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Comment by nullrouted | Hacker News Reader

You cannot offer unlimited storage when you offer a cloud storage product. Bitcasa found out the hard way and now OneDrive is taking the same lesson, people will abuse it.

I think any company has the right to change their business model and/or product offerings. The one thing I'm a bit confused about is why are they decreasing their free storage tier and taking away the camera roll bonus? To me that just seems like a really bad PR move. In a similar fashion Box did the same type of thing way back in the day and while that was their right I still won't use them to this day.

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They've actually done it before - SkyDrive (back when it was called that) used to offer 25GB. They reduced it to 15GB, but gave everyone already using it a 10GB "loyalty bonus".

I still have that 'loyalty bonus'.

I wonder if my 25GB will drop down to 5GB now?

that's how I read it. I'm in the same boat.

Many companies offer unlimited cloud storage:

Amazon: $60/year

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/unlimited

Crashplan: $60/year

https://www.code42.com/store/

BackupLizard: $36/year

http://www.backuplizard.com/

Backblaze: $50/year

https://www.backblaze.com/best-online-backup-service.html

Carbonine: $60/year

http://www.carbonite.com/en/cloud-backup/personal-solutions/...

AltDrive: $44.50/year

http://altdrive.com/pricing.html

NitroBackup: $39.95/year

http://www.nitrobackup.com/plans-and-pricing/

Those are cloud backup....not cloud storage and usually allow you to backup a single computer. It's not like you can upload 50 TB to them.

I think the unlimited storage is very appealing to the consumer. For example, Amazon has S3 priced per GB. For the average user, they do not want to sit down and calculate how much their cloud storage is going to cost them. Instead, knowing that they can just keep uploading and not worry about it is best.

But at the end of the day, there needs to be some limit as you alluded to.

The S3 price per GB is less of a problem for the people I know than the outbound bandwidth pricing.

Ah touche. That is something even I overlooked!

Woe betide anyone who uses Amazon Glacier for backup without paying close attention to the pricing.

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

Retrieval pricing...

I got bitten really badly by this a while ago when trying to migrate some servers about.

3TB of storage would cost £21/month just to have it sat in Glacier. This isn't too bad, I suppose, but when you then need retrieve it, you're looking at an additional £270.

That depends, because you can actually recover it for free over a long enough time period. It's easy if you plan your file sizes in advance based on your allowance, and don't need it in a hurry.

Your bill is based on your peak retrieval rate multiplied by the number of hours in the month.

But you can retrieve a calculable amount an hour, for free, all month, for however long it takes to get your files back. You could also pay a little bit more, and get them back much after.

You certainly wouldn't want to request all 3TB at once though.(It would be billed spread over four hours, and it'd still be thousands.)

You can request ranges of files, so even if you have massive files, you can still throttle the requests to below a given threshold if you're careful.

At that rate you might as well request more data and use snowball.

Never seen the snowball before -it's shiny looking hardware. No idea what the actual cost works out like, though. 1 petabyte per week they claim...

At the moment I'd be interested in backing up my NAS boxes, which is only about 36tb raw or 23tb usable space. It's a lot, but nowhere near snowball sizes :)

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t...

>You cannot offer unlimited storage when you offer a cloud storage product

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html

And what do they do if someone stores 75TB of stuff? "Unlimited" nearly always means "we will fire you as a customer if you use way more than anyone else".

https://help.backblaze.com/entries/57805800-What-Happens-If-...

Which makes it a mirror rather than a proper backup.

CrashPlan has unlimited backup and never deletes files. And keeps all the old versions of the files. I don't know how they stay in business, given that somebody probably uses it to backup petabytes of constantly changing data. They have pretty slow upload/download speeds though so perhaps something like Amazon Glacier is involved.

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Restoring/Retaining_A...

I was just about to say that CrashPlan is restricted to the internal drive of a computer & is therefore limited to the maximum size of hard drives (e.g. 1-2 Terabytes for laptops), but apparently CrashPlan lets you backup external drives now too:

http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Backup/Backing_Up_Exte...

Having used CrashPlan's personal offerings for many years, I recall that they have always allowed the backup of attached storage either from hard drives or network mounts.

The slow upload is also a way to limit the backup size. I currently back up >4TB on CrashPlan and it took a few months of 24/7 upload.

I was going to point to the ability to seed large backups to CrashPlan's cloud, but it doesn't look like this is an option anymore.

You can still seed to a private cloud of your own, friends and family, but not to CrashPlan's server.

That is cloud backup...not cloud storage and they limit you.

It's not abusing a service when you're using it exactly as advertised. If you have a service that says "we'll store as much data as you can throw at us" you'd be foolish to not use it as much as possible to backup every last thing. There's nothing wrong with that to constitute using the term "abuse." Microsoft could've just as easily sold Office 365 with 1 or 2 TB of space, but they wanted to put that Unlimited text on the box.

Frankly I think they should be made to honor it.

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