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Replacing Dropbox in favor of DigitalOcean spaces
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- uxenthusiast 6y agoWhat kind of digital ocean plan did you get for your setup ? I've been thinking about putting together something similar but the price to get a reasonable amount of space seemed prohibitive.
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoI choose Spaces which costs $5 a month. And you don't actually need VPS for this. https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/spaces/
- __soter__ 6y ago$5 for 250GB of storage and then $20 per TB ($0.02/GB) after that seems a bit steep. Plans and Pricing The base rate of a Spaces subscription is $5/month and gives you the ability to create multiple Spaces. The subscription includes 250 GiB of data storage (cumulative across all of your Spaces). Additional storage beyond this allotment is $0.02/GiB. If you cancel your subscription by destroying all your Spaces, your bill will be prorated hourly. https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/spaces/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/spaces/
- secfirstmd 6y agoInteresting comparison price when something like Sia is so cheap per TB (4 dollars). Will be interesting to see how it developers.
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoIt looks they also have S3 support now. Will need to try it out. https://blog.sia.tech/introducing-s3-style-file-sharing-for-sia-through-the-new-minio-integration-bb880af2366a https://blog.sia.tech/introducing-s3-style-file-sharing-for-...
- jrockway 6y agoI think $20/TB*month is exactly what GCP charges, and is probably on par with what Amazon charges.
- secfirstmd 6y agoTrue. That's what makes Sia intriguing
- StavrosK 6y agoI tried to use Sia once but I needed to download the entire blockchain. Not a fan of storing 5 GB locally so I can store 1 GB remotely...
- foolmeonce 6y agoI think hetzner is about half an expensive (€8 tb/m) and I personally prefer ssh/rsync to http/S3.
- ogre_codes 6y agoI don't know what Hetzner is, but if rsync is available, it's a much better option, particularly if you can do incremental syncing you can get a fairly robust setup with very little code.
- gruez 6y ago>I think hetzner is about half an expensive (€8 tb/m) What offering is that? Their "storage" page quotes 26 euros for 5TB.
- foolmeonce 6y agoThe BX30 in 7.90 before any country specific tax. But that is the 1tb price as the price per TB is discounted by volume (and you get more snapshots, etc.)
- gruez 6y agoOkay I see now. If you switch VAT region to us and get the biggest size, it works out to 3.9 euro per TB per month.
- christophilus 6y agoI’ve been happy with Wasabi.
- mynegation 6y agoWith prices like that, Microsoft Office 365 subscription that gives you 1TB of OneDrive space, seems like a better deal.
- dyeje 6y agoIf you're cool with the spartan interface, why not use S3? Isn't most of the value prop on DO Spaces the CDN component?
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoWith s3cmd you could use it with almost anything supporting S3. I work with AWS every day and am a bit shell shocked by it :) And for personal things I prefer DO. And my needs are low. My whole sync folder is about 5gb. But yeah, I could use AWS S3. I agree.
- quaffapint 6y agoYou could also go the route of using Backblaze for storage and Cloudflare for delivery. You'll pay $1.25 for the same 250gb ($0.005/gb) and get free bandwidth through CF.
- geonic 6y agoCan you expand on that? I store my backups on B2. Are you saying I can download all data via cloudflare without paying for B2 egress?
- cweagans 6y agoInfo is here: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/backblaze/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/backblaze/
- 22c 6y agoInterested in this myself. There appears to be some sort of partnership between Backblaze and CloudFlare https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using-Backblaze-B2-with-the-Cloudflare-CDN https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666928-Using... https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010017893-How-to-allow-Cloudflare-to-fetch-content-from-a-Backblaze-B2-private-bucket https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/360010017893-Ho...
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoDoes this have a limitation? Size or whatever ? I want something to store peertube videos and serve them. This sounds like too good to be true
- ddorian43 6y agoIt is, you didn't step on a free video cdn. Cloudflare probits using video unless you're in Enterprise.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
- jph 6y agoYou wrote about deplatforming-- heads up that DigitalOcean does deplatform people. I have direct firsthand knowledge of DigitalOcean deplatforming a security disclosure professional reporting a root breach bug. For your secure backups, I can suggest Tarsnap by Colin Percival, who's a security expert and a frequent contributor on Hacker News. I don't get anything for recommending Tarsnap; I'm just a customer. https://www.tarsnap.com/ https://www.tarsnap.com/
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoDamn! Thanks for the info. I don't get these companies. That person should be thanked and not deplatformed.
