3 ms·

If you don't want to pay for the cloud, then there is only one sane option: You keep upgrading your local storage so that you never have more than a few device

If you don't want to pay for the cloud, then there is only one sane option: You keep upgrading your local storage so that you never have more than a few devices. Every six months, buy a new giant disk and decommission as many smaller disks as you can.

arthurcolle 5y ago
This sounds extremely expensive
- amarshall 5y ago
  Cloud storage is really expensive, though. Putting 4 TB in S3 costs US$94.21/month before any transfer costs. A 4 TB CMR HDD is ~$140. That doesn’t include power costs, but over a year you get $990 to spend on that and other things from the cost difference vs. S3 (plus you can sell your old drives when you’re done with them). (I use B2 for cloud storage backup since it’s a lot cheaper than S3 at US$20 for 4 TB, but that still is ~$105/year more than local)
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    > 4 TB CMR HDD is ~$140 And that's with bad pricing! Last year, 4TB was $120 and 6TB was ~$150. Building out a NAS for $1000 ($600 in 4x hard drives, $400 for other components) is very reasonable. Last year that was 4x6TB == 12TB storage + 12TB redundancy, but this year prices are worse so you "only" get 8TB + 8TB redundancy. $400 can afford a Synology or various NAS devices. It can also afford a new desktop that you can install FreeNAS or whatever onto. ----------- Eventually, when the 8TB is not enough, just buy a new HBA card and shove 4x more hard drives in there for a 2nd storage on the same NAS. Maybe 8TB x 4 == 16TB usable + 16TB redundancy. Except no need to copy everything over, just keep the old 8TB cluster working, and just start writing to the new 16TB storage.
    - rhacker 5y ago
      This is the true answer to this entire thread.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    Cloud storage is also really different from a hard disk though, mostly in the direction of being really better than a hard disk, so it being more expensive is not surprising.
  - bastawhiz 5y ago
    > Putting 4 TB in S3 costs US$94.21/month before any transfer costs. If you have 5TB of photos, chances are you're not looking through 5TB of photos all that often, and S3's IA storage is very appealing at ~$65/mo. If you only want a cold storage backup, glacier will keep them for you at $20/mo. If you need storage that's only accessed once or twice a year (and you don't mind waiting a bit to get your file) you can pay less than $5/mo with Glacier Deep Archive. The cost of S3 that you quoted is for _nine nines_ of durability and milliseconds latency. If you don't need that, you can pay for far cheaper storage that better-matches your needs, with the convenience of never needing to buy/transfer/replace/sell drives. > That doesn’t include power costs, but over a year you get $990 to spend on that and other things from the cost difference vs. S3 If you spend ~days each year worrying about storage and paying for ever-larger disks (and spending time selling your old ones, for whatever you can get), chances are the few hundred dollars you might come out ahead doing it yourself isn't really worth it.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Cloud storage is doing a LOT more than what you describe: for example, to compare with S3 you'd be budgeting for at least 3 disks in geographically separated locations running a secure always-online service with things like guarantees for immutability and bit-rot detection/prevention. For backups, you probably also want to compare things like the infrequent or cold storage tiers. You can still beat that, of course, but it's assuming you have time and skills to do so and don't mind spending that time playing sysadmin.
  - _Algernon_ 5y ago
    The advantage of cloud storage is that it gives you a remote backup, which a local NAS or external drive doesn't.
- TheDudeMan 5y ago
  "Six months" was just a random number. You get the idea.
- denkmoon 5y ago
  it is, and it is over the top. Moving up to larger drives every 6 months is insane. Maybe every 3-4 years. Depending on your actual storage requirements of course. Not sure why OP's requirement is to have "few devices". Local storage is always cheaper than cloud storage unless you're doing it really wrong. Fully (3-2-1) backed up local storage less so, but if you do it smart it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg.
- benlivengood 5y ago
  It's not prohibitively expensive; all the large internet/cloud companies upgrade machines and drives on a ~3 year schedule and mostly keep the data online. Storage Moore's Law means that every upgrade let's you put the old data onto fewer new drives. Storage Moore's Law is slowing, but still makes this the most affordable option when taking durability into account. Offline storage is dangerous. Readers go obsolete. Media degrades. Data sets go missing. Protocols and storage formats become obsolete. Migrating data from one online storage to another while upgrading hardware solves a lot of these issues, the only exception being storage format for straight file copies between systems.

