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Indeed. My annual cost will jump from $60 to $180. That's too much for simple offline backup , so it's time to start looking for options again :( Glacier may

Indeed. My annual cost will jump from $60 to $180. That's too much for simple offline backup , so it's time to start looking for options again :( Glacier may a more affordable option, but my experience a few years ago has been terrible. Any suggestions? Google Drive is also pricey ($240); Crashplan is incompatible with NAS, and tarsnap is out of question (>$6,000/year).

tehlike 9y ago
maybe use https://camlistore.org/ https://camlistore.org/ on GCE?
nodesocket 9y ago
For fun, I just checked out Google Cloud Platform. 1 TB of regional storage costs $20.00 a month not including bandwidth which could be huge. 1 TB of egress bandwidth is $120.00 a month.
- klodolph 9y ago
  Regional storage is inappropriate for backup. On GCS, backup should be nearline or coldline, depending on how long you think it will be there. Presumably you'd pay the $120 bandwidth fee seldom or never.
  - nodesocket 9y ago
    Ok, Google Storage Nearline is still $10 a month for 1 TB. That's $120 a year vs $59.99 a year for Amazon Drive not including Google bandwidth which could be significant.
    - klodolph 9y ago
      I feel like the comment about bandwidth got ignored—you only pay for egress bandwidth, which basically means you only are paying high bandwidth fees if you lost all of your data and it's an emergency, at which point they seem pretty reasonable because you just lost your house in a fire or something like that. Uploading is free (well, you pay your ISP). Most of the time, people only need to restore a few files from backup because they were accidentally deleted. The bandwidth costs for a few GB here and there are pretty cheap.
Mathnerd314 9y ago
I've been thinking that a p2p backup solution (encrypted storage, storage cryptocurrency, occasional random requests to make sure they're still around) would work. I guess these guys: https://storj.io/ https://storj.io/. $15/TB of storage, $50/TB of bandwidth. and competitors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13723722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13723722
nightfly 9y ago
The Glacier storage class on S3 would probably better if you like Amazon and are okay with Glacier's price. Backblaze's B2 is pretty cheap too, and has a nice API.
- ptman 9y ago
  Isn't Glacier separate from S3?
  - nightfly 9y ago
    It's both: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/
dawnerd 9y ago
Where are you getting 240 for google drive? It's only costing me 120/year. (Well technically through gsuite)
- guiambros 9y ago
  $19.99 per month for 2TB plan [1]. [1] https://www.google.com/settings/storage https://www.google.com/settings/storage
  - victorhooi 9y ago
    You can buy a GSuite plan (https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html) - which is $10 a user a month, for unlimited storage.
izacus 9y ago
Google Cloud Nearline storage is rather cheap, doesn't have as much limitations as Glacier and is AWS API compatible so NAS backup software works with it.
darawk 9y ago
You could try out one of these new storage cryptocurrencies: https://www.storj.io https://www.storj.io http://sia.tech/ http://sia.tech/ https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ https://maidsafe.net/ https://maidsafe.net/ I haven't used them myself so I can't vouch for the UX or quality, but they should be able to offer pretty low prices.
teekert 9y ago
I have a Raspberry Pi at my parents home (which has r/w to the disk attached to my fathers Airport extreme), it rsyncs every night with the server in my basement (which has all my data on 2 disks.) It also syncs my parents data back to me. It works well but I still need to add a feature to email me if syncing somehow halts or errors out. I use "rsync -av" (over SSH), so nothing is ever deleted.
- dspillett 9y ago
  > so nothing is ever deleted. It could be overwritten though. A good backup protects you from more than just destruction at the primary site. There are various relatively efficient ways to arrange snapshots when using rsync as your backup tool. Also, remember to explicitly test your backups occasionally, preferably with some sort of automation because you will forget to do it manually, so detect unexpected problems (maybe the drive(s)/filesystem in the backup device are slowly going bad but in a way that only affect older data and don;t stop new changes being pushed in).
  - w458cmau 9y ago
    Versioning backups seems like a must. Encrypting malware is a thing and has been for a while, just like rm -rf type mistakes which are subsequently propagated automatically to "backups".
    - dspillett 9y ago
