What are Lemmy’s feelings about the best cloud storage options these days, if you really want to break into the 1-2TB range? I’m not there yet, probably not even halfway there, but I like the peace of mind of potentially having the space if I need it. And I think subscribing to something in the Netflix price range is maybe something I’m ready for.
My thoughts so far:
pcloud - Intriguing because you can pay for a “lifetime” plan of 2TB of storage. But it’s $350, which is a lot, and I don’t know that I love the interface or usability, and I don’t know if I trust them.
iDrive - Super affordable. 5tb for “just” $80/year. It might be the best deal, but nothing about their identity suggests to me that they are “good guys.” By which I mean, I’m not sure I trust them to make long-term promises for any specific plan.
Mega - I like its very anti-google, very encrypted attitude. Born from the ashes of megaupload, they built encryption and zero knowledge into it. I LOVE that you can connect to it through the android app Solid Explorer and therefore don’t even need the mega app if you don’t want it. I hear bad things about it though? And it’s pretty expensive at $115 per year for 2TB.
My personal thoughts/reasoning/caveats:
Homebrew stuff: I don’t quite trust myself to use a homebrew setup like Nextcloud or Syncthing correctly. There’s too much in terms of labor, upkeep, catastrophic single points of failure where you could lose everything. I feel like I’m 70% of the way to being smart enough to do this.
Avoiding the Bad Guys and the Free Stuff: I’ve tried the free version of just about everything, from Google to Onedrive to Dropbox to Mediafire to Mega. There’s even an android app that offers 1 free terrabyte?? But I don’t want something from the bad guys where I’m going to be integrated into their closed source death drap: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and I don’t want a too-good-to-be-true free service where I’m the product.
I also would prefer to avoid something from the upstarts who kinda-sorta imitate the bad guys: Dropbox, Mediafire, Box. Because I’m not sure how much I can trust any specific long term promise from them.
It sounds like you’re saying nothing is good enough! What exactly do you want!? Something from good guys, not bad guys. Something like Standardnotes, but for file storage. They emphasize privacy, good governance principles and longevity of their service. Or Linode, with their independence, sense of mission, love of Linux & free software, all of which tells me they are good guys.
Probably the correct answer is (1) here’s this magical perfect source I never thought of, or (2) I’m thinking this much about it, I should probably do Nextcloud or syncthing given all the constraints that I’m putting out there.
Anyway, that’s my thoughts on cloud storage. What are yours?
Your own NAS. Not your hardware, not your files.
While I agree that using your own NAS and actually having the ownership of your own files is the best option, with proprietary hardware backdoors like the Intel ME, it unfortunately seems very difficult to actually own the hardware we paid for. Everything is trending towards everyone owning nothing and renting everything as a service.
I mean I do have a my passport drive, but I guess I worry about the cost in terms of electricity of keeping a persistently connected and keeping my home computer persistently on. I know that’s technically not the same thing but a similar idea. I’m ready for the my passport drive to just die at any given time though, and then what, should I be copying between two drives regularly? I feel like a certain degree of planning and management is involved there that can get rather costly if you don’t have a good system.
The power bill to keep a small nas running is gonna be a lot cheaper than any cloud storage of equal capacity.
I rent and have a landlord and roommates, so this was a concern of mine, too. For personal use, a Rapberry Pi should be fine and uses the same wattage as some light bulbs (is it 15 watts, i forget). The Pi’s physical size is so small and light that I can connect the power supply/plug/cord to the Pi and have it all it the wall outlet without needing to set it onto the floor or something else. i used a hidden piece of velcro, but then had to wrap an ugly rubbed bad around it, too. Mine is headless, of course, but it is nice to know I could make it into a desktop unit later by adding a monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Ok, I’m not sure I fully understand your comment but I will try my best to help.
A good backup system follows the concept of 3-2-1.
3 copies of your data (one of which includes the copy on your computer), on two separate storage mediums ( multiple hard drives from different manufacturers or an SSD or on archival blu-ray discs for example), and one of these copies being off-site (like in a safe at a family members house or online) to avoid destruction by things like a building fire.
If you are wanting storage that you own and can access from anywhere, perhaps one option might be something like a low-power single board computer like a Raspberry-pi 4, Odroid or something connected to a USB hard drive. Every month or so, take the files and transfer copies to another drive that you store in a different location. If you’re wanting something like an active file sync between your storage and another computer, using syncthing might be a solution.
Hope this helped!
@beansniffer
@abbenm
I’m not an expert, but I’m quite happy with my “raspberry pi (RBP1) + Nextcloud (server) + hard disk (HD1)”-setup. I take daily backups/snapshots (using backintime) of that hard disk (HD1) on another hard disk (HD2). And I sometimes make backups to a completely offline hard disk (HD3). You could have another raspberry pi + Nextcloud (client) + hard disk at a friend’s/ family members place to protect against fire risk.
Thanks, I was a little unclear. I was trying to say that I have a Western digital My passport 1 TB hard drive, and well that’s not quite the same thing as NAS, it’s possibly similar for practical purposes.
321 as you’ve outlined it is a good and easily memorable system, so that gives me something to work with.
The lifetime plan is such a scam. They gonna close the service in 2-3 year when it won’t be sustainable anymore.
For 350€ you can buy 2*4tb drive a low power mobo and electricity for a while.