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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

It should be pointed out that this "security flaw" is the only way these cloud file storage platforms are cost effective. Since it allows the same anonymous blob stored by several dozen users to only take up one unit of space instead of one unit per user.

This is particularly space saving if a particular file type was chunked cleverly so that static parts of the file's structure were stored away from dynamic parts (Microsoft's Office XML formats for example could definitely be split this way).

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I don't believe that. Apple charges $10/mo for 1TB of data. That's $120/yr. You can get 1TB drives commercially for under $50 these days, you'd need a bit more than 1 drive per user for reliability & sharding, but still. Not de-duplicating the data would clearly be profitable anyway.

Hetzner charges less than half of that for their storage solution, and that's without de-duplication[1].

Does decreasing the security of their users & not offering end-to-end encryption save them even more money? Sure, but I don't see how it couldn't be profitable without it, seeing as you can easily buy non-de-duplicated cloud storage for way less from other providers.

1. https://www.hetzner.com/storage-box?country=us

Just look at the pricing for Amazon S3. It cost 20-30$/month * TB. This makes Apples 10$ a month for 1TB looks like a fairly good deal.

Don't forget that the price includes VAT and other taxes. General infrastructure costs, including traffic. Redundancy. Backups. I don't think they're turning much of a profit, but offer it because it makes their platform more attractive.

I'm sure Apple makes plenty of money from users that don't fill up their space to pay for the ones that do.

I have a 2TB family plan that I'm paying $10/mo for, a total of 135GB is used. Most of that usage is from iCloud Photo Library, and while I could use the 200GB plan I'd rather just pay the extra to have effectively unlimited space and not worry about needing to upgrade the plan, especially as I record video in 4K by default now.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who does this, $10/mo is probably nothing to the vast majority of people on HN compared to the hassle of worrying about whether we have enough storage or not.

iOS is pretty good about nudging you to the next tier as you approach filling your current one, IIRC. When I recently had to jump from 200GB plan to 2TB it was one tap on a notification to move to next tier for my whole family, so even for those of us who can easily afford it's arguably not that sensible a strategy to jump straight to 2TB, unless one's goal is to subsidize Apple as much as you can.

HEVC/H.265 introduced in iOS 11 largely makes shooting 4K on an iOS device cost _roughly_ the same in storage terms as 1080p/H.264 did, so recording in 4K doesn't really move the storage needle here like it used to either, assuming of course you have an iPhone 7 or newer.

Wow, MS Office 365 costs like $100/y for 5 users, each getting 1TB of OneDrive. And also, well, Office.

OneDrive also doesn't integrate well with my Apple devices, so there's that.

I do also pay for Office 365 though, $100/yr is significantly cheaper than purchasing Office for every computer in my house.

Apple includes their own office suite for free with all macs so if you don’t need 100% office compatibility why give MS more money? I haven’t had or used office in some years now and don’t miss it a bit.

I read this comment and was confused because it is exactly what I would have written and thought I had a moment of amnesia where I forgot that I posted a response...

Same boat 100%... Family sharing, 2TB plan, have my wife and mother in the family. Combined we use less than 200GB, but I am happy to pay for more storage rather than deal with tech support calls from them two when we go over 200GB and they get error messages popping up. :P

Apple probably pays less than $20-30/m per TB though, what with being kinda a large customer.

Absolutely. I was just pointing out that the price is in the better end of the scale, especially to end consumers only buying a relatively small amount of storage.

Hetzner, OVH, Online.net offer between 8$ and 10$/month per terabyte, duplicated and backed up, with availability guarantee.

Apple’s $10 is absolutely not a good deal.

It is from the standpoint of the average user that doesn't want to hassle with figuring out what backup provider to use, figure out what software they need to install, or wants to share the data automatically between multiple devices natively.

As the most popular comment here said when Dropbox was announced, "1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

Personally, I'm using seafile on a server, it's cheaper than iCloud or Dropbox, with more storage, and more custom functionality. Many NAS nowadays support Nextcloud out of the box.

Yes, you are obviously not their target market. Most people don't know what a NAS is, or what FTP is. With iCloud they toggle a switch and it Happens Like Magic.

The average person can figure out a car, can figure out how to vote in complicated voting systems, and can figure out much more.

You don’t have to dumb down things unnecessarily. If a person can buy a smart home device, plug it in and configure it, or an Apple TV, or a computer, then they can also get one of the simpler NAS, and sync with that.

Except your backup is now on-site, has no redundancy and has poor accessibility outside the home network.

Geographical redundancy and low-latency data transport are nontrivial factors in pricing cloud storage.

I worked out the math a while ago and it will take over 10 years for a home-built NAS to be more cost-effective than iCloud, and that's only if there are no hardware or disk failures, and doesn't include the additional hassle of being out of Apple's model when it comes to auto-backups and storage.

It depends on what you value. If you value keeping your data at home, and accept the trade off of higher cost and the need to maintain it yourself and use some sort of sync mechanism that isn't built into the OS, then you do that.

It was a naive and ridiculous comment then, and it's neither more informed nor less ridiculous now.

(Which is kind of a shame because a truly bulletproof, user-friendly NAS might be an interesting product. Who is going to be the Apple to Synology's Microsoft?)

So if you go somewhere else, you can get a worse experience that is not build into the OS, and save 2$/TB.

It's only a worse experience if you don't value the lack of de-duplication and the increase in privacy that gives you. Which is fine either way.

So same price and doesn’t integrate with Apple devices?

Keep in mind that most people don't actually store the full 1TB of data.

I find this hard to believe. I get that it reduces space used _in thoery_, but do you have any data on the % of uploads that are duplicated across clients?

It would have to be very, very large to justify the claim that it turns a previously non-cost-effective service into a cost-effective one, especially as prices have been dropping for some time and would hypothetically have simply not dropped as fast if this was the case.

Pretty much everybody keeps a copy of "Bringing Sexy Back" on iCloud.

It's not the "only" way. Another way:

* Offer to charge less usage if a duplicate block is detected, but allow users to pay full price for privately-salted storage. This is similar in principle to how Data Saver works on your mobile device (opt-in to allow a man-in-the-middle to compress or downsample your data)

I thought they same reading this thread, but there's two huge problems with that:

a) Once you know the chunk size, you can determine based on pricing whether another customer has that data, which can have huge privacy implications.

E.g. let's say we both work at the same company and get the same salary statement PDF aside from the dollar number & your name (which I know).

I can simply brute-force craft a file that changes that number around and upload it to iCloud, when I stop paying for storage I know I've cracked what's on your drive.

In any case, I'd be surprised if Apple's not already leaking this information due to caching in a way that could be revealed via timing attacks.

b) It'll lead to hugely erratic pricing for consumers. E.g. let's say you download 100TB of movies from BitTorrent, now you pay almost nothing for it, but if everyone else deletes their copies pricing for you will go up.

Apple could mitigate that by never raising the price on a given chunk, but that just leaves them paying for it, and it's easily abused. Open two accounts, upload the same data, then delete it from one account, pay 1/2 for storage.

That’s a great solution, but at what point is it easier to just store your data yourself? If someone worried about their provider knowing some user has the same file as another user, that person shouldn’t really be trusting Google or Apple with anything.

Sounds like a great side-channel attack vector for law enforcement.

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