I’m looking for a diskspace of possibly 1TB online
Edit: my idea is to use it like as an external harddisk for everyday stuff. Encrypt the disk, put my filesystem on it, mount it as external drive kinda. Never worry about backups or lost data etc, as the provider would take care of it
Since you didn’t mention your requirements, I’ll assume data 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
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'
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This gave me a hearty chuckle. Thank you for showing me that wonderful piece of software.
This is hilarious. I love it haha
Thanks 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 :)
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Is this an ARG?
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And then send us the links. Sharing is caring :)
That’s pretty high risk, though, since the admins could notice at any time.
Depends 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.
Hey, 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. 👍
Depends 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.
Heck yeah, it’s great. Wasabi is nice too, but keep in mind they bill differently for storage vs retrieval.
Hetzner storage box is 3.81€/month for 1TB.
Over 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.
You 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.
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.
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.
I’ve been using Backblaze. Have no complaints
On AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive 1TB will cost you $1/month. I use it as one of my off-site backup solutions.
Careful recommending glacier. It is shockingly, crazy expensive to retrieve data.
How much will it cost to retrieve that backup though?
Around $120/TB from memory when I looked into it.
That’s too much for regular stuff, but if you’re using it to store your family photos and videos off-site in case of a fire etc, you’d pay it. Hmmm… I wonder whether you could get insurance to cover it?
I use it exactly for that. It’s a secondary, long term backup which I plan to hopefully never retrieve. It’s basically write-only for me and I hope it will remain that way. (Because if it’s not, I lost my on-site backup AND my primary cloud backup as well. So I’m probably very fucked.)
Especially if you forget to tar it.
Backblaze.
9/month for unlimited storage.
I’m at 4tb stored.
It’s hard (and against ToS) to access B2C Backblaze with any S3/Swift API, though. So it depends a bit on your use-case.
(preparing for inevitable downvotes) depending on how much storage you need and the flexibility you have in how you use it, Office365 includes 1TB of OneDrive storage for 6 users for somewhere around $100/yr. I use it for storing encrypted video files from my NVR and it works for my use case, but ymmv.
Yet another B2 user here, I only backup things I can’t afford to lose so my monthly spend isn’t particularly high. I think the most I’ve ever paid for was around 1.5TB. One big draw for B2 is their upcoming egress policy change tomorrow: up to 3x the data stored with them is free to transfer out every day. Egress absolutely wrecks people’s storage budgets a lot of the time, restoration costs can be absurd when you need to recover data.
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.
Awesome 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.
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 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.
This is what I do. Truenas scale and backup to ext hard drive and B2
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.
Pretty similar. Not sure what OMV uses as a FS but Rockstor natively uses btrfs (a FS I used for years and trust) so it was a no brainer for me. Everything else works as expected, nfs, smb, snapshots, backups, etc. The only add on I decided to use on top of Rockstor itself is for Duplicati for B2 backups. I hear a lot of good things about FreeNas too.
Thank you! I hope to be able to setup my first NAS soon.
OVH is quite cheap (£0.0024/GB-month)
Does anyone use Proton for storage?
I’ve been contemplating hopping onto their offerings once Proton pass has added some more features.
I tried but for me the upload was very slow and not very practical.
They only have a windows app for now, so to back up my NAS the only solution I found was to create a windows VM, a virtual disk pointed at my data on the NAS and running the VM regularly to back up the data.
I gave up after few weeks and went to backblaze.
I have Proton for VPN and it came with 500gb of cloud storage with my plan. Pretty decent.
I think it could be a good option in the future, but it’s pretty under baked right now.