      Another thing that I do with my backups is making it so that the main machine can't access the backups directly and vice-versa. It is slightly more faf to setup, adds points of failure (though automated testing is still possible), and is a little more expensive (you need one extra host) but to significantly so. My "live" machines push data to an intermediate machine, the the backup locations pull data from there. This means that the is no one machine/account that can authenticate against everything. Sending information back for testing purposes (a recursive directory listing normally, a listing with full hashes once a month, which in each case gets compared to the live data and differences flagged for inspection) is the same in reverse. This way a successful attack on my live machines can't be used to attack the backups and vice-versa. To take everything you need to hack into all three hosts separately. Of course as with all security systems, safe+reliable+secure+convenient storage of credentials is the next problem...
styx31 9y ago
Currently trying Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html. Overall fits my needs.
- Sukotto 9y ago
  I used Backblaze for several years before closing out my account in 2012. Initial backup took a long time. There was no easy way to prioritize, for example, my photos over system files. I ended up manually prioritizing by disallowing pretty much my entire filesystem, and gradually allowing folders to sync. First, photos, then documents, then music, etc. Eventually it all got synced up and it was trouble-free... until I tried to get my data back out. The short version of the story is that a power surge fried my local system. I bought a new one and had some stress when it appeared the BB client was going to sync my empty filesystem (processing it as a mass delete of my files). I managed to disable the sync in time. Then I discovered there was no way to set the local BB client to pull my files back down. Instead, I had use their web-based file manager to browse all my folders and mark what I wanted to download. BB would then zip-archive that stuff which would then only be available as an http download. There was no Rsync, no torrent, no recovery if the download failed halfway, and no way to keep track of what I had recently downloaded. Also, iirc, they were limited to a couple of GB in size per file. (which didn't matter because at that time, the download would always fail it the file was larger than __MB (I don't remember the exact number. 100MB? 300? Also hazy on the official zipfile size limit) So I had to carefully chunk up my filesystem for download because the only other option BB offered was to buy a pre-filled harddrive from them (that they would ship to me). I felt like Backblaze was going out of their way to make it hard for me in order to sell me that harddrive of my data. I felt angry about that and stubbornly downloaded my data one miserable zipfile at a time until I had everything. Once I was reasonably sure I had everything I cared about, I closed my account and haven't looked back. [Edit to add] This was at least 5 years ago. No doubt their service has improved since then.
  - timlin 9y ago
    I use Backblaze but haven't had to do a restore yet. It appears their current limits are 500gb per zip file. They also have a "BackBlaze Downloader" utility (Mac & Windows) that has the ability to resume interrupted downloads. https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665888-How-to-Create-a-Restore-from-Your-Backblaze-Backup https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665888-How-t...
mkup 9y ago
There's Siacoin, a cryptocurrency/blockchain built around the idea of decentralized encrypted p2p storage. They're dirt cheap to store as of now: median contract price is $12/TB·mo, but network storage utilization is currenly only 2%, so actual deals settle on about $2/TB·mo. Downside is that exchange rate of their coin is highly volatile, at least was during last month. https://sia.tech/ https://sia.tech/ http://siahub.info/ http://siahub.info/ http://siapulse.com/page/network http://siapulse.com/page/network (Prices tab)
- ericflo 9y ago
  This is the one I've got my eye on - once the marketplace boots up on both sides, it's going to be hard to compete against it. I suspect some day even the big providers like Amazon and Google will sell into these kinds of marketplaces.
  - klodolph 9y ago
    I'm calling it, it's not gonna happen. For data storage, you need error encoding. Sia does that, but you pay for it. So for 1TB of data, you upload 2TB to the network (that's how Sia is configured) and at the current $2.02/TB per month, that's $4.04/TB, which is more expensive than Glacier. Glacier charges funny for downloads but Sia charges for downloads too. I assume that if you wanted to store ~2.5TB like we're talking about, you'd be paying more than $4/TB, because 2.5TB is 10% of the total of all data currently stored in Sia, currently 24.5 TB. (By comparison the major cloud providers are undoubtedly in the exabyte range of actual data stored. Or for another comparison, you could comfortably hold 24.5 TB of storage media in one hand.) Sia promises to be cheap because you're using unused bytes in hard drives that people already bought, but that's exactly what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are already doing, except their data centers are built in places where the electricity costs less than what you're paying. Plus they don't charge you extra for data redundancy.
