Cubbit offers an innovative distributed cloud storage system called the swarm

Cubit has summoned a ‘swarm’ of users to protect your data in the cloud.

Cubbit distributed cloud system.

As a kid a cubby house was a special place that belonged to me and a cubbyhole was a small secret place for stashing away some prized possessions. Fast forward several decades, and a company is offering you a cubby of sorts in the digital ether for your prized data.

Cubbit, as it is called, is not your average consumer cloud storage. Your valuable data is not backed up at a data centre somewhere in the world.

That’s because Cubbit is a new-age distributed system, a peer-to-peer network, a bit like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Your data is broken up into little pieces, encrypted and squirrelled away on Cubbit devices owned by thousands of other Cubbit users. As with Bitcoin, there is no central repository. And bits of other people’s data is on your Cubbit.

Cubbit calls its network of users ‘the swarm’. (There’s no connection to the 1978 horror film with Michael Caine BTW.)

I decided to join the digital swarm and try Cubbit. The company was founded in Italy in 2016 and is now LA-based. It did well on crowdsourcing platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo, receiving a healthy $1.6m in funds. Cubbit claims Techstars and Barclays among its global partners.

To join the swarm, you buy a Cubbit ‘cell’ by making a one-off payment that gives you a permanent cubby with no annual fees. A 512GB Cubbit cell is $454 while a 1TB cell is $548.

Data being shared between Cubbit units.

You might think why bother with a Cubbit when you can store data on a hard drive at home for much less. Offsite storage is valuable should your home data become infected with ransomware, or your entire home data storage is destroyed by fire or a flood, or is stolen.

My experiment began when a hexagon-shaped Cubbit unit arrived in the post. Cubbit calls your file space a stash and mine is 1TB.

Installation is a cinch. I simply connected the Cubbit to a spare slot on my router with an Ethernet cable, and plugged it into the power.

Your Cubbit stash takes the form of a regular folder/file directory. You can access your files through a browser. You can drag and drop files and directories to it and click a link to download your files. Cubbit says its client generates an AES 256 key and uses it to encrypt your files. No one has access to the entire file key.

Cubbit sign-in screen

You can additionally download and run the Cubbit app if you wish to synchronise your Cubbit and a folder on a PC, Mac, or Linux system. The app also gives you usage figures.

Cubbit also has an environmental pitch. It says you save 100kg of carbon dioxide for each terabyte you store on Cubbit; I’m not sure about that; you need to also factor in the CO2 used by each of the 3000 plus members storing others’ files to arrive at a figure.

In the end my problem with Cubbit is not the concept of distributed cloud; it’s the performance. Cubbit would upload some of the files I sent its way and not others. This became messy as I’d try to determine what hadn‘t been uploaded and reload it. Uploads of large files are slow. It also can be slow to delete files.

Having said that, the developers are upfront in telling you it’s a work-in-progress and some features aren’t ready. As Cubbit says, Rome wasn’t built in a day – and that comes from an Italian company.

A Cubbit cell

In the end, Cubbit is a great idea. The fact your data is broken up into multiple bits and scattered across the Cubbits of other users is clever. The company tells me data is stored multiple times in 24 pieces; if a Cubbit user holding a slice of your data goes offline, the data can be retrieved from another Cubbit user.

Cubbit is going to let you expand your storage to up to 4TB by adding an external drive; you get more storage and so does the network.

I asked Cubbit what would happen to people’s data if Cubbit closed down. The company said the Cubbit software would be available as open source so the scheme could continue.

There’s also the question of impact Cubbit traffic would have on your home network, storing and retrieving other people’s data. Personally, I didn’t notice any degrading of my home network performance with Cubbit connected.

In the end, Cubbit is a pioneering project but it definitely needs work to get up to speed. There are bugs to iron out before it can be deemed reliable. It could be successful once this happens.