HiveDisk owes its efficiency, reliability, and robustness to an intricate distributed and sustainable cloud—hiveNet.
All major cloud companies rely on huge data centers running 24/7. Our solution is different - it uses hard drives of computers like yours so it doesn’t use any extra energy.
Read our sustainability reportHiveNet is our distributed cloud infrastructure. It brings together individual devices of community members, who contribute their storage space to create a secure and resilient network.
This network forms the backbone of hiveDisk, enabling us to provide our users with an affordable, efficient, sustainable, and highly private and secure cloud storage solution.
In the future, we will be building more cloud solutions on hiveNet, from creating backup vaults (hiveVault) to sharing your computing power (hiveCompute).
Simple on the outside, complex on the inside. There is a lot of “magic” happening to keep your data private, safe, and ready to use.
This is where your data gets split, encrypted, and encoded, ready for storage on hiveNet.
Chunk
Before the upload, your data is divided into manageable pieces, known as "chunks".
Compression and Encryption
Each chunk is compressed using the zlib algorithm to minimize its size. Then, client-side encryption is applied, ensuring that no one, including Hive, can access your data. AES-GCM with a 256-bit key is used, which is considered quantum-safe.
Sharding and Encoding
After encryption, chunks are further divided into shards and encoded using erasure codes (specifically, Reed-Solomon codes), resulting in additional shards.
This encoding allows for the retrieval of the original data with only 50% of available shards.
Here's how we choose where to store your data and what we do to ensure it stays safe and accessible.
Node Selection and Dissemination
HiveNet selects the most suitable nodes based on reliability, capacity, performance, and location to host your data shards. The chosen shards are then uploaded to these nodes.
Monitoring and Healing
HiveNet continually monitors the network to ensure data availability, even when nodes disappear. It tracks the redundancy ratio of your data (the total number of available shards divided by the number of shards required to reconstruct your data).
If the redundancy level falls below a safety threshold, the network triggers a swarm healing process to regenerate new shards, maintaining the desired redundancy ratio.
When you need your data back, this process ensures that you can download, decode, and decrypt your data.
Downloading and Decoding
To retrieve your data, hiveDisk downloads the minimum subset of shards needed to decode the chunks. The decoding process generates encrypted and compressed chunks.
Decryption and Reconstruction
After retrieving the encryption keys from the network, the chunks are decrypted. This process is zero-knowledge and happens only on your device, ensuring your data's security. Following decryption, your data is reconstructed.