    - Geee 9y ago
      You can't compare to Glacier. S3 is a more comparable product. And obviously redundancy is already in the price, or did you think there's no redundancy?
klodolph 9y ago
If you were paying $60/year for 2-3T of cloud storage then Amazon was subsidizing you. Even Glacier would cost $120/year for 2.5T, and Glacier is so cheap that everyone's trying to figure out how they could possibly sell Glacier and still be making money.
- fnord123 9y ago
  >Even Glacier would cost $120/year for 2.5G $120/year for 2.5T. https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/
  - klodolph 9y ago
    Yes, thank you for pointing out the typo.
- askvictor 9y ago
  Isn't the catch that you have to pay to get your data out of there?
imron 9y ago
If it's just backup, and it's from a single computer (with potentially multiple external harddrives), then maybe BackBlaze: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html
- toast76 9y ago
  Backblaze (and others) don't support backing up from a NAS, which, for a family, is impractical.
  - Polyisoprene 9y ago
    https://www.backblaze.com/b2/partner-synology.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/partner-synology.html
    - ptman 9y ago
      But isn't that with B2 pricing, not the $5/month unlimited pricing?
      - snuxoll 9y ago
        Sure, but B2's pricing isn't too expensive anyway. If I had all 7TB of usable space filled up on my NAS it'd cost me $35/mo - that's easily doable, even for a digital packrat like myself.
        imron 9y ago
        That's $420 a year, which is well over what the grand-grand-*-poster of this sidethread mentioned was too much. Even for his smaller data size of 3TB it still works out to $180 a year which is the same as what he'd have to pay Amazon.
hasch 9y ago
GCE's Nearline maybe?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mikevm 9y ago
Why is CrashPlan incompatible with NAS? I am running it on a headless Ubuntu server and it works just fine (you just need about 1GB of RAM for every TB of storage).
- glenneroo 9y ago
  And if you happen to be running FreeNAS, there is even a plugin available via the GUI (same RAM rules apply).
  - mikevm 9y ago
    Same for Synology.
    - guiambros 9y ago
      Have you upgraded your Synology OS lately? For 3 years, every time I did it, the headless CP server would stop working.
      - mikevm 9y ago
        I don't actually have Synology. A friend of mine does and he runs CrashPlan on it.
zwischenzug 9y ago
I feel like a luddite but I have three backups at home (PC HD, 2 rsync'd USB drives I bought several years ago) and one off-site backup (encrypted HD in locker at work). Far cheaper afaict than any cloud backup.
- dingaling 9y ago
  My offsite backup is likewise an encrypted disk stored at a friend's house, and vice versa. After the initial hardware puchase cost it's free.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    And, based on my experience, generally horrifically out of date.
    - jamespo 9y ago
      * cheap * capacity * convenient choose 2
- w458cmau 9y ago
  I think this is a good basic and relatively low-tech strategy. Do you do versioning? As in what happens if your files are silently corrupted e.g. by accident or by malware? Rsync would overwrite your files, and you might even overwrite your off-site backup when you connect it. My main reason for going beyond such a set-up though is that it takes time, effort and remembering to sync the off-site backup by taking it home, syncing and putting it back. And during that time all your data is in the same place. If something happens to your home during that time (break-in, flooding, fire...) you're out of luck. Unless your rsync'd drives are also encrypted and you just switch one of them with the off-site one for rotation.
  - zwischenzug 9y ago
    One of my backups is 'add only' The really key stuff is in git repos. Most of the data (films, mostly) I could stand to lose.
zeta0134 9y ago
I personally run syncthing on several devices, and don't worry about the cloud. It's self-hosted, devices replicate files between themselves, and there's no real limit other than hard drive space. It runs on just about anything too; several of my backup systems are Raspberry Pis. It can be a bit weird to set up initially, and is a lot less magical in the interest of putting you in control for privacy reasons, but the flexibility added is pretty useful. I have a music folder that I sync to my phone without needing to pull the rest of my backups along with it, since they wouldn't fit anyway. Several of my larger folders aren't backed up on every single device for similar reasons, but some of my really important smaller folders (documents, photos, regular backups of my website's database) go on everything just because it can. Anyway, check it out. Highly recommended all around: https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- lewisl9029 9y ago
