23 ms·

A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

154 points by katrinarodri 3y ago

below43 3y ago
It's definitely worth people considering getting local storage. Personally I like the combo of onboard storage, sync to cloud storage, and routine backup to external storage.
ThaRedah 3y ago
What this article fails to justify is there isn't a simple solution for users to have a "Local Cloud". A NAS or Hard Drive on a computer will be beat by the ability to have all of your photos/software on you wherever you go. There needs to be a better way for Personal devices to access personal or home networks for personal cloud solutions to become more accessible to the average person.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  Most popular NAS have built-in services for remote access that regular users can use.
solatic 3y ago
I don't disagree with the premise, but the author's case is deeply flawed. > Instead of paying a monthly subscription to store and access your files, a one-time payment for an external hard drive may be a more economical alternative over time. Cloud storage has much, much more redundancy than a single external hard drive, and the author discounts the value of that redundancy. > Reliable access Have fun getting grandma to cycle her drives when the drives inevitably fail! Also, have fun setting up networked access over the Internet, without resorting to a drive provider's portal (misses the point of getting off the cloud), dealing with the sorry state of static IP addresses for residential connections, helping grandma set up a domain and DNS, hoping nobody attacks your exposed network, etc. Non-starter.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Unfortunately, cloud storage really does have reliability issues. A recent case in point, though there are many more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-issues-warning-to-drive-users-over-sudden-deletion-of-files/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-i...
  - southernplaces7 3y ago
    So in other words, Google in particular has a reliability issue (big news flash there). Unless you're nitpicking for its own sake, you presumably know there are many other cloud options out there for which you can even use your own encryption system (think boxxryptor, cryptomator, reclone, etc) for maximum privacy. It's neither expensive or hard to run simultaneous, fairly simple multiple cloud backups of one's device data with different providers that each have better customer service reputations than google.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      > It's neither expensive or hard to run simultaneous, fairly simple multiple cloud backups ... Yep, that would potentially be a suitable workaround. Not sure I'd really agree with the pricing aspect not being expensive, but that's probably one of those things that depends on each users circumstances.
motles 3y ago
> a one-time payment for an external hard drive may be a more economical alternative over time. If you care about your data, you are playing with fire. Drives do not store data forever. Data must be read and rewritten occasionally to maintain it, from old media past its lifespan to new media. Good storage software, with the ability to write your data with either mirroring or striping of some sort is able to routinely scan your entire data set and detect bit rot - and rewrite sectors that contain bitrotted data to new media. You simply do not get that level of protection buying a single external hardrive alone. Most enterprise storage systems do this. Most cloud storage does this. It’s worth paying for if you have data that is valuable.
- jackjeff 3y ago
  I have a cron job running snapraid scrub. And smart demon with email alert. Once I had to quickly buy a HDD (next day Amazon) because it was dying. Big appeal of cloud storage is that the data won’t go up in smoke if there’s a fire. But everything else you can do if you’re patient enough.
  - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
    > Big appeal of cloud storage is that the data won’t go up in smoke if there’s a fire. Unless it’s OVH…
- janwillemb 3y ago
  I have used local drives for my data for decades. I have data since 1995. Nowadays I also have a remote offline backup somewhere. It seems to work for me so far.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    With your setup, is that having your data on a single local drive at any time, or was it generally copied onto a few? aka "making sure you're not hosed if a drive goes bad"
    - 3y ago
roca 3y ago
Security: with local storage it's on you to make sure that your NAS or whatever is constantly up-to-date with security patches. And that's assuming your NAS provider keeps providing patches. It's on you to do all necessary monitoring for intrusion detection etc. Reliability: with local storage it's on you to keep backups, make sure those backups work, replace failing drives, don't accidentally wipe the drive, and make sure you have distribution across geographies. Good luck with that. Cost: sure, local wins here. If systems administration is your fun hobby, or you are incredibly cost-sensitive due to large scale, by all means manage storage locally. Otherwise pay professionals to do it.
- jackjeff 3y ago
  My experience setting up a Linux NAS server on a HP Proliant N54L is that once you’re past the initial set up cost (doing Linux sysadmin things which is very time consuming and sometimes frustrating) it’s basically done. Sure you’ll have to apply updates and reboot from time to time, but that’s almost nothing. As for security, set things up correctly (proper samba auth) and use firewalls. UFW on the box. I have a Linux router and only computers on the right Ethernet ports can touch the the NAS. Done.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  for 99% of applications, especially with proper system design, this stuff is super easy now with containers and automated backups if you’re storing lots of user generated data, probably should have just scrapped the idea
