Our Vision

An account of why I am moving away from cloud storage and attempting to solve what I believe to be the missing piece of technology in our modern lives.

Core problem

As the population tends towards consumerism and builds disposable income, an immediate need to capture, retain, and relive memories is observed, leading to more and more people leaning to purchase cloud storage subscriptions or external drives.

However, these solutions come with their own demerits and do not truly satisfy this growing demand.

Problems with Cloud

The Cloud has its merits in ease of use, but is best suited for remote sharing and collaborative work. People who use it as a storage, sooner or later get to a saturation point where it becomes unfeasible to continue storing more data in it, due to growing recurring costs.

Furthermore, cloud storages are what I like to call a pseudo-private storages, where whether or not your data is private depends on your faith in your cloud service provider and your government in power. Since breach, malintent, or change of policy in either will result in your data being in the hands of people who you'd rather not share it with.

Problems with external drives

For people who are paranoid with privacy, physical hard drives become the next best solution to store your data.

External hard drives or SSDs, have its own merits over cloud storage solutions. Unlike cloud storage solutions, physical drives are isolated from the internet, making your data in them truly private to you. By storing your data on your own physical drive, you ensure that your data is safe from public data leaks, and you are also not required to put your faith on a single provider or your government.

But you are however, required to put your faith on the drive itself. Hard drives and SSDs are prone to failure and data rot, and unless you trust your data management skills and routinely backup and store multiple copies of your data in different locations, your drives become like a ticking time bomb that can go off at anytime, taking your data with it.

Furthermore, HDDs are honestly cumbersome to carry around and to plug in. A decade of engineering went into creating the wireless world we live in today. Plugging something in to your device is primitive.

The solution that is not quite right

If you are now wondering how did businesses survive without a proper storage solution for the past 2 decades, here is the answer.

Businesses whose existence depends on data storage, figured out an ingenious way to store and access their data. The technology is formally called a NAS or a Network Attached Storage. Very briefly, a NAS is more like self hosting your own personal cloud infrastructure, and since you are the one hosting it, you maintain absolute control over it. A NAS thus combines the merits of both a Cloud storage and a physical hard drive, and enables your organization to maintain maximum privacy as well as mind numbing transfer speeds.

Over the years hence, a lot of companies considered taking this technology and packaging it as either an open source operating system or into a small form factor you can purchase today.

Owning or having one of these is an experience like no other, and something I am afraid very few people in this world will ever be able to witness.

I say that not because these products are hard to come by or unreasonably expensive, but because owning any one of them is like having to manage your own server, and requires a level of technical dexterity that only the tech savvy have. Its not necessarily something you cannot learn, but it is inconvenient enough that makes it uncomfortable and not worth pursuing - a very steep learning curve if you may.

Storage boosted consumption

Being on the other side of the technical spectrum and owning my own self made Network Attached Storage server, I witnessed a change in my consumption behavior from before and after owning one.

The era before owning my own NAS, is an era where I rarely documented my life and saved anything. Very few of the pictures I click in my life ever make it to an archive, and most of the back up I do are only done in haste to free up storage on my phone before an event.

I would click far less pictures, record minimal to no videos, and delete things more often. For every time I pull out my phone, I am reminded of the pain I will have to endure to organize and archive my life experiences. This would however manifest as less of a physical pain and more of a limitation - a limitation that I at that time, much like almost everyone else today, had learnt to accept.

My life was about to change however, with a gamble I made almost 3 years ago on repairing an old computer I had lying around the house, and turning it into a NAS. I invested Rs. 25,000 when I had only around 50k in my bank, into hard drives. Installed TrueNAS on it by looking at some online tutorials, and a couple of sleepless nights later, I had my own NAS.

Looking back at my first build, it was horrible in terms of best practices, and it was mere luck that I didn't loose all my data. This is the steep learning curve I have been talking about. However, it was a NAS - a full 4TB of storage at my disposal.

In a couple of months after I would figure out how to make it accessible from anywhere, and I observed my consumption behavior change. As my shackles of storage disappeared, I started documenting nearly everything in my life. Since then, I don't think I have ever eaten a take out or at a destination, without snapping a picture first. I also started spending more on life experiences and capturing more of my experiences on my phone.

My phone since then miraculously seem to be out of storage more often as I fill up nearly 128GB of my storage in just a quarter. I shoot in full 4K, the maximum resolution my phone can support, and get my moneys worth of footages, instead of manually downgrading to 1080p, which I used to do earlier.

I also built a NAS for my team last year to solve the organization problem we had been having with shared resources. And coincidently enough we also started our content creation journey since then. My team has access to an 8TB NAS where all our projects go. Although the adoption did take time, but looking at the server storage today, we only have about 2.7 TB of storage left, which I find very interesting.

This is what I am calling "Storage-Boosted Consumption". A behavior I witnessed, where in if virtually unlimited storage were to be provided to an individual, the individual experiences an elevated sense of freedom and lowered inhibition that results in them capturing and storing more data.

When people don't have to worry about running out of space, the usual mental filters - "Is this moment worth saving?" , "Do I have enough space?" , "Should I delete older files first?" - all go away. The friction is hence removed. This lower cognitive cost and the absence of scarcity create a psychological green light for over-collection. Very similar to how people reported to read 30% more books after buying a Kindle, or like how people might eat more at an all-you-can-eat buffet than at a paid-per-item dinner.

The hurdle with AI assistants

With AI deeply influencing almost every industry in the world we live in today, I cannot imagine a future or a technology where AI will not be a part of.

So far the most apparent use case of AI is in terms of a personal assistant. However, apart from intelligence, which will keep on getting better over time, a limitation of how good an AI agent is for you, depends on how much it knows about you. Since an assistant that knows more about you, your habits, and your preferences, will perform far better for you than any other assistant. And here in comes the problem.

To what extent are you willing to share personal information to an AI assistant running on a server managed by someone else, before you decide it knows too much?

I believe that there is a future where you don't have to. As our computation power doubles every 2 years, there will be a time where a lot of the manual tasks you do today, can be completely offloaded to an AI model that is running locally on device and not on a server.

This will be like a digital butler right at your house, that you can truly trust. Since everything is local, you don't have to worry about privacy policies changing or data leaks.

The AirVault vision

I believe that we are headed towards a future where our lives will be very similar to Ironman. Not necessarily all the jets, super cars, and metal suits, but more like a future where we have our own personal AI assistants we can share our secrets with, our own private data storage servers that stores whatever we want, and the digital infrastructure to document, organize, and relive every moment of our lives seamlessly.

Today we are limited by our storage options, and the need for technical expertise to have a server at our home. At AirVault, we want to challenge that idea.