  I've moved mostly to syncing through Syncthing for my devices too, but I'm curious what people use for sharing files with others and accessing files through a browser on machines you don't control?
- Symbiote 9y ago
  If you accidentally delete some files (even all the files!), won't Syncthing delete all the "backups"? I don't use Syncthing, I use an rsync script I wrote over 10 years ago, using the --link-dest option to keep incremental backups for around 2 years. This relies on Zsh's fancy globbing, but the gist of it is: date=$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M) [for loop over users] older=( $backups/$user/*(N/om) ) rsync --archive --recursive \ --fuzzy --partial --partial-dir=$backups/$user/.rsync-partial \ --log-file=$tempfile --link-dest=${^older[1,20]} \ --files-from=$configdir/I-$user \ --exclude-from=$configdir/X-$user \ $user@$from:/ $backups/$user/$date/
  - anc84 9y ago
    Syncthing has options to store versions of files so that scenario is easily avoided: https://docs.syncthing.net/users/versioning.html https://docs.syncthing.net/users/versioning.html
PinguTS 9y ago
Make a tool that makes photo files out of data files. In its simplest form you just need to make the according header files (added benefit: additional meta data can be easily encoded). Because as a Amazon Prime photo storage is for free and unlimited. Could be a nice hack.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  They could be reencoding, witch will destroy the data.
  - crest 9y ago
    Use forward error correction.
algesten 9y ago
I'm using Resilio Sync (formerly BitTorrent Sync) which makes like a private cloud dropbox between my machines/phone. No versioning, but pretty solid.
tw04 9y ago
Crashplan isn't incompatible with NAS. You can either mount a share and run it from your workstation, or run it directly on the NAS itself. The core of the product is Java so it runs on just about any architecture to boot.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  Coming from someone who tried to do this setup, it wasn't worth it. CrashPlan's client isn't something you generally would want to run on your NAS, it takes memory proportionate to the amount of data on your disk (and a fair amount of RAM, at that) and unless you're running an GUI on your NAS it's impossible to configure without a huge headache. You can run it from your workstation, but if you've got a reasonable amount of data on your NAS then the memory issues will bite you again. Something like Backblaze B2 is more expensive, but I'd rather pay $10/mo to backup the 2TB of data on my NAS (growing every day) and use CrashPlan to backup my computers only.
  - ValentineC 9y ago
    > CrashPlan's client isn't something you generally would want to run on your NAS, it takes memory proportionate to the amount of data on your disk (and a fair amount of RAM, at that) and unless you're running an GUI on your NAS it's impossible to configure without a huge headache. CrashPlan's client is able to attach to a headless instance [1], but the RAM requirement does mean that it's only really usable on NASes with expandable RAM. [1] https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Use_CrashPlan_on_a_headless_computer https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Use_Crash...
  - guiambros 9y ago
    +1. I used Crashplan for 3 years on a Synology NAS. It's a disaster. Every time there was a Synology upgrade, the CP headless server would stop working, and you'd need to reinstall, re-set the keys, etc. After 10 ou 15 times doing this, I got rid of Crashplan entirely, migrated my backups to Amazon Drive, and never looked back. Given the lack of decent options, seems the best choice will really be to pony up the $180 for 3TB that Amazon will start charging next year...
luca_ing 9y ago
Backblaze b2?
rabboRubble 9y ago
Re Crashplan & NAS... I've managed to get NAS back up to work. Are you certain on this point? I am going to double check my set up. I have the MacOS CrashPlan client configured to back up a variety of NAS shares when the NAS is powered on and the share is mounted. Only about 4 shares, and I made a point to mount them and leave them mounted until the sync completed. The shares are cold storage, so once synced, they stay virtually unchanged.
victorhooi 9y ago
For Google storage - you can get GSuite (https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html) - $10 a user a month, for unlimited storage via Google Drive. You can then mount the drive using DriveFS: https://blog.google/products/g-suite/introducing-new-enterprise-ready-tools-google-drive/ https://blog.google/products/g-suite/introducing-new-enterpr... It's basically a FUSE filesystem built on top of Google Drive. Alternatively, you can use the Drive Sync Client, if you want to just sync stuff back and forth (without a virtual FS).