- mrtesthah 3y ago
  Security: you don't need a NAS because your files don't need to be accessible "online" -- they're already local to your own computer. Reliability: with local storage, you have the ability to make backups without re-downloading multiple terabytes of data each time. And there's definitely no way your files could just spontaneously disappear from cloud storage, either: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-issues-warning-to-drive-users-over-sudden-deletion-of-files/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-i...
- jjav 3y ago
bradley13 3y ago
Run your own cloud (specifically OwnCloud). The setup takes effort, but afterwards it's easy. I run it on a microserver at home, with port forwarding for access. All the benefits of "cloud", but you know where your data is. Do remember to make backups, but you need those for commercial services as well.
- adfm 3y ago
  Considering OwnCloud’s current breach following recent acquisition, you might want to check out the NextCloud fork, which seems to be actively worked on https://nextcloud.com/blog/security-statement/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/security-statement/
  - bradley13 3y ago
    NextCloud is certainly also an option. That said, the security issue wasn't really the fault of OwnCloud. They use a Microsoft library, which itself included a further library. That downstream library had the security issue. Unfortunately, it happened to interact especially badly with the containerized version of OwnCloud. That kind of downstream security issue can bite any project. I don't blame OwnCloud in the slightest, and they were very quick to acknowledge the problem and post the solution.
- yCloser 3y ago
  In the past I've been hacked for some owncloud lldap vulnerability. Do not allow access to owncloud without a vpn!!
  - bradley13 3y ago
    I don't doubt your experience, but I wonder what the issue was. The only LDAP-related issue I find (cve-2021-40537) also requires compromised admin-credentials to exploit. Of course, with compromised admin credentials, all bets are off anyway. I know it is only anecdotal, but I have been running OwnCloud for many years now, available without a VPN, with no security problems.
aaron695 3y ago
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RajT88 3y ago
My local setup - please critique as you like. For NAS, I am running Windows Server 2022 (I have a rational reason for this). It hosts many things. * IIS, for my local browser start pages, I configure with "new tab redirect" plugins * JellyFin - Basically a personal Netflix for all my ripped media * DokuWiki, thumbdrive version - for documenting house stuff * Twonky - Because it's the least-bad DLNA solution I've used so far * NGINX - provides public reverse proxy function for Jellyfin I have a backup script which backs up the most critical documents (taxes, work code, personal writings) up to S3 and Azure - pennies a month. I have all my stuff on mirrored drives locally. I have been mulling over burning MDISC discs for my larger media (personal photos, video, etc.), and doing something with that. This is partly aspirational - Once-a-year MDISC burning for stuff could be cool, but where do I store those when safety deposit boxes are becoming more and more rare?
- deepmauka 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing your elegant and versatile setup. A thought for the discs and safety deposit boxes, I live in a rural area and have an account with a credit union that service several labor unions. They’re rooted in the community, profitable, and I don’t see them changing anytime soon. 3”x10” boxes are $20/yr.
  - salad-tycoon 3y ago
    To expound on safety deposit boxes since GP was asking for critiques. From what I’ve read they can be prone to accidents, theft, damage and are a big reasons to have them is for showing off. My understanding, which entirely comes from this NYT article, is that banks hate them. Safe Deposit Boxes Aren’t Safe, NYT, 2019: https://archive.is/NfnL6 https://archive.is/NfnL6
    - infecto 3y ago
      Agreed on Safe Deposit boxes. I would probably invest in a real fire rated safe. Real defined as a safe over $1000. Not the consumer crap that gets shoveled out.
    - 3y ago
buro9 3y ago
Syncthing is a dream. Photos sync'd from phone to laptop making pics taken instantly available to share via desktop apps. Also add in the NAS and you have three copies before you consider RAID or BTRFS or anything. Replace Dropbox with syncthing and you have multiple folders and can choose which folders go to which devices. Put a NAS at a second location and you have the ability to power up and power down the remote NAS whenever you want to make a backup and syncthing will handle the rest. Add in any one of the UIs over the files on the NAS and you replace most of the household use of things like Google files or drive. About the only thing I would like and don't have, is syncthing with an object storage backend for cloud based folders fully under your control.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  Garage (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/) gets pretty close for object storage. It’s built with mixing high/low latency links and replication between multiple hosts. Unfortunately it’s not really built for end-users, but devs, so there’s no ui or anything like that.
  - koito17 3y ago
    Yup. Garage is painless to set up and, unlike Minio, is designed for "small scale", self-hosted use cases where your nodes may not have identical storage and compute. One current caveat of Garage, compared to Minio, is that anonymous access is not supported. (Patches welcome!) This means you can't easily generate or share links to files in a bucket. I personally use Garage for locally testing things that run against the S3 API. It's very easy to run the single binary directly. No need for containers, but of course that is also an option, and it's very easy to containerize since you realistically only need to run a statically linked binary and mount a TOML file somewhere.
