Ask HN: What's your cloud storage option? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your cloud storage option?

20 pointsmalmsteen21 comments

Hi guys, I'm looking for the best "long-term safe, large (100gb+ but I think 1To is better) and cheap", "easy to use" cloud option which I can also trust. Right now I saw these interesting offers:

dropbox:

- 1To: 99 euros/an

drive:

- 100go : 20 euros/an

- 1To : 100 euros/an

pcloud:

- 500 Go : €47.88 /YEAR

- 2 To : 95.88 /YEAR

- 500 Go : 125 euro / lifetime

- 2 To : 250 / lifetime

Zoolz:

- 2To : 49 dollars / Lifetime (expiring offer in 5 days)

Mega:

- FREE $0.00 50 GB

- LITE €4.99/month - €49.99/year 200 GB

- PRO I €9.99/month - €99.99/year 500 GB

- PRO II €19.99/month - €199.99/year 2 TB

Amazon:

- 100 Gb: 12 per year

- 1Tb: 60 per year

Which do/would you use and why ? I'm tempted to go with the giants "google/amazon/dropbox" for trust issues rather than the small "zoolz/pcloud" but the small options seems really interesting.

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Dropbox fares quite well in terms of reliability, data safety and security. In general I'd say they're trustworthy.

There's one trust issue I have with Dropbox though, which goes by the name of Condoleezza Rice. Since 2014 she's been serving on the Dropbox board of directors.

While Dropbox probably approached her because she undoubtedly is a very talented woman and not because of her political background the agenda implemented by the administration she was part of, particular the surveillance measure, leaves a sour aftertaste.

As a company for which protection of user privacy rights should have paramount importance how do you justify hiring someone who obviously couldn't care less about these rights?

Any company that grows to that size has to get in bed with the government to various degrees depending on their industry. If you don't think Dropbox (and Amazon, and Google, and Twitter, and Facebook, and everyone) isn't in cahoots then you're just naive. Individual rights matter little, all files on all these providers are constantly scanned, you have no expectation of privacy at all.

Perhaps discharging her (or not hiring her in the first place) wouldn't change all that much in the grand scheme of things. Maybe, opposing a well-known proponent of a shady agenda in such a position is just a feel-good measure, a drop in the ocean that ultimately doesn't change anything.

However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be doing something on principle because ethically it's the right thing to do. Obviously, I failed to do so myself in that case because I still have a Dropbox account. After all, one specific name on the board perhaps really isn't all that important for users to switch to another service that might not offer the same benefits as Dropbox.

Still, it's a slippery slope. I think both shareholders and customers have to hold companies accountable for their behaviour.

I use a bunch of providers for different use cases:

My photos are all stored in iCloud because of the great integration between all my Apple devices. I have 2TB free from an old job but will have to switch to the 50gb for $0.99/month when that runs out. Also, I store my third-party password manager keychain in iCloud (I personally believe it has the best security).

The files I actively work on or have worked on semi-recently (school stuff, personal programming projects) are all in my Dropbox because I often need the files actually stored on my computer but also easily accessibly online from somewhere else. I only have 2.2 gigs of space, but it's fine because I'm usually storing plain text documents.

I use Google Drive for backups and any large files I don't need stored on my computer because I get unlimited space through university. This is usually an "upload and forget" type thing where I almost never go back and access the files, but still want them saved somewhere.

I use Youtube for saving video (I have a lot of drone footage). I upload hundreds of gigs of video to a private playlist. I don't need the original full quality videos, and would rather have ease of access from anywhere, so this works well.

Seconding YouTube -- better than losing video.

I used Backblaze B2 for cloud storage backups for a commercial blog I run IT for.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/transparency-in-cloud-storage...

I use free accounts on Dropbox and Google Drive and paid top tier iCloud storage (2TB) for personal items mostly because of ease of use of iCloud for photos on every device. Photos also backed up (compressed) for free to Google Photos so there isn't a single point of failure for all my family's photos.

I am also in the process of switching to B2. I had previously used Dropbox but really don't like the direction they are taking with the Google Docs clone, and showing me a bunch of thumbnails from my photos. I just want a simple, affordable storage service.

FreeNas has recently added a "cloud sync" feature. So I have my NAS just automatically syncing to B2. It has been easy and transparent thus far.

+1 on b2.

- The APIs are good

- There’s good Python (2 and 3) clients on pip for quick scripting

- It integrates with many backup frontends

- Significantly cheaper than S3, while basically being the same thing

- Privately held, based in SF, no VC money (and the related incentives)

What about home-brewn? Buy a 8TB hard disk for ~200EUR (source: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hde7s), a cheap computer like an Intel NUC, Raspberry PI or Mini-ITX based one (another 200EUR) and you have a reasonable online system which you can run at home. Then you can still order a long-term backup service (such as Amazon glacier -- or just encode your data as photos and store them for free at Google photos) with the big advantage that you can encrypt your data before uploading them there.