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoThis is really awesome! I will definitely try this out. Thanks again.
- ev1 6y agoDO will also use "machine learning" and "AI" to shut down your machines or terminate your account if your usage pattern is disliked.
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoHas this been happening already? I have been using this script for about 4 months now, and I had no problems yet. I do syncing once a day.
- freedomben 6y agoOh yes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169
- Osiris 6y agoDid they ever post the post mortem? It doesn't sound like they changed policies that automatically block flags accounts.
- pronoiac 6y agoNote, it's not bidirectional sync right now: > All I need to do is write a Bash script that does the reverse and downloads from remote server to local folder.
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoTrue! All I need to do is reverse parameters. Documentation states: s3cmd sync LOCAL_DIR s3://BUCKET[/PREFIX] or s3://BUCKET[/PREFIX] LOCAL_DIR But I need to test it out before I post that solution.
- muxator 6y agoI wouldn't trust that script too much: there is no error checking at all. What happens when s3cmd fails and after two months you discover the "Vault sync succeded" emails you have been getting were all illusory? If the author is reading: please take the time to update your example, including proper error checking (at least "set -eu"), otherwise the people on the internet that are going to copy your script are in for a hard time. Skeleton of the "incriminated" script: #!/bin/bash [...] s3cmd sync ... [...] notify-send [...] "Vault sync succeded [...]"
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoI agree with you. I should add a disclaimer that this is still being worked on. I will add what you proposed. Thanks for your input.
- lanstin 6y agoAlways start all your bash scripts with set -e You'll never regret it and might be very very very happy it was there. And if you start with that, then as you work on the shell script, you'll be more likely to make the script be idempotent (checking for files before copying, checking for lines in files before appending/sed'ing etc.) Idempotent >> non-idempotent for "alter the state on an end point" things.
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoWill do. Thanks for this.
- slaymaker1907 6y agoTotally agreed. You can also temporarily turn it off and turn it back on again if you really need to by doing "set +e ... set -e". Sometimes it is more convenient to check errors explicitly, i.e. with test code where the test is expected to fail, but errors should fail fast by default.
- jbrot 6y agoI don’t know about never regretting. “set -e” is the right choice the vast majority of the time, but definitely has some gotchas to it. For instance, what does the following script print? #!/bin/bash set -e ( echo "Start of Subshell" (exit 1) echo "This shouldn’t run, right?" ) || echo "Subshell failed"
- asidiali 6y agoThis is really cool! Thanks for sharing - going to give it a go. Similarly, I took a stab not too long ago at attempting to replace my Dropbox [1] - I opted for an implementation using Git and FSWatch. Pro: version control for your files Con: more expensive and takes more storage [1] https://sidia.li/simple-dropbox-alternative/ https://sidia.li/simple-dropbox-alternative/
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoLove it. Your solution is much more polished and Dropbox like. Very nice!
- asidiali 6y agoThanks for checking it out - may we both never have to succumb to third party syncing platforms again!
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoCouldn't agree with you more.
- mciancia 6y agoAnother clickbait, it's a replacement for Dropbox in the same way as a tent is a replacement for a car - you can sleep in both. Whole thing just looks like poor ad for DigitalOcean
- mitjafelicijan 6y agoI never claimed that this is 1 on 1 replacement for Dropbox. Dropbox is much much much more than what I am doing here. And I agree with you on that point. I choose DO because it is very easy to set up and get started with. But for my needs this is all that I need and it solves my use case. And regarding DO, its just one of the possible S3 providers out there. One could choose something else.
- paxys 6y agoThere is a lot of open source file sync software out there (ownCloud, NextCloud, Seafile, Syncthing, ...) that would be much better suited for a self-hosted Dropbox replacement than a single bash script. You are many orders of magnitude more likely to lose your data due to a code bug or unstable network than deplatforming. I looked into setting up something of the sort for myself a little while ago, but unfortunately the pricing just isn't feasible if you have a large amount of data (say a few hundred GBs). You could easily end up paying more than $100/mo for storage + compute + bandwidth, while Dropbox and others charge ~$6-$10/mo for like 2TB.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- homedrive 6y agoYou can host Nextcloud at your home using something like NextcloudPi+DDNS (https://nextcloudpi.com https://nextcloudpi.com) or HomeDrive (https://homedrive.io https://homedrive.io, which has ngrok-ish end-to-end tunnels integrated), and the monthly cost would be almost $0. :)
- whoopdedo 6y agoI recently set up Nginx on a DO droplet as a reverse proxy to my home server over Wireguard. It's not $0 but it doesn't directly expose my home IP. And I have an authoritative resolver on the LAN so local clients go directly to the private address.