- Gys 3y ago
  What I like about Dropbox is all files are available (browsable) from their ios app. Do you happen to use a similar app for remote browsing?
Helmut10001 3y ago
I run a 48 TB ZFS pool (Z2; 24TB usable), and an offsite, offline 48 TB ZFS pool (mirror). My primary server is Proxmox, where I have 8 unprivileged VMs with Docker nested inside (since ZFS 2.2.0, Docker on unprivileged ZFS works now without detours). My backup is ZFS-send plus Borgmatic as a fallback, until I trust the ZFS-send approach that I just added (I usually have "migration phases" for new features that may last 1-2 years). I run Gitlab, Nextcloud, Funkwhale, InfluxDB, Graphana, Homeassistant, Mailcow-Dockerized (as an email-management and collector solution) and other things. All of this not public, but on local VLAN and VPN. The good thing with Docker + Watchtower is that I only have very little (<30 Mins) administration work per month, most of this is also testing new features. Has worked reliably for the past 5 years. For connecting households (my brother's family etc.), I use OPNsense and pfSense boxes. My server is powered by a 90 kWp solar array - I don't have a (house-) battery yet, but that will be added in 1-2 years. Current energy consumption is about 250 Watt - but I also have an old Xeon from 2013. The main cost (after initial investment) is harddrives and (of course) learning time. It pays off in other areas, too. I just got a job that I think I only got because of my report of self-hosting. The biggest convenience is that I can sync all devices and all data (e.g. Nextcloud auto-upload from phones, DAVx5 for calendar/contacts) to a single, secure and private place that is then automatically backed up. I don't know the correct word, but maybe "liberating" describes the feeling best. All of this does not require super-secret knowledge, just some motivation (and you should not be completely broke). I started in 2017 with the plan to learn Linux and get away from FAAN(M)G and I am happy I started this endeavor back then.
- ssss11 3y ago
  That all sounds great but what we desperately need is instructions on how to do things like this for the less technical, and easy maintenance… I think those are the limiting factors for wide spread adoption
  - Helmut10001 3y ago
    I agree. We need more and better instructions and easier-to-setup tools - all of this got a big boost with docker (compose). On the other hand, we need to pair the less-technical with the power-users and help each other. I am responsible for about 8-10 people. This frees them from cloud providers and helps me to built better and more robust solutions.
JeanMarcS 3y ago
Ok. So now your house is on fire. How do you retrieve your datas from the melted local NAS ? Or a buglar come and empties it. Don't get me wrong, I'm full "move away from the cloud" in the "proprietary cloud" way. But getting some drive space on a different location is important if you care about your datas. Could be in a relative's or friend's place (so almost no per month cost) or on a cloud drive (I personnaly use the Hetzner 10€/m 5TB drive), depending on your choice of backup solution. But it's important.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I have a raspberry at a family member's house with an encrypted backup on an external HDD I sync with rsync. I used hetzner before but the problem was I needed about 1.5TB and their only options in that range are 1 and 5TB. The 5TB option was a bit too wasteful.
  - geek_at 3y ago
    I use the same, just I sent incremental encrypted ZFS snapshots. These are a game changer since the target can import them and verify that they work without ever needing the key
- pmlnr 3y ago
  Ok. So your credit card expired, and the provider cleared your cloud data. How do you retrieve it? See, each has issues.
  - epups 3y ago
    This is not a good example. One of them is under your control, the other isn't.
    - AndroTux 3y ago
      I read many posts of people complaining about some cloud service deleting their data for „no reason“ (= user error, mostly not reading emails) every month, while I can’t even remember the last post of someone losing their data due to a fire (except OVH bursting into flames ;) ). So I think it’s a valid argument to be made. Bottom line: have a backup, and utilize cloud as well as local storage.
politelemon 3y ago
Sorry to be disparaging, was this generated content? The points made are so hand wavy, and address barely any of the topics they're headlining, and pretending there are no similar issues with local storage. This is very questionable quality, relying on just one piece of reasoning repeatedly.
9dev 3y ago
You know… I deal with complexity, redundancy, unexpected errors, hardware specs, software updates, security issues, automated exploits, and so many other things, all day. I just don’t want that at home. I’m sure it’s nice to feel in control of your stuff, but I’d rather do something with my family, read a good book or go for a walk instead of having more of the same shite I put up with all day at work.
- ryanjshaw 3y ago
  That's what I used to think. Then you read horror stories of people being lifetime banned by a Cloud provider with robot-only support. Also, do you really want all your personal documents and stuff accessible on your phone to anybody who grabs it while you walk around with it unlocked on a call? Yes you might be using some security locks on folders but are you 100% sure you didn't miss any path to anything interesting? I'm slowly working towards local storage first, partial one way syncing from phone, deliberate cloud sharing of limited stuff etc. and I'm having no regrets.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    > people being lifetime banned by a Cloud provider with robot-only support Just don't use GCP then? Every time I've worked with Amazon (from 5 person companies to 2k+ global corps) it's been extremely easy to contact an actual human with very minimal costs. Currently we have 3 AWS people on a Slack channel and we can ask questions from them at any time, they've even given suggestions on how to optimise costs and have recommended AGAINST using some AWS services because wouldn't fit our use-cases.
