The reason I started thinking about this was that I remember back when Gmail started offering several gigabytes of space, software came out that "mounted" your Gmail inbox as a drive in Windows (this was before Dropbox). So I'm thinking, what's stopping anyone from doing the same thing today, except with many different cloud services at once, and with local encryption rendering the remote data useless for anyone snooping around?
Most cloud services are built around a couple of basic rules, such as "Every user should only use one account, and should pay for more space". I am assuming services like Dropbox has some sort of mechanism for recognizing "bad" users that are only uploading useless data (encrypted data) en masse and shutting these down, which might be a problem.
Still, what's stopping anyone from creating a solution that is:
- Safe, in the sense that all data is encrypted.
- Redundant, in the sense that all data is stored in more than one account in case one account gets closed down (this way, you could also turn off local sync and only store in the cloud).
- Free, because you would only have to use accounts that you did not pay for.
Are there any practical tools available to achieve something like this? Since there are already software RAID solutions available, and from what I gather you can mount Dropbox (and probably other cloud services) in Linux for example, could you just set up a RAID structure with EncFS, and add new accounts (disks) while some of them get shut down?
I'm also realizing this would likely be seen as "abuse" by the services themselves, so you would probably have a good chance of being permanently banned from Dropbox, so I'd just like to finish by pointing out that I'm only interested in this from a conceptual standpoint, I'm not planning on actually doing it (I'm personally unsure if it would be worth the work since most cloud services do not offer a lot of space).
Any thoughts on the possibility of achieving something like this are greatly appreciated.
