Can you tell me about reliability/redundancy?
What happens if the node that has my files goes offline forever? Will i lose my files or are there other copies of them in the network ?
I don't pretend that SIA duplicates my uploaded file to every node of the network, that would be unsustainable, but at least i want to know how many
redundant copies are there.
That is important because , unlikely Onedrive/Gdrive etc., a P2P network like SIA has poor uptime for each node, i.e. each node is not always online and there's no guarantee that it will keep working with SIA forever , while Onedrive servers have 99.9% uptime and will be there forever.
So i think that some redundancy is needed for a P2P cloud storage, i just want to know if SIA has it.
I would pay more than 2$/month but i want to be sure that i won't lose my files.
What happens if a host goes offline? Absolutely nothing for you in terms of file availability. Each file is uploaded to 30 different hosts by dividing it in chunks and sending each chunk to 3 different hosts (a redundancy of 3x). The algorithm that distributes the chunks is called Reed-Solomon, and ensures that 20 of those 30 hosts can go offline and you still will have access to your files.
But moreover, in Sia hosts are heavily de-incentivized to go offline. Each host is risking collateral when you make a contract with them (several times bigger than your payment), and if they don't keep an uptime of 97%, that collateral will be lost.
So you see, hosts in Sia keep each one of them an uptime of 97% (at least) and you only need 10 out of 30 to recover your files. That is an availability of your files bigger than 99.9%