    - crabbone 3y ago
      > extremely easy to contact an actual human That's the opposite of my experience with Amazon, and I even worked for a company that underwent a "partnership certification" process or w/e it's called. (I.e. we had to take classes on how to use a bunch of useless AWS crap and then test out on that, just to be able to put our product on marketplace). You are either exceptionally lucky, or maybe Amazon's support is geographically locked (into your location)... or a bunch of other reasons I can think of. Anyhow. Even if what you say was true today, this is no guarantee that it will stay true tomorrow. If Amazon finds it expedient to cut down on support, they will.
ollybee 3y ago
describing the costs of long term local storage in terms of "a one-time payment for an external hard drive" shows a lack of understanding. I want to keep my important photos for decades which is beyond the life of a single disk, or even a RAID. For most people cloud storage is a rational choice.
kymki 3y ago
How is this reaching the front page? I assume everything I read is to some extent generated content, but I can generate an article on this topic in under a minute that puts forward more depth and nuance. "The cloud may be a seemingly secure space, but storing your photos and documents on your computer provides an extra layer of control and security. There is less concern for unauthorized access or data breaches because your files are physically with you. " Regardless of what the audience is here, this is just nonsense.
theshrike79 3y ago
Yeah, gonna jump on the "this seems like autogenerated blogspam" train here. The whole golivecosmos site is filled with similar articles that just link to other places with very little actual substance. Also the submitter's history seems like they've only posted stuff from the same domain...
- bithaze 3y ago
  It's a marketing blog for a service that relies on storing files locally, so that sounds about right. The HN username also matches the blog's author, so it does feel like they're posting exclusively for self-promotion.
datadrivenangel 3y ago
Security and cost tend to be less of a win locally than you might expect. I'm a huge advocate for going local and owning your stuff, but it depends on circumstances. 2 TB from dropbox is $120 per year. A 2 bay Synology is $448. Brand name 2TB harddrives are ~$50, so all in you're looking at $550 for a reasonably nice home NAS. That will probably use around ~20 watts on average, or 1 kwh per 2 days, working out to 175 kwh per year, or ~$52 if you're paying $0.30 per kwh in a high cost of energy place like California. Assuming you get ten years from the NAS box, that puts you at $1,070 for the NAS versus $1200 from dropbox... So you get into big questions of who do you trust to last longer: hardware or the current storage provider pricing. Also which one do you think will be less of your time to manage. You should still 100% have an offline backup for either one, so that's another $50 for both for a external HDD that you store in a closet.
- J_Shelby_J 3y ago
  Don’t forget to adjust for inflation.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    One of the big factors in this is how the costs go up! Will the cloud provider raise their price? Probably. Will your cost of electricity go up? Probably. Becomes a highly dimensional decision with no single obvious optimal answer, as a lot of low probability high risk events will dominate cost. If you're scared about house fires, the expected realized lifetime of the hardware goes down. If you're scared about OVH fires... likewise.
- rakoo 3y ago
  If you repatriate content locally, do you need a NAS ? I see the alternative to the cloud as being ~50, or more realistically ~100 for a usable external drive. No consumption when it's not used. Higher longevity than a NAS with the same drives. I don't think the alternative is a self-hosted cloud with requirements of being online, reachable by multiple devices, etc...
  - 3y ago
vinay_ys 3y ago
You can deal with this problem only if you are very disciplined about it, like GenX and prior generations were with their physical photo albums and paper financial records. At some regular cadence (say weekly or monthly, whatever is your balance for loss tolerance vs discipline is), you will have to organize (tag) and archive your digital assets (photos, finance/health records etc), compress and encrypt it, and then do an offline disk backup as well as upload it to a cloud storage like S3. You will have to keep your encryption keys, S3 credentials etc safe and secure. And you will have to do it serious discipline, at the cadence you decided or at least upon completion of major life milestones, to save your digital life. Then, every once in a while, at least once a year, you will have to download your entire archive, decrypt and decompress and verify that your system of tools and processes still work. If you skip any of these steps, you are likely to find that you have screwed up and lost your digital life irrevocably. Btw, just like your GenX parent/grandparents kept physical photo albums and file folders, you can keep digital equivalent in BD-Rs.
- thunfischbrot 3y ago
  Organizing and keeping a photo album seems a much lower barrier and mental load for most people than the steps in paragraph 2. Let alone paragraph 3. I am all for it, and practice something similar. I don't know anyone else though.
- lukevp 3y ago
  You should do this even if you use Dropbox or some other service provider. There’s still data loss potential. Google has lost entire Gmail accounts for example. The durability isn’t 100% after all… those extra .9’s aren’t to cover durability issues in the architecture, they’re to cover “oopsies” where the provider loses your stuff.
SuzetteClayton 3y ago
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154 points by katrinarodri 3y ago

