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Comment by robbiemitchell | Hacker News Reader

It's $20/month for unlimited storage on Dropbox.

Yes, but for my friend who is a low-income earner, $20 is difficult for her, so we just went with a one-time investment going with a separate HD and using the free Dropbox tier until she outgrows the storage space.

Dropbox is remote backup and cloud storage. It solves a rather different (larger) problem from a local backup.

As others have pointed out, I was not aware there is a 3-license minimum.

Neither the pricing page nor the plan comparison page state this minimum. You have to click into the business section to actually see that.

Does anything stop you from uploading 10s or 100s of TB? I recently crossed 1TB of storage use on S3 (which costs around $20/month) and am in the process of exploring alternatives.

I've never really understood how companies can offer "unlimited" storage at low prices.

"Unlimited" space in any online service almost always means "there is a soft cap where we start threatening to shut down your service, but we won't tell you what it is ahead of time".

Actually quite an interesting point. Consider S3. They provide unlimited storage, but their software has to be able to keep up with the insane growth of data, albeit the hardware storage demand as well.

S3's cost to the consumer scales with the amount stored. That's different from Amazon, Dropbox, or Google, who offer enterprise-facing non-developer storage options at a flat rate for "unlimited".

They can do this because these enterprise-facing products offer fewer performance guarantees relative to their developer-facing products. But, ultimately, "unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited, in literally all of these products.

I would think enterprise offering would have a stricter SLA than developer-facing product. The only thing between Dropbox and Amazon is that there is no independent enterprise offering for S3, except Amazon pays a penalty for violating said SLA.

You still pay per TB. So yes, if you pay, you can have "unlimited" storage.

Overage? Like they can offer 30 people a terabyte of storage for every 10TB available because very few people will use their full quota.

Simple bandwidth would stop most people from uploading that much. It would take a long time at typical ISP speeds.

Is this a hidden plan? The cheapest unlimited plan I see right now on their website is 54€/month, which is the advanced business plan for 3 users. Even if I take the annual plan and divide the price by 12 it's 45€/month. Also these prices don't include VAT, while the personal plans do. Perhaps you were unaware that the business plans can't be bought for a single user?

I stand corrected, I was not aware there is a 3-license minimum.

Neither the pricing page nor the plan comparison page make this clear. You have to click into the business section to actually see that. Super annoying.

AFAICT only if you buy 3 licenses minimum.

That's a bummer. I have a sizeable chunk of raw image files I'd love to back up somewhere without having to have it on my machine, Dropbox would be a good fit if it wasn't for the 1TB limit on individuals. Ended up uploading directly to S3 and archiving to Glacier.

Amazon Prime Photos allows unlimited photo storage (RAW included) with any $100/yr subscription to Amazon Prime. If you're already paying this for the other benefits, then it is free.

At the risk of "ruining" it for some users, Amazon doesn't appear to validate nor re-compress uploaded images. I uploaded some bits from /dev/random as a .png, and it counted towards photo storage, and I got the same bits back re-downloading the test file. So you don't even have to resort to stuffing metadata or steganography.

For the record, I don't exploit this loophole and only tested to satisfy my curiosity. At $60/yr. it's already very cheap for unlimited -- it's my tertiary backup so I'll accept the risk that "unlimited" is qualified -- generic file storage.

Correct, didn't realize that, thanks for pointing out.

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