tehlike 9y ago

maybe use https://camlistore.org/ https://camlistore.org/ on GCE?

nodesocket 9y ago

For fun, I just checked out Google Cloud Platform. 1 TB of regional storage costs $20.00 a month not including bandwidth which could be huge. 1 TB of egress bandwidth is $120.00 a month.

klodolph 9y ago
Regional storage is inappropriate for backup. On GCS, backup should be nearline or coldline, depending on how long you think it will be there. Presumably you'd pay the $120 bandwidth fee seldom or never.
- nodesocket 9y ago
  Ok, Google Storage Nearline is still $10 a month for 1 TB. That's $120 a year vs $59.99 a year for Amazon Drive not including Google bandwidth which could be significant.
  - klodolph 9y ago
    I feel like the comment about bandwidth got ignored—you only pay for egress bandwidth, which basically means you only are paying high bandwidth fees if you lost all of your data and it's an emergency, at which point they seem pretty reasonable because you just lost your house in a fire or something like that. Uploading is free (well, you pay your ISP). Most of the time, people only need to restore a few files from backup because they were accidentally deleted. The bandwidth costs for a few GB here and there are pretty cheap.

Mathnerd314 9y ago

I've been thinking that a p2p backup solution (encrypted storage, storage cryptocurrency, occasional random requests to make sure they're still around) would work. I guess these guys: https://storj.io/ https://storj.io/. $15/TB of storage, $50/TB of bandwidth. and competitors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13723722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13723722

nightfly 9y ago

The Glacier storage class on S3 would probably better if you like Amazon and are okay with Glacier's price. Backblaze's B2 is pretty cheap too, and has a nice API.

ptman 9y ago
Isn't Glacier separate from S3?
- nightfly 9y ago
  It's both: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/

dawnerd 9y ago

Where are you getting 240 for google drive? It's only costing me 120/year. (Well technically through gsuite)

guiambros 9y ago
$19.99 per month for 2TB plan [1]. [1] https://www.google.com/settings/storage https://www.google.com/settings/storage
- victorhooi 9y ago
  You can buy a GSuite plan (https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html) - which is $10 a user a month, for unlimited storage.

izacus 9y ago

Google Cloud Nearline storage is rather cheap, doesn't have as much limitations as Glacier and is AWS API compatible so NAS backup software works with it.

darawk 9y ago

You could try out one of these new storage cryptocurrencies: https://www.storj.io https://www.storj.io http://sia.tech/ http://sia.tech/ https://filecoin.io/ https://filecoin.io/ https://maidsafe.net/ https://maidsafe.net/ I haven't used them myself so I can't vouch for the UX or quality, but they should be able to offer pretty low prices.

teekert 9y ago

I have a Raspberry Pi at my parents home (which has r/w to the disk attached to my fathers Airport extreme), it rsyncs every night with the server in my basement (which has all my data on 2 disks.) It also syncs my parents data back to me. It works well but I still need to add a feature to email me if syncing somehow halts or errors out. I use "rsync -av" (over SSH), so nothing is ever deleted.

dspillett 9y ago
> so nothing is ever deleted. It could be overwritten though. A good backup protects you from more than just destruction at the primary site. There are various relatively efficient ways to arrange snapshots when using rsync as your backup tool. Also, remember to explicitly test your backups occasionally, preferably with some sort of automation because you will forget to do it manually, so detect unexpected problems (maybe the drive(s)/filesystem in the backup device are slowly going bad but in a way that only affect older data and don;t stop new changes being pushed in).
- w458cmau 9y ago
  Versioning backups seems like a must. Encrypting malware is a thing and has been for a while, just like rm -rf type mistakes which are subsequently propagated automatically to "backups".
  - dspillett 9y ago
    Another thing that I do with my backups is making it so that the main machine can't access the backups directly and vice-versa. It is slightly more faf to setup, adds points of failure (though automated testing is still possible), and is a little more expensive (you need one extra host) but to significantly so. My "live" machines push data to an intermediate machine, the the backup locations pull data from there. This means that the is no one machine/account that can authenticate against everything. Sending information back for testing purposes (a recursive directory listing normally, a listing with full hashes once a month, which in each case gets compared to the live data and differences flagged for inspection) is the same in reverse. This way a successful attack on my live machines can't be used to attack the backups and vice-versa. To take everything you need to hack into all three hosts separately. Of course as with all security systems, safe+reliable+secure+convenient storage of credentials is the next problem...

styx31 9y ago

Currently trying Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html. Overall fits my needs.

