TheLemmingWhat's the cheapest online storage that you know of?
bus_factorIf 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.