- imwillofficial 6y agoCan you share how you did this? I’ve had this idea for awhile but never figured out how to pull it off.
- luord 6y agoI would also really like to know how you set this up. I've been thinking about this kind of setup for my and my family's data, at least.
- swjz 6y agoDropbox does a great job syncing a large number of small files -- I believe they compress the small files somehow before uploading to the cloud. And plenty of other optimizations that make me happy to pay Dropbox's premium. Otherwise, Google Drive and OneDrive are cheap alternatives too.
- jamesmunns 6y agoI actually really like DO spaces, I use it for hosting a small audio podcast. One downside is they give you NO way to see your bandwidth usage, other than seeing whether you got a bill overage or not. It was pretty surprising to me that they HAVE the information for billing, but don't expose it to the user of spaces in any way.
- jmuguy 6y agoI also found that to be really bizarre and there’s threads of users requesting usage info going back to over a year ago.
- midasz 6y agoIf you're just doing simple stuff where bandwidth matters I'd look into OVH/kimsufi, it's cheap unmetered dedicated servers.
- AnonC 6y agoCould you please expand on how you host a podcast and what software you use (or point to resources that can help)? I’m assuming you mean hosting the podcast audio files, not just RSS feeds to the episode files stored elsewhere. Thank you.
- centimeter 6y agoHigh efficiency and very high performance trustless backup setup: send incremental (encrypted, compressed) ZFS snapshots to rsync.net, hetzner, or buyvm. This produces smaller backups than rsync or similar tools, produces them faster, and also shields your data from prying eyes, as it’s all encrypted when it leaves your machine.
- tarruda 6y agoRsync.net also supports borg backups at a cheaper price than ZFS: https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html
- notyourday 6y agoIf that's what you are doing why not just go to Wasabi? It is cheaper, storage is the only thing that they do and downloads is free until the GB transferred is under GB stored per month.
- tra3 6y agoI've never heard of them -- how long have they been around?
- chromatin 6y ago2017
- bachmeier 6y agoI looked at Wasabi not long ago. > For customers that use Wasabi’s pay-as-you-go pricing model, Wasabi has a minimum monthly charge associated with 1 TB of storage ($5.99/month). If you store less than 1 TB of active storage in your account, your total charge will still be $5.99/month (plus any applicable taxes). See FAQ#4 for more details. > With Wasabi minimum storage retention policy, minimum number of days are as follows: > 90 days (default) for customers using Wasabi’s pay-as-you-go pricing model Wasabi's not intended for small-scale use cases.
- Dylan16807 6y agoSix dollars a month isn't small scale?
- notyourday 6y agoIt is six dollars a month per TB billed on a GB level with 1TB minimum, with no weird plan tiers with S3 compatible API and no stupid per API call charges, reasonable pull pricing ( either free or cheap ), not related to other accounts. What, exactly is that level of control of $ spent ( as it is going to be lower than pennies ), that people want while maintaining reasonable reliability, stability, durability and scalability of storage.
- ogre_codes 6y agoWhen I read "Replacing Dropbox", reading about a 1 way sync system for backing up a single system isn't what jumps to mind. The magic of Dropbox is that it sync files across multiple computers and allows multiple people to share files. This doesn't do any of that. You can use Dropbox for that, but there are definitely cheaper/ more robust solutions.
- contravariant 6y agoWell to be fair the remote backup is the part that's hardest to recreate with a self-hosted solution.
- ogre_codes 6y agoIs it? I used to do something similar with a couple rsync commands. In fact I think the rsync solution is more robust because you can create incremental backups.
- contravariant 6y agoJust having a secure/trustworthy/robust remote location to backup too is somewhat of a hassle. The backup itself is not the tricky bit.
- 0x426577617265 6y agoI have a 50TB+ NAS in my garage rack. Which I'm not utilizing completely. I wonder if there is a market for renting out some of my storage for someone else's encrypted backups. Something like a website, where I can list my price/gb & connection speed -- or maybe people could swap. Maybe I want to store 5TB off site and I'm willing to let someone else store their 5TB on my server. The website would act as the middleman for introducing the two customers.