arthurcolle 5y ago

This sounds extremely expensive

amarshall 5y ago
Cloud storage is really expensive, though. Putting 4 TB in S3 costs US$94.21/month before any transfer costs. A 4 TB CMR HDD is ~$140. That doesn’t include power costs, but over a year you get $990 to spend on that and other things from the cost difference vs. S3 (plus you can sell your old drives when you’re done with them). (I use B2 for cloud storage backup since it’s a lot cheaper than S3 at US$20 for 4 TB, but that still is ~$105/year more than local)
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > 4 TB CMR HDD is ~$140 And that's with bad pricing! Last year, 4TB was $120 and 6TB was ~$150. Building out a NAS for $1000 ($600 in 4x hard drives, $400 for other components) is very reasonable. Last year that was 4x6TB == 12TB storage + 12TB redundancy, but this year prices are worse so you "only" get 8TB + 8TB redundancy. $400 can afford a Synology or various NAS devices. It can also afford a new desktop that you can install FreeNAS or whatever onto. ----------- Eventually, when the 8TB is not enough, just buy a new HBA card and shove 4x more hard drives in there for a 2nd storage on the same NAS. Maybe 8TB x 4 == 16TB usable + 16TB redundancy. Except no need to copy everything over, just keep the old 8TB cluster working, and just start writing to the new 16TB storage.
  - rhacker 5y ago
    This is the true answer to this entire thread.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  Cloud storage is also really different from a hard disk though, mostly in the direction of being really better than a hard disk, so it being more expensive is not surprising.
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  > Putting 4 TB in S3 costs US$94.21/month before any transfer costs. If you have 5TB of photos, chances are you're not looking through 5TB of photos all that often, and S3's IA storage is very appealing at ~$65/mo. If you only want a cold storage backup, glacier will keep them for you at $20/mo. If you need storage that's only accessed once or twice a year (and you don't mind waiting a bit to get your file) you can pay less than $5/mo with Glacier Deep Archive. The cost of S3 that you quoted is for _nine nines_ of durability and milliseconds latency. If you don't need that, you can pay for far cheaper storage that better-matches your needs, with the convenience of never needing to buy/transfer/replace/sell drives. > That doesn’t include power costs, but over a year you get $990 to spend on that and other things from the cost difference vs. S3 If you spend ~days each year worrying about storage and paying for ever-larger disks (and spending time selling your old ones, for whatever you can get), chances are the few hundred dollars you might come out ahead doing it yourself isn't really worth it.
- acdha 5y ago
  Cloud storage is doing a LOT more than what you describe: for example, to compare with S3 you'd be budgeting for at least 3 disks in geographically separated locations running a secure always-online service with things like guarantees for immutability and bit-rot detection/prevention. For backups, you probably also want to compare things like the infrequent or cold storage tiers. You can still beat that, of course, but it's assuming you have time and skills to do so and don't mind spending that time playing sysadmin.
- _Algernon_ 5y ago
  The advantage of cloud storage is that it gives you a remote backup, which a local NAS or external drive doesn't.
TheDudeMan 5y ago
"Six months" was just a random number. You get the idea.
denkmoon 5y ago
it is, and it is over the top. Moving up to larger drives every 6 months is insane. Maybe every 3-4 years. Depending on your actual storage requirements of course. Not sure why OP's requirement is to have "few devices". Local storage is always cheaper than cloud storage unless you're doing it really wrong. Fully (3-2-1) backed up local storage less so, but if you do it smart it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg.
benlivengood 5y ago
It's not prohibitively expensive; all the large internet/cloud companies upgrade machines and drives on a ~3 year schedule and mostly keep the data online. Storage Moore's Law means that every upgrade let's you put the old data onto fewer new drives. Storage Moore's Law is slowing, but still makes this the most affordable option when taking durability into account. Offline storage is dangerous. Readers go obsolete. Media degrades. Data sets go missing. Protocols and storage formats become obsolete. Migrating data from one online storage to another while upgrading hardware solves a lot of these issues, the only exception being storage format for straight file copies between systems.