I finally got the dreaded over storage warning from google today. What is everyone moving to these days? People were moving to dropbox advance but i heard its not really unlimited anymore. I have 30TB of data that can’t be reproduced (family videos and photos). Any recommendations? I prefer not to spend $100+ a month on backups but if i have to do it then i’ll do it.
Build a NAS. If you’ve already got one, build a second one as backup. It’s cheaper in the long run than most cloud storage solutions. Especially when you factor in the time it would take for a complete restore.
The main issue with a NAS for this use case is the “what if my house burns down” scenario. Zero/ low effort off site backups are really important for treasured memories.
I’m currently working on this problem. My plan is to use a Phoenix DataCare 2001 media firesafe to rotate a copy of my full backup. See my post for the discussion.
30 TB this makes much more sense to build a NAS vs use the cloud, but a very important point: the second NAS should not be in the same location (long term) as the first.
Also I believe that backblaze can do NAS backups now relatively affordably.
Last I looked it was .005 GB/Month. That adds up quickly when you have 30TB.
That’s a very fair point, they also offer the setup where you can rent a hard drive and ship the initial “upload” (with 30TB that can still be an issue).
Edit: just realized you’re not talking about the cost of data transfer but monthly storage cost. I’ll look again but last I checked the server/NAS bulk unlimited tier was a set cost up to x TB
When I looked last time I didn’t see anything about different pricing on NAS backup. But I also didn’t look very hard.
Last I looked it was .005 GB/Month. That adds up quickly when you have 30TB.
Nope. so just looked and you were bang on. So for OP, $150+ including some bulk download if needed.
I use AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive. 30 TB would cost you about $27 per month.
How much is it to retrieve the data if needed?
There’s Jottacloud with unlimited storage for 10 EUR/month, but they gradually slow down after first 5 TB. 30 TB might be a bit too much. There’s Hetzner with their dedicated 4×10TB machines for ~52 EUR, you could do RAID5 and have somewhat redundant 30 TB, at the cost of self-managing a dedicated machine. There are several providers doing regular S3 (which you can take advantage of with tools like rclone) with decent redundancy for 4-5 USD/TB + egress. For high-value data you should be probably spending more than 100 USD/month for 30TB in the cloud, or invest in actual hardware. Do you need hot access to this dataset, or is a cold storage archive enough?
Cold storage is enough. Most of the data are pictures and videos that i don’t access regularly. I was looking at Hetzner but it looks like most of the servers are in the EU. I’m based out of the US so i’m guessing file transfer would be slow. I also don’t have experience with Hetzner but if they are reputable then i don’t have an issue with going down that route.
Yep, it’s EU. File transfer shouldn’t be bad if your files are large, though it’s best if you tested it first—it might depend on your ISP’s peering and your prefered transfer protocols/tooling. Whether it’s reputable for your purpose, you probably have to do your own research. Also, remember that the offer I mentioned would only be equivalent in durability to a single-box RAID5 for your purposes, so not exactly equivalent to Google’s.
I think the days of unlimited backups are coming to a close. I don’t know of any truly unlimited storage anymore.
At that size do you have and friends or family you could just use as an off site backup? It would be a high upfront cost for buying the drives and hardware but should be much cheaper overall. If that is something your looking for.
Or even a safety deposit box for an offline/offsite backup.
I currently have a NAS at home and another one at my parent’s house a few towns over. I don’t know anyone out of state that’s willing to host a NAS for me. I prefer to have my data in the cloud since me and my parents don’t live that far from me and the data is irreplaceable.
Ahh that makes sense. In that case I think AWS Glacier might be your cheapest option. (At least until you need to restore).
Edit. That said a safety deposit box might still be an option if you vacation or visit a far away place somewhat regularly. Just update it every year or so. Keep changes waiting to be updated in a cloud backup. This way your not backing up and paying for 30 TB in the cloud but maybe 1-3TB of recent data that hasn’t been backup to the safety deposit box. That cloud backup size would get reset once you successfully update the safety deposit backups.
I am not sure what the best option is software wise for actually accomplishing this world be. But something to think about.
Agreed with this one really. “3 copies of your data, in 2 physical locations, equals 1 backup” has been my thing for a long time.
I used to just keep my third copy one a drive in my desk at the office, but I’ve been full remote for years now.
Thanks for the reminder, I need to see if I can convince my folks to host a NAS in their hobby room or something.
Build A NAS, and AWS Glacier for the very important data. I think AWS is less expensive than BackBlaze
AWS Glacier will be cheaper until you need to restore the data. On AWS, you’ll pay $0.09/GB for bandwidth + Glacier retrieval fees. Over time, AWS might be cheaper but you’ll be looking at a $3000+ bill to restore 30 TB.
That’s a good point. Which provider should I go for, for about 15TB?
The cheapest option I’ve found is Hetzner storage boxes, they don’t even charge for bandwidth. Backblaze and Wasabi are good options too, but Backblaze charges for outbound bandwidth and Wasabi is increasing their prices.
That’s a fantastic find. If someone could limit the ultra important media/assets to 1TB, this is fairly affordable. And no transfer fees too!
I use Backblaze B2 and M-Discs for the really important stuff. For replaceable media, I use HDDs, one local and one remote.
if you backup locally so not over a network share you could use Backblazes Personal Backup ( https://hub.docker.com/r/tessypowder/backblaze-personal-wine ) it’s like 8$ for unlimited backup
but they have some kind of tracking for blocking cifs/smb shares but you can circumvent that using dolany my current setup as my data is mainly just a Hetzner 20tb storage box I have a second windows VPS that mounts that CIFS storage using dokany und Just run backblaze Personal backup there was a real hassle to set up an the backup takes for ever but yeah it works
What you also might consider is re-encoding your stuff to use less space. Photos can be stored as lower quality jpgs and home movies can be reencoded as hevc. The latter can even be done automatically using something like tdarr.
Local NAS with one share for Borg and proxmox image backups. That is then sync’d to S3 glacier. Borg is used for compressed, deduped archives of all important data. I do 3 daily, 4 weekly, 3 monthly.
Borg to rsync.net works too. Or just use rsync.net directly and they will snapshot for you. Borg accounts are cheaper though.
Scaleway Glacier costs ~€0.002/GB/month, so ~€60 / 30TB
idrive e2 costs $50 / 30TB / month and it’s hot storage