- ukd1 6y agoSiacoin and Filecoin are basically this; you can store small parts of files under contracts that give you crypto in return. Occasionally you'll get tested by the network to check if it's online, and you have the files you should have. A good use of crypto, though last time I looked the ROI wasn't great as a host.
- 0x426577617265 6y agoThat sounds more taxing on my connection than what I was thinking. Not really up for 100 connections, but if I'm matched up with 1 or 2 other users then that would seem ok.
- adtac 6y agoWhat's the difference? The 1 or 2 users could be in a datacentre with all the bandwidth in the world.
- ukd1 6y agoFrom what I understand it doesn't really work like that - files get split in to 30 chunks on different providers, and you only need 10 to restore. Apparently "this means that if 20 out of 30 hosts go offline, a Sia user is still able to download her files."
- paxys 6y agoThe amount of liability you'd be taking on would make it absolutely not worth it for 2 customers and a few dollars a month in income. On the opposite end, I'd trust Google or Dropbox with my encrypted backup much more than a rack in someone's garage on a home internet connection.
- jiggawatts 6y agoI went down a bit of a rabbit hole of Digital Ocean and their "security" for production workloads. > Show me any other vps provider that silently provides access to customer A's data to customer B after receiving commands from customer A to destroy their instance and then I'll believe you guys aren't at the very bottom of the "takes security seriously" list. From: https://github.com/fog/fog/issues/2525#issuecomment-31337481 https://github.com/fog/fog/issues/2525#issuecomment-31337481 YC News Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983097 > You do not need to scrub or write anything to not provide user A’s data to user B in a multi-tenant environment. Sparse allocation can easily return nulls to a reader even while the underlying block storage still contains the old data. ... On top of all of that, when I pointed out that what they were doing was absolute amateur hour clownshoes, they oscillated between telling me it was a design decision working as intended (and that it was fine for me to publicize it), and that I was an irresponsible discloser by sharing a vulnerability. From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20091026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20091026 > You've got an additional problem though, which is that this tells us you have two support channels: one that doesn't work (i.e. yours, the one you built), and one that does (Twitter-shaming). The first channel represents how you act when no one's watching; the second, how you act when they are. Most people prefer to deal with people for whom those two are the same. From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169 Speaking of randomly locking accounts, the post-mortem kills me: > The initial account lock and resource power down resulted from an automated service that monitors for cryptocurrency mining activity (Droplet CPU loads and Droplet create behaviors). These signals, coupled with a number of account-level signals (including payment history and current run rate compared to total payments) are used to determine if automated action is warranted to minimize the impact of potential fraudulent high-cpu-loads on other customers. From: https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/an-update-on-last-weeks-customer-shutdown-incident/ https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/an-update-on-last-weeks-cu...? In other other words, DO will kill your account with a curt email staring simply: "We have reviewed your account and have declined to activate it. No further information or action is required from you." for simply using "too much CPU"! https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D76ocofXoAY_xB5.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D76ocofXoAY_xB5.png
- mitjafelicijan 6y ago
- chrissnell 6y agoI must say, I concur with this person’s assessment of the Goog-exit feeling. I ditched GMail for Fastmail and my own domain last week. I had been putting this off for years because it seemed like such a massive pain in the ass and I was afraid that I would just end up with two email services. In the end, it took me one evening to update every service that I cared about to use my new address. The rest (mostly e-commerce companies) I’ve been doing as I use them.
- nsomaru 6y agoBeen thinking seriously about this. Do you just inform your contacts with an auto responder? How long do you intend to keep the gmail account?
- chrissnell 6y agoI didn't do any auto-responders. Frankly, email is kind of dead for p2p comms with friends so there's not many people to inform. Most difficult part I've encountered was getting my dad, who is old, on board. He keeps emailing me at my GMail.
- wly_cdgr 6y agoAll this kind of stuff just feels like cosplay unless you are gonna build out your own tier 1 (that also doesn't need other tier 1s) Which isn't to say you can't learn a lot of useful practical stuff from it, just like you can from cosplay
- jmartrican 6y agoOnce I "git reset --hard" the wrong repo and lost a lot of code. Had to use Dropbox's rollback feature to get it all back. Was not the first time Dropbox saved my butt. For me, a comparable alternative would need to have the same rollback features.
