Symform

About Symform

Symform, founded in 2007 by former Microsoft engineers Praerit Garg and Bassam Tabbara, operated a peer-to-peer cloud storage network aimed at fundamentally altering the economics of data backup. The company was established to solve the disparity between inexpensive local storage and the high cost of traditional cloud services, a problem they attributed to the capital-intensive datacenter model.

The core of Symform's business was a decentralized, crowdsourced network. Its business model, termed "Bytes or Bucks," allowed users to receive free cloud backup services by contributing their own unused local disk space to the network. For every two gigabytes of local storage a user contributed, they earned one gigabyte of cloud storage. Alternatively, customers could pay a monthly fee for storage, positioning the company as a freemium service provider. This structure was designed to eliminate the need for costly centralized datacenters, thereby reducing overhead and passing the savings to customers. The target market included individual users and small businesses seeking affordable and secure offsite data backup.

Symform's service encrypted data using 256-bit AES, then fragmented it and distributed these pieces across multiple devices on its global network using a proprietary technology called RAID-96. This method ensured that no single point of failure existed and that the data on any contributing device was unreadable, providing both security and redundancy. By 2014, the company served 45,000 customers across 170 countries and had raised approximately $20 million in funding. In August 2014, Quantum Corp, a company specializing in backup and data retention, acquired Symform's technology and development team for roughly $500,000. However, due to a strategic shift towards enterprise clients, Quantum discontinued the Symform service on July 31, 2016.