Or better yet buy a bunch of cheaper 2TB hard drives configure them as RAID with redundancy. Or you could use ZFS for extra fun.

If you're going to host this at home you'll probably want/need a firewall, I hear OpenBSD is great in that area.

Valid points, but they raise the initial hurdle. I run a dead simple and cheap (<200EUR) NAS at home for 5 years, just connected to the internet with DynDNS and masqueraded tcp ports http and ssh from my local internet uplink. I made regular backups to a USB hard drive. It was cheap, fast at home and usable from remote. Using only 20W, it was also reasonable cheap, roughly 40 EUR/year of energy costs, so over 5 years the system costed 6 EUR/month. For this I did not only get lot's of storage but also a reasonable computer to host arbitrary services on.

Today, you would probably classify this as indiweb or decentralized. I would just call it DiyO and always prefer it against some subscription.

The fastest transfer rates I could get were all with Dropbox (specially upload, as I have fiber at home and I expect a decent paying service to be prepared for customers). I decided to cancel my iCloud subscription because it was terribly slow for my godzillions of small files. I still pay for some Amazon Glacier storage too, for real long-term backups of memories and personal archives (haven't touched them in the last 5 years). If only Dropbox Smart Sync was cheaper I would pay for it so I don't have to sync all my stuff everywhere or selectively check out some folders only.

Google Drive is probably perfect for you use case.

I know you asked about cloud storage. But the rise of Vloggers and Youtube creators and their 4K video requirements is driving a lot of innovation in hard drives. That $100 could also get you something like this sweet rugged portable 1TB SSD unit. Perfect companion for drone cinematography in the great outdoors ;)

https://www.lacie.com/professional/rugged/

I use Backblaze B2 right now for offsite backups, I've previously used S3. I'd like to use Rsync.net but I can't afford it. I'm using restic to perform the backups.

Google drive has some terrible integrations to 3rd party apps, making it extremely messy to manage alot of folders at times (folder endpoints are in the root folder, but dropbox uses /apps folder to make things clean). You don't see 3rd party integrations to google drive as often as dropbox because its API is subpar.

Google drive also can get someone confusing with how it integrates with things like google spreadsheets when you want to keep non-google things seperated

Dropbox has the fastest sync rates by far, and the largest number of integrations. You also have useful features like selective sync as well

Icloud has some subpar sync rates from when I use it. Personally, I do IT for family members who own apple products and I can definitely tell you I have spent at least 3 hours on tech support with a apple lvl3 tech just to resolve some basic issues. Dropbox never had that problem.

Amazon, I have not tried it. Dropbox used to use a lot of AmazonS3 until it migrated to its own storage solutions last year? so you can't necessarily go wrong with them. However again, 3rd party integrations is not there

Mega while its doesn't offer a lot of 3rd party integrations, and I can't attest to any of its quality

I used to be in the same boat as you comparing prices to GB of storage, but this is a highly inaccurate way of benchmarking cloud solutions.

Your benchmark needs to consist of

- Cost vs. Storage Size

- Folder complexity VS. sync/index times

- File size VS sync/index times

- Number of 3rd party integration

- Privacy concerns

- Other features (selective syncing, revision control for 1 year, etc)

At the end of the day I use dropbox since $99/year is not a whole lot anyways. I'd rather pay more for a better solution.

I have a few personal files encrypted using boxcryptor that I run alongside with dropbox

I have a Microsoft Office 365 subscription, which comes with a free (well, no additional cost) 1TB of OneDrive storage. I plan to use something like duplicity to encrypt and backup my files on that.

I don't expect this to be widely used option by other commenters here :-)

Edit: another way to look at it is that the subscription price (£80 per year in the UK) is fairly reasonable fot 1TB of cloud storage but you also get MS Office for free. Again, this won't be very convincing to most on HN, but to me it's an unbeatable deal.

I use Google Coldline for irreplaceable archive storage. Pricepoint is close to Glacier without the complexity of the business/cost model.

I use Dropbox for everyday, but I’m probably going to drop it becuase of the premium pricepoint and less than premium features. Services like OneDrive and Google Drive suck less than they once did and offer useful features like search.

Google Drive wins it for me.

I have a lot of data, and I moved most of it to sia.tech just recently. Not the easiest software to use, but saves me tons of money.

OneDrive:

  - 1TB

  - Comes with Office Suite

  - 60 EUR/year

I use Dropbox for sync and main storage and Crashplan for proper backups.

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