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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

The choice of the word "only" is an interesting one. It may be better than Drive or Dropbox, but from my perspective that comes out to $120/yr, which is still double the price of a Crashplan or Backblaze yearly subscription, both of which are unlimited.

I don't have a Mac, so many someone can explain whether the iCloud integration into MacOS and iOS is worth the price premium. For me, it wouldn't be enough, as I have way more than 2TB of data.

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Backblaze and Crashplan aren't really comparable to iCloud, in the same way that they shouldn't be compared to Dropbox. They're both backup services, neither position themselves as online file storage in quite the same way.

iCloud storage includes file storage, iOS backups, mail (if you're using an iCloud email address), and photos. It doesn't have the same features as Dropbox or Box, but I prefer it simply because it works fine for me. I'm on a 200GB plan and plan to upgrade once the family sharing plans are live.

Personally, $120/year for 2TB of online storage for a service I regularly use is actually great. But I'm still disappointed that iCloud only comes with 5GB of free storage and the pricing options of lower tiers hasn't really changed.

> They're both backup services, neither position themselves as online file storage in quite the same way.

Indeed, CrashPlan has a policy of removing backups if the machine hasn't connected in 6 months [1]. Those services aren't intended for long term document storage with no local copy, just for disaster recovery.

[1] https://support.crashplan.com/Subscriptions/Backup_Retention...

I believe that was deliberate. Many people only care about iCloud to backup their iOS devices, and 5GB is really only enough space to backup a single device because the backup sizes inflate over time due to some mechanism I've been unable to pin down even after extensive effort.

The alternate is to setup multiple Apple IDs and link them via family sharing to get the same iTunes purchases, but that's a huge pain in the butt and (IMO) not worth the effort to save $1/month on the 50GB iCloud plan.

Really? I only care about iCloud for photos and data syncing across devices.

You plug-in to a computer to backup your phone? That is pretty rare these days!

My music is stored in the cloud, by photos are in the cloud, my e-mail is held elsewhere, I can redownload any apps. What am I bcking up for again?

>You plug-in to a computer to backup your phone? That is pretty rare these days!

Some of us don't want to have our data available to others.

> because the backup sizes inflate over time due to some mechanism

Was that not fixed in iOS 10? They completely reimplemented how backups work in that release.

Also Amazon Cloud Drive is $60/year, and is unlimited. They also have an unlimited plan for photos for $12/year.

ACD just royally fucked those of us that use rclone with it. I've now just bought a bunch of hard drives and a recent model optiplex to keep at a family member's house for my offsite backup. Not worth the "convenience" of a managed service when they pull this shit, especially with how expensive it really is compared with owning the equipment and keeping it at a friend/family's house.

Apparently rclone violated amazon's TOS by having an API key in the source code instead of authing with a central server? The cynic in me says "whelp, that's what we get for actually utilizing an 'unlimited' service".

How is their local internet connection going to handle that? Do you have the same kind of professional reliability like data centers do?

You should be doing a local NAS type thing like you do with your optiplex at home and a cloud service to diversify your backup types.

I think the 99.99% uptime that most residential internet has will suffice for my incremental backups that I run daily from all of my machines. ACD with rclone had relatively mediocre throughput and slow stat-ing compared to a basic rsync, so if anything I'm in better shape than before for performance.

I already have internal, networked, and cold backups. I just needed one offsite. Doesn't matter to me whether it's a 15 minute drive away, or across the country. If my entire city gets nuked I have bigger things to worry about.

Does icloud work with rclone?

I don't think so.

ACD involves dumping all your data into one folder. iCloud has better integration with OSX.

Didn't they stopped offering the $12/yr unlimited photos plan? I was on that plan and last year I was migrated off to the 60usd/yr unlimited everything plan.

The iCloud Drive integration on the Mac is pretty good. It's as good as Dropbox. The iOS integration is good too but hampered by the limited concept of files on iOS. Maybe with the Files app on iOS 11 this will change (although that app supports third party cloud drive services).

Having worked on an iCloud using iOS app... it's hugely buggy. I've yet to see as problematic API as iCloud is on iOS 10. Files failing to sync, a lot of users don't even get the app folder, randomly files won't sync (forever) and more. All of that is wrapped into opaque service, which doesn't really tell you what it's doing and what went wrong.

Might be they're all messy like that... but iCloud didn't really seem like a reliable service and it wasn't close to reliability of Dropbox :/

You can also use offline files on Sierra, where files are stored in iCloud and only downloaded when needed to save disk space. It's pretty cool technology, similar to what MS did with Skydrive (nee Onedrive) in Windows 8.

How do I backup my iPhone automatically every night to crash plan or Backblaze?

Can't? Ok, Apple sucks. Now that that's out of the way, given the reality we have, it's worth paying Apple for the storage.

I "only" get free unlimited full-size photo and video storage with my Pixel.

From my perspective that's not worth the trade-off of well... Google. I don't trust them with my data, information, or much at all really.

Though the Pixel is a nice phone.

For me, I pay $1 a month for automatic iPhone/photo backups. $12 a year is trivial and beats syncing up my phone every once in a while and creating two backups for it.

I, however, do use my own HDDs for backing up my computers.

If you go with gsuite you can have unlimited drive for 10/month. It says you need five users but it's not currently enforced. I'm rocking almost 8tb and there's no sign of a cap.

The major feature that makes me stay with iCloud is that it transparently moves rarely-used files to the cloud and frees up the space locally.

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