TheLemmingWhat's the cheapest online storage that you know of?
lustrumDepends what you want to do but Backblaze B2 is reasonably cheap. $6 per TB
It’s reasonably cheap and you pay only for what you use.
Yeah that’s the best for me. I use about 600GB.
500GB plans aren’t enough and 1TB plans are too much. Paying what you use is so good.
jelloeater85Heck yeah, it’s great. Wasabi is nice too, but keep in mind they bill differently for storage vs retrieval.
IzzyDataDepends for how long. Buying a used NAS with a single 1TB drive is probably cheaper over a 10 year period than subscribing to some cloud service for the same duration.
BlazeHey, interesting to see you back
Where did I go?
Wasn’t there something with a LW community? Anyway, it doesn’t matter so much
You mean three drives? You need data integrity, what if a drive fails? What if you have a raid 1 but when readding a new drive you have read errors? Parity is good.
Good point. Perhaps at least a 2 drive NAS then. 👍
Hetzner storage box is 3.81€ for 1TB.
frippaOver the course of a year you basically bought an HDD (but excluding backups/power)
Off site storage is off site for a reason, though.
You could say this about any service.
LUHGYou purchased a shit hard drive at that price and bad point anyway.
Eh, could be an average ish 2TB HDD
I had a hetzner box a while back but I didn’t know about these storage boxes. This is pretty great. I’ve used rsync.net for many years but it’s basically 3x the price and it’s painfully slow.
I’ve been using Backblaze. Have no complaints
I’m using iDrive. Quite cheap and if you want an S3 interface you can check their enterprise e2 tier.
JackGreenEarthIs that Apple storage? Isn’t that called iCloud?
Different product. I use IDrive as well since it has a native Synology app.
They also have a super low-end tier of 500GB for 9.95 a year, less than a dollar a month, which is nice for a not so heavy user.
Not sure about cheapest, but Wasabi is affordable considering no data transfer fees
If you want really good answers, you will need to be more specific about your requirements.
The absolute cheapest as the question is stated is to go dumpster diving for a free hard drive and host it at a friend’s house, but this is likely not what you had in mind.
- Do you need backups?
- Does it need to be encrypted at rest?
- What bandwidth do you need up and down?
- Is it okay with a monthly bandwidth cap?
- what latency is okay? Is cold storage where it takes a day or more to fetch the data okay?
Exactly. How often will you use it? Every day? Just get a hard drive. Once a year? AWS Glacier is like $1 per TB per month and it can’t burn down.
Because it’s made of ice?
Well, I intend to use the offsite storage as an everyday-use-external-harddisk, I want to encrypt it, put a filesystem on top and the mount it. The thought behind it is, the provider will take care of data integrity and backups as well. Worry free usage for me then
That’s unlikely to perform well enough to be usable at all. You’d at the very least need some sync method which just updates the blocks you wrote to, and that rules out a lot of cheap storage.
You’d be better off with either cloud storage a la Google Drive or Dropbox, either mounted from the remote location or used as storage for a sync-based backup solution. You could have it upload things instantly if it listens for save events in inotify.
Since you didn’t mention your requirements, I’ll assume integrity isn’t super important. In that case, allow me to introduce you to /dev/null as a service. It’s free and has unlimited capacity.
Now we just need to invent a way to read the Void of Nothingness to retrieve the data and bam! Infinite storage.
That’s easy, just read from /dev/urandom. The access speed is super slow, but eventually you’ll find your data
Now we just need to turn calculating the offset into a quantum problem and we’ve got the infinite storage thing solved
Idk man, I think it might have some reliability issues… I tried restoring my data and all I got back was a badly-typed copy of the complete works of Shakespeare.
Try running:
sed ‘s/blurst of times/worst of times/g’
Already exists, and it’s offered by IKEA. Here is the kit you need: 0 1
The only problem is that I don’t have the plans that shows how to assemble the parts.
This gave me a hearty chuckle. Thank you for showing me that wonderful piece of software.
This is hilarious. I love it haha
asudoxThanks for the website, it was a funny read.
I’d never expect to find an answer like this lol. Thankyou
Happy to help! Let me know if have any other technical questions :)
Youtube
operatorIf you're into SCP/FTP/Rsync/SMB check out Hetzner Storage Servers. About 3 € for 1 TB, including 10 snapshots
Another Backblaze user checking in 😁 I use their B2 service for $6/TB/mo, however they have an unlimited storage option for Windows/Mac if you’re interested in that
Maybe Google isn’t welcome around here, but I spend ~100/yr. for 2TB. $4.20/mo./TB.
I map my Windows libraries to my Google Drive and I’m done. Save it and it syncs. Plus, I use Android and Gmail, so everything fits nicely in the same ecosystem.
Windows libraries?
𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍Awesome company that makes it eau to interface worth their storage outside of their proprietary tools, resulting in wide support built in to a bunch of backup software. Have no issue with you storing encrypted blobs. But - and this is most important - they don’t harvest your data and resell or reuse it (although, always encrypt, to be sure).
Fantastic company.
Unlimited storage eh? ::cracks knuckles::
Like others are saying, it depends on your requirements.
I’m loving Storj as a cloud NAS. Basically I have a NAS with 8 TB of storage but if something goes wrong with that, I’m out of luck. What I did was copy everything to Storj then reconfigure the NAS to simply act as a local cache for it.
This is great because I can share my media with friends and family while using client-side encryption and it streams FAST rather than relying on my residential ISP with slow upload speeds.
What is NAS here?
How do you access your storage? I thought Storj was more for backend storage?
They have their own CLI tool (uplink) but it does have an S3 gateway.
Yeah it’s geared more for backend stuff but I use rclone to both sync it and to provide a WebDAV gateway (it supports others but they didn’t work great for my needs).
I’ll just say this: you get what you pay for. I used pCloud a few years ago and wasn’t able to retrieve all my data, some files got corrupted (luckily I had backups). Now I use a DIY NAS and backup to B2.
This is what I do. Truenas scale and backup to ext hard drive and B2
This is only slightly related - I lost a small number of files with DreamHost object storage, and they were charging more than S3 per GB.
So, I agree you usually get what you pay for, but also make sure the provider is all-in on the product. I think DreamHost really isn’t interested in their virtualized/cloud offerings.
Yeah of all the things to cheap out on, it doesn’t seem wise to do it with data storage unless you don’t mind losing it…
Agreed. Especially when reliable storage only costs $4-$6/tb these days. (Where I live that won’t buy you a freaking cup of coffee lol). I only back up to the cloud and pay for my important data anyway, I have terabytes of data that I don’t mind losing and therefore don’t bother backing up to the cloud.
I wish I knew how NAS and what to do in case of a failing hard drive.
Is it necessary to have it always powered on?
It’s really not complicated. Look up Truenas or Rockstor. Both are solid NAS OSs. I’ve been running Rockstor for about a year now (partly because I’m a huge fan of btrfs) and I’m pretty happy with it. Make sure to keep an offline backup on an external drive just in case you mess something up. I manually plug in a drive about once a month for that.
I think DIY is more fun anyway ;) and I’m sure the community will help with questions you can’t find answers to online. Good luck!
I do FreeNas at home. How does RockStor work out, seems like OMV.