Sukotto 9y ago
I used Backblaze for several years before closing out my account in 2012. Initial backup took a long time. There was no easy way to prioritize, for example, my photos over system files. I ended up manually prioritizing by disallowing pretty much my entire filesystem, and gradually allowing folders to sync. First, photos, then documents, then music, etc. Eventually it all got synced up and it was trouble-free... until I tried to get my data back out. The short version of the story is that a power surge fried my local system. I bought a new one and had some stress when it appeared the BB client was going to sync my empty filesystem (processing it as a mass delete of my files). I managed to disable the sync in time. Then I discovered there was no way to set the local BB client to pull my files back down. Instead, I had use their web-based file manager to browse all my folders and mark what I wanted to download. BB would then zip-archive that stuff which would then only be available as an http download. There was no Rsync, no torrent, no recovery if the download failed halfway, and no way to keep track of what I had recently downloaded. Also, iirc, they were limited to a couple of GB in size per file. (which didn't matter because at that time, the download would always fail it the file was larger than __MB (I don't remember the exact number. 100MB? 300? Also hazy on the official zipfile size limit) So I had to carefully chunk up my filesystem for download because the only other option BB offered was to buy a pre-filled harddrive from them (that they would ship to me). I felt like Backblaze was going out of their way to make it hard for me in order to sell me that harddrive of my data. I felt angry about that and stubbornly downloaded my data one miserable zipfile at a time until I had everything. Once I was reasonably sure I had everything I cared about, I closed my account and haven't looked back. [Edit to add] This was at least 5 years ago. No doubt their service has improved since then.
- timlin 9y ago
  I use Backblaze but haven't had to do a restore yet. It appears their current limits are 500gb per zip file. They also have a "BackBlaze Downloader" utility (Mac & Windows) that has the ability to resume interrupted downloads. https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665888-How-to-Create-a-Restore-from-Your-Backblaze-Backup https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665888-How-t...

mkup 9y ago

There's Siacoin, a cryptocurrency/blockchain built around the idea of decentralized encrypted p2p storage. They're dirt cheap to store as of now: median contract price is $12/TB·mo, but network storage utilization is currenly only 2%, so actual deals settle on about $2/TB·mo. Downside is that exchange rate of their coin is highly volatile, at least was during last month. https://sia.tech/ https://sia.tech/ http://siahub.info/ http://siahub.info/ http://siapulse.com/page/network http://siapulse.com/page/network (Prices tab)

ericflo 9y ago
This is the one I've got my eye on - once the marketplace boots up on both sides, it's going to be hard to compete against it. I suspect some day even the big providers like Amazon and Google will sell into these kinds of marketplaces.
- klodolph 9y ago
  I'm calling it, it's not gonna happen. For data storage, you need error encoding. Sia does that, but you pay for it. So for 1TB of data, you upload 2TB to the network (that's how Sia is configured) and at the current $2.02/TB per month, that's $4.04/TB, which is more expensive than Glacier. Glacier charges funny for downloads but Sia charges for downloads too. I assume that if you wanted to store ~2.5TB like we're talking about, you'd be paying more than $4/TB, because 2.5TB is 10% of the total of all data currently stored in Sia, currently 24.5 TB. (By comparison the major cloud providers are undoubtedly in the exabyte range of actual data stored. Or for another comparison, you could comfortably hold 24.5 TB of storage media in one hand.) Sia promises to be cheap because you're using unused bytes in hard drives that people already bought, but that's exactly what Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are already doing, except their data centers are built in places where the electricity costs less than what you're paying. Plus they don't charge you extra for data redundancy.
  - Geee 9y ago
    You can't compare to Glacier. S3 is a more comparable product. And obviously redundancy is already in the price, or did you think there's no redundancy?

