What Contribution Means
You’re ready to take advantage of free or super-affordable cloud storage with Symform, but you still don’t quite get the contribution part. When you contribute to the network, you’re contributing some of your excess local storage (from your computer, external hard drive or NAS device, server, etc.) to the Symform Cloud. Nearly everybody has excess storage sitting around. Research suggests that as much as 80 percent of local storage goes unused.
Contributing Is Easy and Safe
When you become a contributor, Symform Cloud Control sends tiny fragments of encrypted data to be stored on your local device. Each of these fragments is just one 96th of one block of data. In other words, if you were to “see” these pieces, they would look like nothing but 1s and 0s. The data you store in the Symform cloud and the data you store on your device are completely protected by military-grade encryption, strong key management processes, and sophisticated algorithms that manage the distribution.
How Does Contribution Work?
- During configuration, you select a destination–a device and folder–to serve as your contribution location for Symform.
- You set your bandwidth and determine how much of it Symform can use during various times of the day.
- Symform works in the background, syncing and contributing data fragments without any interruption to your other applications or processes.
- Symform lets you know if you need to contribute more local storage, based on how much cloud storage you are using.
- You only need to contribute as much local storage as you want to store in the cloud, plus a fraction of that amount so that Symform can build in redundancy for data protection.