It's definitely worth people considering getting local storage. Personally I like the combo of onboard storage, sync to cloud storage, and routine backup to external storage.

ThaRedah 3y ago

What this article fails to justify is there isn't a simple solution for users to have a "Local Cloud". A NAS or Hard Drive on a computer will be beat by the ability to have all of your photos/software on you wherever you go. There needs to be a better way for Personal devices to access personal or home networks for personal cloud solutions to become more accessible to the average person.

arghwhat 3y ago
Most popular NAS have built-in services for remote access that regular users can use.

solatic 3y ago

I don't disagree with the premise, but the author's case is deeply flawed. > Instead of paying a monthly subscription to store and access your files, a one-time payment for an external hard drive may be a more economical alternative over time. Cloud storage has much, much more redundancy than a single external hard drive, and the author discounts the value of that redundancy. > Reliable access Have fun getting grandma to cycle her drives when the drives inevitably fail! Also, have fun setting up networked access over the Internet, without resorting to a drive provider's portal (misses the point of getting off the cloud), dealing with the sorry state of static IP addresses for residential connections, helping grandma set up a domain and DNS, hoping nobody attacks your exposed network, etc. Non-starter.

justinclift 3y ago
Unfortunately, cloud storage really does have reliability issues. A recent case in point, though there are many more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-issues-warning-to-drive-users-over-sudden-deletion-of-files/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-i...
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  So in other words, Google in particular has a reliability issue (big news flash there). Unless you're nitpicking for its own sake, you presumably know there are many other cloud options out there for which you can even use your own encryption system (think boxxryptor, cryptomator, reclone, etc) for maximum privacy. It's neither expensive or hard to run simultaneous, fairly simple multiple cloud backups of one's device data with different providers that each have better customer service reputations than google.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > It's neither expensive or hard to run simultaneous, fairly simple multiple cloud backups ... Yep, that would potentially be a suitable workaround. Not sure I'd really agree with the pricing aspect not being expensive, but that's probably one of those things that depends on each users circumstances.

motles 3y ago

> a one-time payment for an external hard drive may be a more economical alternative over time. If you care about your data, you are playing with fire. Drives do not store data forever. Data must be read and rewritten occasionally to maintain it, from old media past its lifespan to new media. Good storage software, with the ability to write your data with either mirroring or striping of some sort is able to routinely scan your entire data set and detect bit rot - and rewrite sectors that contain bitrotted data to new media. You simply do not get that level of protection buying a single external hardrive alone. Most enterprise storage systems do this. Most cloud storage does this. It’s worth paying for if you have data that is valuable.

jackjeff 3y ago
I have a cron job running snapraid scrub. And smart demon with email alert. Once I had to quickly buy a HDD (next day Amazon) because it was dying. Big appeal of cloud storage is that the data won’t go up in smoke if there’s a fire. But everything else you can do if you’re patient enough.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  > Big appeal of cloud storage is that the data won’t go up in smoke if there’s a fire. Unless it’s OVH…
janwillemb 3y ago
I have used local drives for my data for decades. I have data since 1995. Nowadays I also have a remote offline backup somewhere. It seems to work for me so far.
- justinclift 3y ago
  With your setup, is that having your data on a single local drive at any time, or was it generally copied onto a few? aka "making sure you're not hosed if a drive goes bad"
  - 3y ago

roca 3y ago

Security: with local storage it's on you to make sure that your NAS or whatever is constantly up-to-date with security patches. And that's assuming your NAS provider keeps providing patches. It's on you to do all necessary monitoring for intrusion detection etc. Reliability: with local storage it's on you to keep backups, make sure those backups work, replace failing drives, don't accidentally wipe the drive, and make sure you have distribution across geographies. Good luck with that. Cost: sure, local wins here. If systems administration is your fun hobby, or you are incredibly cost-sensitive due to large scale, by all means manage storage locally. Otherwise pay professionals to do it.

jackjeff 3y ago
My experience setting up a Linux NAS server on a HP Proliant N54L is that once you’re past the initial set up cost (doing Linux sysadmin things which is very time consuming and sometimes frustrating) it’s basically done. Sure you’ll have to apply updates and reboot from time to time, but that’s almost nothing. As for security, set things up correctly (proper samba auth) and use firewalls. UFW on the box. I have a Linux router and only computers on the right Ethernet ports can touch the the NAS. Done.
yieldcrv 3y ago
for 99% of applications, especially with proper system design, this stuff is super easy now with containers and automated backups if you’re storing lots of user generated data, probably should have just scrapped the idea
mrtesthah 3y ago
Security: you don't need a NAS because your files don't need to be accessible "online" -- they're already local to your own computer. Reliability: with local storage, you have the ability to make backups without re-downloading multiple terabytes of data each time. And there's definitely no way your files could just spontaneously disappear from cloud storage, either: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-issues-warning-to-drive-users-over-sudden-deletion-of-files/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-i...
jjav 3y ago

bradley13 3y ago

Run your own cloud (specifically OwnCloud). The setup takes effort, but afterwards it's easy. I run it on a microserver at home, with port forwarding for access. All the benefits of "cloud", but you know where your data is. Do remember to make backups, but you need those for commercial services as well.

