FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Updated: Aug 14, 2024

The amount of files, photos, and videos generated and stored has grown dramatically following the digital revolution, and growing at an annualized growth rate of 49% according to Gartner.

This information "tsunami" has also created new challenges in data management, not only in terms of time and effort spent organizing, classifying, and discovering digital assets, but also in protecting data from accidental loss and managing security access control. Users may store critical financial information on the same storage device as family photos and work-related assets. The accessibility of various mobile devices, such as the iPhone®, has also made the generation of digital data more frequent among even inexperienced computer users. Social networking services have also spurred users to generate, share, and store a variety of different files.

Unfortunately, this plethora of data is not always organized in a manner conducive to safe and efficient management. Users may store their data in disparate locations where the data is not easily accessible, or centralize their data storage at a single location when the data would be more safely segregated among a plurality of devices. Often when a device fails, or a user loses access to a storage unit, they are without remedy. As a precaution, users must often adopt onerous personal backup habits, or create personalized scripting tools, to ensure that their data can be preserved. Since individual operating systems and hardware configurations may or may not lend themselves to the user's ad hoc solution, users must often turn to a third-party solution, such as a dedicated storage drive.

With the increasing ubiquity of data storage, however, the use of a single storage device for data replication appears increasingly inefficient. The typical home or office network may contain dozens of different computing devices, each possessing a myriad of different storage systems and capabilities. Ideally, a user could take advantage of this untapped resource to replicate and store their data across a distributed collection of storage devices.

Taking advantage of these disparate devices' resources is not easy. The topology of modern networks and the diversity of operating systems and hardware standards generally renders distributed replication unfeasible. Each computer device on a home or office network may have intermittent availability and may join and leave the network at unpredictable times, e.g. as a mobile phone is taken to work, as a laptop is brought home from school, as a Universal Serial Bus (USB) storage device is removed from a computer, etc. The devices may have a plurality of different partitions, with each partition servicing a different file system type. Confronted with these obstacles, users have often relied on a single external drive for their storage backup, and left the distributed resources of their multiple devices on their networks untapped.

Accordingly, there exists a need for a system capable of providing file replication and management across a plurality of devices in a dynamic network environment.

Current industry solutions are anchored around two opposing paradigms. On one side, “on-premise” solutions that rely on locally owned-and-operated hardware & software. On the other, “pure cloud” storage solutions that host and manage data. Each of these present trade-offs affecting universal access, data availability, total cost of ownership, and privacy.

Cloud storage has been a disruptive force. It’s a convenient way to store everything, without having to worry about backups, and having access to all your files anytime, anywhere, on any device. But it also has some clear disadvantages that would disappear if decentralized solutions were adopted.

What is Alterante?

Alterante is a self-hosted software product designed to help users manage, organize, access and share all files on all their computers and devices. As the number of files and devices increases dramatically over time, users need an automatic and intelligent way to make data conveniently available anytime, anywhere, while also making sure their data protected from accidental loss & unauthorized access.

Alterante moves beyond the file/folder metaphor to leverage advanced search technology as the basis for navigation, access and sharing. Alterante runs on your private LAN network, not in the cloud, so has big advantages in performance, data privacy and storage costs.

Alterante automatically discovers, organizes, and protects all your digital assets, and makes them instantly available from any authorized device, safely and privately.

Our patented virtual filesystem technology (US Patent 9,311,326) provides instant search, automated curation, seamless data replication, and secure access from any device (no VPN setup required).

Who is Alterante for?

Ideal customers for this collaboration software are SMB looking for a secure yet flexible data management solution that prioritizes privacy. Target organizations are seeking an efficient platform for collaborating internally or with external partners while safeguarding sensitive information.

Whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud, Alterante's platform caters to SMBs seeking a private, elastic, and cost-effective data management and collaboration solution. With its focus on ease of use and robust security measures tailored specifically for SMB, Alterante's product is well-suited for companies aiming to enhance collaboration workflow privacy and security.

What is the problem with existing products?

Today’s existing products, Dropbox, Slack, Google Drive rely on outdated, centralized architectures. This results in the following problems:

Higher Operating costs Existing service providers need to own and operate massive data centers to store and process your data. These higher costs directly impact pricing (the costs are passed down to you).
Single point of failure Inevitably a central design represents a single point of failure (SPOF), which affects the reliability of the service when outages occur.
Data Security Data stored at rest, even if encrypted, can be subject to monitoring, surveillance, and exfiltration, without your awareness or consent.
Data Privacy The privacy of your data is no longer in your control, since the data is hosted and managed by a third party (not by you).

How is Alterante different from other products?

To address these problems, a decentralized solution is needed. For this reason, we created Alterante.

Alterante is a peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration platform that runs on your own hardware - Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android devices. Alterante runs on your devices (laptops, desktop, phones, tablets), and uses your own storage for file hosting and storage.

Because it uses P2P technology, it can operate without an Internet connection (on your private LAN network).

What can I do with Alterante?

The product's emphasis on automatic asset discovery and organization enhances productivity while enforcing stringent data protection policies.

The product is designed for privacy, speed and performance. It allows you to find any file on any device within seconds. A powerful built-in search engine offers helpful suggestions and displays matching results as you type. Alterante also lets you preview photos, watch movies, open documents, share photos via email and even launch a video on another remote device, all without leaving the browser.

A powerful feature provided by Alterante is the tagging system, which lets you apply your own tags to files in order to find and access them faster and easier in the future. You can also share the tagged files with specific users, so they can access the files remotely (via peer-to-peer sharing).

The Navigation UI helps you filter out files according to their type, format and date. Hence, you can browse only your photos, songs, videos or documents. On top of that, you can access only your DOC, XLS, PPT or PDF files and view the files you created today, in the past three days, or in the past year.

On Mac and Win/PC, Alterante runs on a browser (web app) , and gives you instant access to all your pictures, songs, videos, documents and email attachments. They’ve also built native apps for iOS and Android, which let you browse through your entire file collection, even when you’re on the road (secure remote access).

Alterante also backs up all your files and synchronizes your data automatically, using all the free unused space on your devices. Alterante lets you visually explore how your space is used across your computers/network, including the number of duplicate copies for each file, and where they are physically located.

In summary:

File management Alterante finds and indexes all your files, giving you a universal search experience for all your files on all your devices.
Access & Collaboration Users can securely share files, communicate with peers through chat functionality, and collaborate within a private, secured environment.
Data protection (Backup & Sync) All files are automatically replicated across your devices for fault-tolerance.

For more information, check out our Features section on our website.

Why is Alterante more private and secure?

Alterante uses peer-to-peer protocols to transfer data between devices. It uses asymmetric and symmetric encryption to securely transfer data between authorized devices. We use AES and RSA encryption to accomplish end-to-end encryption (E2EE) between devices.

Because Alterante uses P2P, it can run without an Internet connection and is suitable for "airgapped" environments.

How does Alterante work?

Our solution utilizes proprietary "virtual filesystem" technology to enable instant search, automated data organization, seamless data replication, and secure access from any authorized device without the need for VPN setup.

How do I get started?

If you'd like to learn more, you can join our community to chat with us and other users. You can click on "Get Started" to request a demo.