- hyperion2010 6y agogit reflog?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- JeffDClark 6y agoI tried, and tried to use Spaces for image hosting related to a site that I am building but it never worked for me. DigitalOcean support was responsive but useless. I got the same basic response over and over again for days on end. I did finally get a response acking my problem and that it would be assigned to an Engineer. The ticket was then closed the next day with no further comment. I re-opened it and asked about the status of the engineer looking at the issue and received back the same response I had already heard nearly a dozen times. I then re-closed the ticket, deleted my Space, and went back to AWS. :( I had heard good things about DigitalOcean, but I would not use them or recommend them to anyone after that experience. The one primary issue I had was a showstopper but there was a lot of other bugginess.
- JoeCianflone 6y agoThat’s crazy. I’m using spaces on several projects and never had so much as a blip from them. If you don’t mind what was the showstopper issue for you?
- JeffDClark 6y agoErroneous 503s. I would get a 503 on every call. Uploading a single file with a single call would immediately 503. I never once got a successful upload. I simply switched the endpoint URL and credentials over to AWS S3 and it worked first time so it was not my code (though I suppose it could have been an issue in the library AWS's node S3 client). My theory was the request was somehow malformed based on what DO was expecting and it was returning a 503 rather than a 400. But the request did work with S3.
- avsteele 6y agoYou can self host syncing service pretty easily: 1) Get a Synology NAS. 2) Install the 'Synology Drive' package 3) set up 'Quickconnect' (~DDNS) 4) Remote backup can be though a number of providers (e.g. Backblaze) for cheap No monthly fees. No domain needed. Storage is as cheap as the HDD's you stock it with. Your hardware and all your files are in your own house. Everything on BlackBlaze can be encrypted. You can set it up all through a webpage-based-GUI. Technical, non-experts in computing stuff can do this. Not quite simple enough for the general public though. https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/drive https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/drive
- CharlesW 6y agoQNAP's Qsync is their file sync service for QNAP NAS owners. https://www.qnap.com/en/utilities/essentials https://www.qnap.com/en/utilities/essentials
- arcbyte 6y agoThis is what I use and I love it. Still working out what I want to do for backing it up to the cloud though. It has a very easy built on way to do that too, but im trying to figure out how "trust no one" I am with encryption and what exactly I really want to pay to keep around forever.
- monkmartinez 6y agoI have a QNAP for my whole family (Mom, Dad, Bro, Sis)... they can remote in and save pictures. I then use cloudsync to backup to GCP nearline. All family pictures are there. Obviously, we don't store stuff that we don't want our mother to see. I take the risk of hacking, but a fire in my house is probably more likely than a hacking of my family photos on GCP. I figure just about everything else is ephemeral.
- kwanbix 6y agoAnd what happens if somebody breaks in and steals your NAS?
- timClicks 6y ago> All I need to do is write a Bash script that does the reverse and downloads from remote server to local folder. This could be another post. A backup strategy without a recovery strategy already in place isn't a backup strategy.
- jscholes 6y ago> To use this on Windows I suggest using Subsystem for Linux or Cygwin. Unless you live inside these environments, an easier option would be rclone[1]. I use it on a regular basis to sync large loads to Digital Ocean Spaces, including its bandwidth limiting schedule to avoid saturating the residential uplink at inconvenient times. [1] https://rclone.org https://rclone.org
- Merman_Mike 6y ago> including its bandwidth limiting schedule Can you share more about this please? The biggest (related) issue I run into running rclone from home is hitting the request speed limit on Digital Ocean Spaces. I frequently get the "Slow down!" error when backing up a bunch of small (<1mb) files.
- arsome 6y agoI'd highly suggest Syncthing over this solution - no need to rely on 3rd parties for your data storage, let alone trust them with unencrypted copies of your data, if someone malicious worked at DigitalOcean and wanted to compromise you, it'd be trivial to put a malicious script in your Vault files. Especially if deplatforming is a concern something like Syncthing would avoid any reliance on a 3rd party that has visibility into your data.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoAs a test case, i use box.com in combination with rclone and have daily backups for db and data of my servers. It copies remotely to /{day of the month} + /{latest} I could easily change my script to run every hour. It works pretty nicely and i have a backup for 30 days ( Outside of the default backup daily ofc)
- woudsma 6y agoFunny, I've done the opposite in recent months. Dropbox's killer feature is 'Online-only' storage IMHO, it allows me to store and access 300GB+ of music and other projects on my laptop without carrying an external HDD with me all the time. Every file is saved as a zero-byte file, which makes the files discoverable even though it's not stored on my disk. When I try to open the file it downloads it automatically, which works surprisingly well. And it's way faster than mounting DigitalOcean Spaces using s3fs for example. Also Dropbox is cheaper: 12eu for 2TB, compared to DigitalOcean Spaces: 5eu for 250GB. And I can even access my files through the Dropbox API.