adfm 3y ago
Considering OwnCloud’s current breach following recent acquisition, you might want to check out the NextCloud fork, which seems to be actively worked on https://nextcloud.com/blog/security-statement/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/security-statement/
- bradley13 3y ago
  NextCloud is certainly also an option. That said, the security issue wasn't really the fault of OwnCloud. They use a Microsoft library, which itself included a further library. That downstream library had the security issue. Unfortunately, it happened to interact especially badly with the containerized version of OwnCloud. That kind of downstream security issue can bite any project. I don't blame OwnCloud in the slightest, and they were very quick to acknowledge the problem and post the solution.
yCloser 3y ago
In the past I've been hacked for some owncloud lldap vulnerability. Do not allow access to owncloud without a vpn!!
- bradley13 3y ago
  I don't doubt your experience, but I wonder what the issue was. The only LDAP-related issue I find (cve-2021-40537) also requires compromised admin-credentials to exploit. Of course, with compromised admin credentials, all bets are off anyway. I know it is only anecdotal, but I have been running OwnCloud for many years now, available without a VPN, with no security problems.

aaron695 3y ago

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RajT88 3y ago

My local setup - please critique as you like. For NAS, I am running Windows Server 2022 (I have a rational reason for this). It hosts many things. * IIS, for my local browser start pages, I configure with "new tab redirect" plugins * JellyFin - Basically a personal Netflix for all my ripped media * DokuWiki, thumbdrive version - for documenting house stuff * Twonky - Because it's the least-bad DLNA solution I've used so far * NGINX - provides public reverse proxy function for Jellyfin I have a backup script which backs up the most critical documents (taxes, work code, personal writings) up to S3 and Azure - pennies a month. I have all my stuff on mirrored drives locally. I have been mulling over burning MDISC discs for my larger media (personal photos, video, etc.), and doing something with that. This is partly aspirational - Once-a-year MDISC burning for stuff could be cool, but where do I store those when safety deposit boxes are becoming more and more rare?

deepmauka 3y ago
Thanks for sharing your elegant and versatile setup. A thought for the discs and safety deposit boxes, I live in a rural area and have an account with a credit union that service several labor unions. They’re rooted in the community, profitable, and I don’t see them changing anytime soon. 3”x10” boxes are $20/yr.
- salad-tycoon 3y ago
  To expound on safety deposit boxes since GP was asking for critiques. From what I’ve read they can be prone to accidents, theft, damage and are a big reasons to have them is for showing off. My understanding, which entirely comes from this NYT article, is that banks hate them. Safe Deposit Boxes Aren’t Safe, NYT, 2019: https://archive.is/NfnL6 https://archive.is/NfnL6
  - infecto 3y ago
    Agreed on Safe Deposit boxes. I would probably invest in a real fire rated safe. Real defined as a safe over $1000. Not the consumer crap that gets shoveled out.
  - 3y ago

buro9 3y ago

Syncthing is a dream. Photos sync'd from phone to laptop making pics taken instantly available to share via desktop apps. Also add in the NAS and you have three copies before you consider RAID or BTRFS or anything. Replace Dropbox with syncthing and you have multiple folders and can choose which folders go to which devices. Put a NAS at a second location and you have the ability to power up and power down the remote NAS whenever you want to make a backup and syncthing will handle the rest. Add in any one of the UIs over the files on the NAS and you replace most of the household use of things like Google files or drive. About the only thing I would like and don't have, is syncthing with an object storage backend for cloud based folders fully under your control.

withinboredom 3y ago
Garage (https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/ https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/) gets pretty close for object storage. It’s built with mixing high/low latency links and replication between multiple hosts. Unfortunately it’s not really built for end-users, but devs, so there’s no ui or anything like that.
- koito17 3y ago
  Yup. Garage is painless to set up and, unlike Minio, is designed for "small scale", self-hosted use cases where your nodes may not have identical storage and compute. One current caveat of Garage, compared to Minio, is that anonymous access is not supported. (Patches welcome!) This means you can't easily generate or share links to files in a bucket. I personally use Garage for locally testing things that run against the S3 API. It's very easy to run the single binary directly. No need for containers, but of course that is also an option, and it's very easy to containerize since you realistically only need to run a statically linked binary and mount a TOML file somewhere.
Gys 3y ago
What I like about Dropbox is all files are available (browsable) from their ios app. Do you happen to use a similar app for remote browsing?

