolen
• if you are victim of a ransomware attack

Also, you may be wasting resources if you are not relying on high availability. I.e. in a home-office or private setting it may not be a problem to spend some time recovering data, as long as you have a backup to recover from. In this case, keeping a mirror copy in the same NAS (a.k.a. RAID1) is both a waste and does not save your data in case of calamity.