Greek Storage Start-Up: Yes, It Exists !
Longaccess, in secure personal cloud archiving
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on April 21, 2014 at 2:46 pmCompany
Longaccess
HQs
Athens, Greece
Date founded
2013
Financial funding
Company raised €110,000 In July 2013 in a seed funding round led by Greece-based Jeremie Openfund II. Current investors also include Driin Holdings who participated in the seed funding round. Total invested in Longaccess is now €210,000.
Founder and main employees
Panayotis Vryonis, founder and CEO, stated that “he founded Longaccess to make sure his two year old daughter will find her first photos when she is old enough to appreciate them.”- Nikos Roussos, software engineer, has been involved in open source communities and projects for more than ten years.
- Kostas Koukopoulos, software engineer, worked on the provision of IT services for the research and academic community.
- Fivos Avgerinos, UI/UX designer, a recent business graduate with master in logistics,
- Theofanis Tokas, software engineer, worked in large scale projects for the Greek Ministry of Education
Technology
Longaccess started working with a small number of professional photographers in Athens, Greece to help them use the service to offer more value to their clients.
The offering for Windows only is a secure long-term cloud storage for personal digital archives, not a file sync or sharing service. You cannot delete the archives.
All user data are encrypted using AES-256 before uploading them to the service and the randomly generated client-side encryption keys are never transmitted to Longaccess or anyone else. The archive is decrypted on-the fly, in user’s browser, as it is downloaded.
The source code of the client application is open for anyone.
When you upload
When you download
Longaccess said the Archive Certificate is a fundamental part of its service. Every time you create and upload an archive using the desktop application, you also get an Archive Certificate.
It’s a text file that contains all information required to access your data in the future:
- Anyone with access to the Archive Certificate can access the corresponding archive data: Nothing else is required, not even a username or password.
- Access to the archive data is impossible without the corresponding Archive Certificate. No one, not the user, not even Longaccess, can decrypt archives without the certificate.
- If you give a copy of the certificate to someone else, he can also access the data.
- The company suggests to print the certificate on paper.
Longaccess is using a combination of Amazon S3 and Glacier to store files.
Now it’s also possible to copy files from Dropbox to Longaccess.
Note that recently Longaccess responds to Heartbleed: “We strongly recommend that you change your password on our service.”
Date launched
January 15 2014, public release of Windows App.
Price range
- For unlimited number of archives and downloads, as well as AES256 client-side encryption: 250GB for free with archives for one year
- 1GB at €7, 10GB at €49, 100GB at €399 prepaid for 30 years
Roadmap
Same service for Mac OS
Competitors
AWS, Holdon.to, Iron Mountain, Sixsafz
Comments
Longaccess is the first and only one Greek storage start-up ever registered since 1978 in our database.
We are not convinced by its technology as archives are stored by Amazon on digital media that are nor guaranteed to last 30 years. Encryption is the only technological guarantee.
But the main question is, of course: will Longaccess be around in 30 years from now?
The company's anwer here is no more convincing: "We made a clear decision to build a different business, on the basis of a very long term commitment. That's what we do. It's part of our corporate DNA. Soon enough we will be announcing a structure that will address these kinds of concerns even better. Stay tuned for the details."
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