Helmut10001 3y ago

I run a 48 TB ZFS pool (Z2; 24TB usable), and an offsite, offline 48 TB ZFS pool (mirror). My primary server is Proxmox, where I have 8 unprivileged VMs with Docker nested inside (since ZFS 2.2.0, Docker on unprivileged ZFS works now without detours). My backup is ZFS-send plus Borgmatic as a fallback, until I trust the ZFS-send approach that I just added (I usually have "migration phases" for new features that may last 1-2 years). I run Gitlab, Nextcloud, Funkwhale, InfluxDB, Graphana, Homeassistant, Mailcow-Dockerized (as an email-management and collector solution) and other things. All of this not public, but on local VLAN and VPN. The good thing with Docker + Watchtower is that I only have very little (<30 Mins) administration work per month, most of this is also testing new features. Has worked reliably for the past 5 years. For connecting households (my brother's family etc.), I use OPNsense and pfSense boxes. My server is powered by a 90 kWp solar array - I don't have a (house-) battery yet, but that will be added in 1-2 years. Current energy consumption is about 250 Watt - but I also have an old Xeon from 2013. The main cost (after initial investment) is harddrives and (of course) learning time. It pays off in other areas, too. I just got a job that I think I only got because of my report of self-hosting. The biggest convenience is that I can sync all devices and all data (e.g. Nextcloud auto-upload from phones, DAVx5 for calendar/contacts) to a single, secure and private place that is then automatically backed up. I don't know the correct word, but maybe "liberating" describes the feeling best. All of this does not require super-secret knowledge, just some motivation (and you should not be completely broke). I started in 2017 with the plan to learn Linux and get away from FAAN(M)G and I am happy I started this endeavor back then.

ssss11 3y ago
That all sounds great but what we desperately need is instructions on how to do things like this for the less technical, and easy maintenance… I think those are the limiting factors for wide spread adoption
- Helmut10001 3y ago
  I agree. We need more and better instructions and easier-to-setup tools - all of this got a big boost with docker (compose). On the other hand, we need to pair the less-technical with the power-users and help each other. I am responsible for about 8-10 people. This frees them from cloud providers and helps me to built better and more robust solutions.

JeanMarcS 3y ago

Ok. So now your house is on fire. How do you retrieve your datas from the melted local NAS ? Or a buglar come and empties it. Don't get me wrong, I'm full "move away from the cloud" in the "proprietary cloud" way. But getting some drive space on a different location is important if you care about your datas. Could be in a relative's or friend's place (so almost no per month cost) or on a cloud drive (I personnaly use the Hetzner 10€/m 5TB drive), depending on your choice of backup solution. But it's important.

wkat4242 3y ago
I have a raspberry at a family member's house with an encrypted backup on an external HDD I sync with rsync. I used hetzner before but the problem was I needed about 1.5TB and their only options in that range are 1 and 5TB. The 5TB option was a bit too wasteful.
- geek_at 3y ago
  I use the same, just I sent incremental encrypted ZFS snapshots. These are a game changer since the target can import them and verify that they work without ever needing the key
pmlnr 3y ago
Ok. So your credit card expired, and the provider cleared your cloud data. How do you retrieve it? See, each has issues.
- epups 3y ago
  This is not a good example. One of them is under your control, the other isn't.
  - AndroTux 3y ago
    I read many posts of people complaining about some cloud service deleting their data for „no reason“ (= user error, mostly not reading emails) every month, while I can’t even remember the last post of someone losing their data due to a fire (except OVH bursting into flames ;) ). So I think it’s a valid argument to be made. Bottom line: have a backup, and utilize cloud as well as local storage.

politelemon 3y ago

Sorry to be disparaging, was this generated content? The points made are so hand wavy, and address barely any of the topics they're headlining, and pretending there are no similar issues with local storage. This is very questionable quality, relying on just one piece of reasoning repeatedly.

9dev 3y ago

You know… I deal with complexity, redundancy, unexpected errors, hardware specs, software updates, security issues, automated exploits, and so many other things, all day. I just don’t want that at home. I’m sure it’s nice to feel in control of your stuff, but I’d rather do something with my family, read a good book or go for a walk instead of having more of the same shite I put up with all day at work.

ryanjshaw 3y ago
That's what I used to think. Then you read horror stories of people being lifetime banned by a Cloud provider with robot-only support. Also, do you really want all your personal documents and stuff accessible on your phone to anybody who grabs it while you walk around with it unlocked on a call? Yes you might be using some security locks on folders but are you 100% sure you didn't miss any path to anything interesting? I'm slowly working towards local storage first, partial one way syncing from phone, deliberate cloud sharing of limited stuff etc. and I'm having no regrets.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  > people being lifetime banned by a Cloud provider with robot-only support Just don't use GCP then? Every time I've worked with Amazon (from 5 person companies to 2k+ global corps) it's been extremely easy to contact an actual human with very minimal costs. Currently we have 3 AWS people on a Slack channel and we can ask questions from them at any time, they've even given suggestions on how to optimise costs and have recommended AGAINST using some AWS services because wouldn't fit our use-cases.
  - crabbone 3y ago
    > extremely easy to contact an actual human That's the opposite of my experience with Amazon, and I even worked for a company that underwent a "partnership certification" process or w/e it's called. (I.e. we had to take classes on how to use a bunch of useless AWS crap and then test out on that, just to be able to put our product on marketplace). You are either exceptionally lucky, or maybe Amazon's support is geographically locked (into your location)... or a bunch of other reasons I can think of. Anyhow. Even if what you say was true today, this is no guarantee that it will stay true tomorrow. If Amazon finds it expedient to cut down on support, they will.