klodolph 9y ago

If you were paying $60/year for 2-3T of cloud storage then Amazon was subsidizing you. Even Glacier would cost $120/year for 2.5T, and Glacier is so cheap that everyone's trying to figure out how they could possibly sell Glacier and still be making money.

fnord123 9y ago
>Even Glacier would cost $120/year for 2.5G $120/year for 2.5T. https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/
- klodolph 9y ago
  Yes, thank you for pointing out the typo.
askvictor 9y ago
Isn't the catch that you have to pay to get your data out of there?

imron 9y ago

If it's just backup, and it's from a single computer (with potentially multiple external harddrives), then maybe BackBlaze: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html

toast76 9y ago
Backblaze (and others) don't support backing up from a NAS, which, for a family, is impractical.
- Polyisoprene 9y ago
  https://www.backblaze.com/b2/partner-synology.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/partner-synology.html
  - ptman 9y ago
    But isn't that with B2 pricing, not the $5/month unlimited pricing?
    - snuxoll 9y ago
      Sure, but B2's pricing isn't too expensive anyway. If I had all 7TB of usable space filled up on my NAS it'd cost me $35/mo - that's easily doable, even for a digital packrat like myself.
      - imron 9y ago
        That's $420 a year, which is well over what the grand-grand-*-poster of this sidethread mentioned was too much. Even for his smaller data size of 3TB it still works out to $180 a year which is the same as what he'd have to pay Amazon.

hasch 9y ago

GCE's Nearline maybe?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mikevm 9y ago

Why is CrashPlan incompatible with NAS? I am running it on a headless Ubuntu server and it works just fine (you just need about 1GB of RAM for every TB of storage).

glenneroo 9y ago
And if you happen to be running FreeNAS, there is even a plugin available via the GUI (same RAM rules apply).
- mikevm 9y ago
  Same for Synology.
  - guiambros 9y ago
    Have you upgraded your Synology OS lately? For 3 years, every time I did it, the headless CP server would stop working.
    - mikevm 9y ago
      I don't actually have Synology. A friend of mine does and he runs CrashPlan on it.

zwischenzug 9y ago

I feel like a luddite but I have three backups at home (PC HD, 2 rsync'd USB drives I bought several years ago) and one off-site backup (encrypted HD in locker at work). Far cheaper afaict than any cloud backup.

dingaling 9y ago
My offsite backup is likewise an encrypted disk stored at a friend's house, and vice versa. After the initial hardware puchase cost it's free.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  And, based on my experience, generally horrifically out of date.
  - jamespo 9y ago
    * cheap * capacity * convenient choose 2
w458cmau 9y ago
I think this is a good basic and relatively low-tech strategy. Do you do versioning? As in what happens if your files are silently corrupted e.g. by accident or by malware? Rsync would overwrite your files, and you might even overwrite your off-site backup when you connect it. My main reason for going beyond such a set-up though is that it takes time, effort and remembering to sync the off-site backup by taking it home, syncing and putting it back. And during that time all your data is in the same place. If something happens to your home during that time (break-in, flooding, fire...) you're out of luck. Unless your rsync'd drives are also encrypted and you just switch one of them with the off-site one for rotation.
- zwischenzug 9y ago
  One of my backups is 'add only' The really key stuff is in git repos. Most of the data (films, mostly) I could stand to lose.

zeta0134 9y ago

I personally run syncthing on several devices, and don't worry about the cloud. It's self-hosted, devices replicate files between themselves, and there's no real limit other than hard drive space. It runs on just about anything too; several of my backup systems are Raspberry Pis. It can be a bit weird to set up initially, and is a lot less magical in the interest of putting you in control for privacy reasons, but the flexibility added is pretty useful. I have a music folder that I sync to my phone without needing to pull the rest of my backups along with it, since they wouldn't fit anyway. Several of my larger folders aren't backed up on every single device for similar reasons, but some of my really important smaller folders (documents, photos, regular backups of my website's database) go on everything just because it can. Anyway, check it out. Highly recommended all around: https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/