- kwanbix 6y agoLove how well Dropbox works. Sadly, for me, it is too expensive. It is 240 euros per year for a family of 6. For comparison, the same plan in Google One costs 120 euros per year. Same for Office 365. If they did 120 euros per year for the family pack I will migrate to them because I like Dropbox better at syncing.
- kwanbix 6y ago(And Office365 actually gives you 1TB per user (so 6TB) and 60 mins of skype per user (so 360 mins), plus online, mobile, and desktop versions of office). But somehow I have the feeling that Dropbox > Google Drive > OneDrive at syncing. Anybody can confirm?
- anderspitman 6y agoYou may also be interested in rclone if you're not aware of it already.
- vicken 6y agoTake a look at duplicity. http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ It does encrypted, incremental backups and can sync to many protocols including S3, DO Spaces, Dropbox, rsync, Mega.co...the list goes on. Super easy to set up. This is my go to backup solution for the cloud.
- uncledave 6y agoDuplicity is crazy unreliable. Had so many problems with that from memory ballooning to corruption. Only thing I’ve found which is even fit for purpose so far is rdiff-backup. For personal stuff I’m just using iCloud and time machine to local disks.
- saargrin 6y agothis is absolutely not a dropbox replacement, this is a script that uploads your files to a cloud shared storage dropbox client does so many more things (including compression,delta uploads,filehandle watch, incremental backup and so on) i mean its fine if thats what you want,but that is not a backup solution by any means
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y agoWhy didn't he mention the cost? How does digital ocean compare to Hetzner's 1$/100GB/month snapshot offering?
- dash2 6y agoThe article, and many of the posts here, seem like a baroque expansion of this (in)famous original response to the Dropbox launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863. I can get off Dropbox by... writing my own shell scripts? What's sad is that increasingly people are feeling that the price for these easy, convenient services is too high, in terms of privacy loss, data lock-in, and so on. Are we going back to the early 00s, when the tech-savvy people would roll their own solutions and everyone else... just has to lump it? Are hackers just being too idealistic? Or do organizations like Signal show a possible way forward?
- caymanjim 6y agoI'm a long-time DigitalOcean user and I'm happy with most of their products, but I use Backblaze for S3-compatible storage. It's half the price of Spaces, and I get better transfer rates from my DigitalOcean droplet to B2 than I get to Spaces, even within the same DigitalOcean datacenter. There are tons of companies offering S3-compatible storage, and there's not much difference between them, other than price. Performance capabilities are similar; they all limit bandwidth. All the ones I've evaluated charge for egress over a certain threshold. Some are more reliable than others. For personal use, there's not a whole lot of difference between them for me. One really cheap alternative for some use cases is Office 365. For $99/year, you can get a family subscription, which allows six accounts. Each gets 1TB of S3-compatible OneDrive storage. If you can handle it being broken up into six 1TB chunks, it's by far the cheapest storage out there. For comparison, Backblaze is $5/TB/mo, and Office 365 gets you $1.37/TB/mo. I didn't end up using this option because the authentication mechanism was inconvenient for my automated use case and I didn't end up needing so much storage, but it's worth investigating if you're on a budget and don't need automated access via e.g. rclone mounts (or want to take the time to overcome the authentication issues I ran into). I evaluated about a dozen S3 storage options for both backups and as backing storage for a personal Plex server (of media I own) and eventually settled on Backblaze because it's cheap, easy to use, and I didn't need more than 1-2TB in the end (since not a single one can keep up with streaming video bandwidth needs, I ditched the Plex idea).
- dikaio 6y agoI stopped using Dropbox as soon as C. Rice was put on the board. Tried tarsnap which was great did everything I wanted but I ended up using Arq instead, have had zero issues with it. https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/