ollybee 3y ago

describing the costs of long term local storage in terms of "a one-time payment for an external hard drive" shows a lack of understanding. I want to keep my important photos for decades which is beyond the life of a single disk, or even a RAID. For most people cloud storage is a rational choice.

kymki 3y ago

How is this reaching the front page? I assume everything I read is to some extent generated content, but I can generate an article on this topic in under a minute that puts forward more depth and nuance. "The cloud may be a seemingly secure space, but storing your photos and documents on your computer provides an extra layer of control and security. There is less concern for unauthorized access or data breaches because your files are physically with you. " Regardless of what the audience is here, this is just nonsense.

theshrike79 3y ago

Yeah, gonna jump on the "this seems like autogenerated blogspam" train here. The whole golivecosmos site is filled with similar articles that just link to other places with very little actual substance. Also the submitter's history seems like they've only posted stuff from the same domain...

bithaze 3y ago
It's a marketing blog for a service that relies on storing files locally, so that sounds about right. The HN username also matches the blog's author, so it does feel like they're posting exclusively for self-promotion.

datadrivenangel 3y ago

Security and cost tend to be less of a win locally than you might expect. I'm a huge advocate for going local and owning your stuff, but it depends on circumstances. 2 TB from dropbox is $120 per year. A 2 bay Synology is $448. Brand name 2TB harddrives are ~$50, so all in you're looking at $550 for a reasonably nice home NAS. That will probably use around ~20 watts on average, or 1 kwh per 2 days, working out to 175 kwh per year, or ~$52 if you're paying $0.30 per kwh in a high cost of energy place like California. Assuming you get ten years from the NAS box, that puts you at $1,070 for the NAS versus $1200 from dropbox... So you get into big questions of who do you trust to last longer: hardware or the current storage provider pricing. Also which one do you think will be less of your time to manage. You should still 100% have an offline backup for either one, so that's another $50 for both for a external HDD that you store in a closet.

J_Shelby_J 3y ago
Don’t forget to adjust for inflation.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  One of the big factors in this is how the costs go up! Will the cloud provider raise their price? Probably. Will your cost of electricity go up? Probably. Becomes a highly dimensional decision with no single obvious optimal answer, as a lot of low probability high risk events will dominate cost. If you're scared about house fires, the expected realized lifetime of the hardware goes down. If you're scared about OVH fires... likewise.
rakoo 3y ago
If you repatriate content locally, do you need a NAS ? I see the alternative to the cloud as being ~50, or more realistically ~100 for a usable external drive. No consumption when it's not used. Higher longevity than a NAS with the same drives. I don't think the alternative is a self-hosted cloud with requirements of being online, reachable by multiple devices, etc...
- 3y ago

vinay_ys 3y ago

You can deal with this problem only if you are very disciplined about it, like GenX and prior generations were with their physical photo albums and paper financial records. At some regular cadence (say weekly or monthly, whatever is your balance for loss tolerance vs discipline is), you will have to organize (tag) and archive your digital assets (photos, finance/health records etc), compress and encrypt it, and then do an offline disk backup as well as upload it to a cloud storage like S3. You will have to keep your encryption keys, S3 credentials etc safe and secure. And you will have to do it serious discipline, at the cadence you decided or at least upon completion of major life milestones, to save your digital life. Then, every once in a while, at least once a year, you will have to download your entire archive, decrypt and decompress and verify that your system of tools and processes still work. If you skip any of these steps, you are likely to find that you have screwed up and lost your digital life irrevocably. Btw, just like your GenX parent/grandparents kept physical photo albums and file folders, you can keep digital equivalent in BD-Rs.

thunfischbrot 3y ago
Organizing and keeping a photo album seems a much lower barrier and mental load for most people than the steps in paragraph 2. Let alone paragraph 3. I am all for it, and practice something similar. I don't know anyone else though.
lukevp 3y ago
You should do this even if you use Dropbox or some other service provider. There’s still data loss potential. Google has lost entire Gmail accounts for example. The durability isn’t 100% after all… those extra .9’s aren’t to cover durability issues in the architecture, they’re to cover “oopsies” where the provider loses your stuff.

SuzetteClayton 3y ago

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