lewisl9029 9y ago
I've moved mostly to syncing through Syncthing for my devices too, but I'm curious what people use for sharing files with others and accessing files through a browser on machines you don't control?
Symbiote 9y ago
If you accidentally delete some files (even all the files!), won't Syncthing delete all the "backups"? I don't use Syncthing, I use an rsync script I wrote over 10 years ago, using the --link-dest option to keep incremental backups for around 2 years. This relies on Zsh's fancy globbing, but the gist of it is: date=$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M) [for loop over users] older=( $backups/$user/*(N/om) ) rsync --archive --recursive \ --fuzzy --partial --partial-dir=$backups/$user/.rsync-partial \ --log-file=$tempfile --link-dest=${^older[1,20]} \ --files-from=$configdir/I-$user \ --exclude-from=$configdir/X-$user \ $user@$from:/ $backups/$user/$date/
- anc84 9y ago
  Syncthing has options to store versions of files so that scenario is easily avoided: https://docs.syncthing.net/users/versioning.html https://docs.syncthing.net/users/versioning.html

PinguTS 9y ago

Make a tool that makes photo files out of data files. In its simplest form you just need to make the according header files (added benefit: additional meta data can be easily encoded). Because as a Amazon Prime photo storage is for free and unlimited. Could be a nice hack.

dingo_bat 9y ago
They could be reencoding, witch will destroy the data.
- crest 9y ago
  Use forward error correction.

algesten 9y ago

I'm using Resilio Sync (formerly BitTorrent Sync) which makes like a private cloud dropbox between my machines/phone. No versioning, but pretty solid.

tw04 9y ago

Crashplan isn't incompatible with NAS. You can either mount a share and run it from your workstation, or run it directly on the NAS itself. The core of the product is Java so it runs on just about any architecture to boot.

snuxoll 9y ago
Coming from someone who tried to do this setup, it wasn't worth it. CrashPlan's client isn't something you generally would want to run on your NAS, it takes memory proportionate to the amount of data on your disk (and a fair amount of RAM, at that) and unless you're running an GUI on your NAS it's impossible to configure without a huge headache. You can run it from your workstation, but if you've got a reasonable amount of data on your NAS then the memory issues will bite you again. Something like Backblaze B2 is more expensive, but I'd rather pay $10/mo to backup the 2TB of data on my NAS (growing every day) and use CrashPlan to backup my computers only.
- ValentineC 9y ago
  > CrashPlan's client isn't something you generally would want to run on your NAS, it takes memory proportionate to the amount of data on your disk (and a fair amount of RAM, at that) and unless you're running an GUI on your NAS it's impossible to configure without a huge headache. CrashPlan's client is able to attach to a headless instance [1], but the RAM requirement does mean that it's only really usable on NASes with expandable RAM. [1] https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Use_CrashPlan_on_a_headless_computer https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Use_Crash...
- guiambros 9y ago
  +1. I used Crashplan for 3 years on a Synology NAS. It's a disaster. Every time there was a Synology upgrade, the CP headless server would stop working, and you'd need to reinstall, re-set the keys, etc. After 10 ou 15 times doing this, I got rid of Crashplan entirely, migrated my backups to Amazon Drive, and never looked back. Given the lack of decent options, seems the best choice will really be to pony up the $180 for 3TB that Amazon will start charging next year...

luca_ing 9y ago

Backblaze b2?

rabboRubble 9y ago

Re Crashplan & NAS... I've managed to get NAS back up to work. Are you certain on this point? I am going to double check my set up. I have the MacOS CrashPlan client configured to back up a variety of NAS shares when the NAS is powered on and the share is mounted. Only about 4 shares, and I made a point to mount them and leave them mounted until the sync completed. The shares are cold storage, so once synced, they stay virtually unchanged.

victorhooi 9y ago

For Google storage - you can get GSuite (https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html) - $10 a user a month, for unlimited storage via Google Drive. You can then mount the drive using DriveFS: https://blog.google/products/g-suite/introducing-new-enterprise-ready-tools-google-drive/ https://blog.google/products/g-suite/introducing-new-enterpr... It's basically a FUSE filesystem built on top of Google Drive. Alternatively, you can use the Drive Sync Client, if you want to just sync stuff back and forth (without a virtual FS).