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Comment by fro0116 | Hacker News Reader

I currently have way to much data lying around for any metered cloud storage to be economical, so I'm currently subscribing to both Backblaze and Crashplan for their unlimited storage backup plans.

Crashplan killed off their consumer plan a while ago, so I ended up moving to their business plan at double the price. In my case even at that price it was still worth it considering the amount of storage I'm using.

Anyone aware of other services offering unlimited storage for a single user? I know Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive all offer unlimited storage in their business plans, but they all require a certain number of users before the unlimited storage kicks in.

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Crashplan ending their consumer product was such a shame. As far as I know it was the only consumer product supporting Linux. I am currently on their discounted business plan, but I still have no idea what to do after that discount runs out.

Your question - about data and transit volumes, and costs - would be answerable if you provided some actual numbers.

I'm not the poster, but I have local and remote backups of photographs.

When I shoot a model I will take 400-600 images in an hour, each about 25Mb in size. The shoot I had last weekend resulted in approximately 18Gb of RAW files, and output JPG files.

In total I have just under 3Tb of RAW, JPG, and other media files. (Sometimes I film shoots, or do some video-work at the same time.)

That kind of volume is not huge, but still painful to upload remotely. Its also at the cusp of the kind of data you can backup to a cheap SAN-box locally. I currently have two toy NAS devices each with 2x4Tb drives. If I want to bump my local capacity to 8Tb, or similar, it'll get quite expensive.

Okay, so if this is a professional gig, then off site backups are a must, and raid on site is also. But for a pro photographer I'd have expected disk costs to be a necessary expense. In Australia we have 10TB disks for AUD 450. Double up for redundancy and add on chassis, this isn't trivial $s, but equally it's presumably 'worth it'.

For my non-pro and far more modest collection of around 300GB of images, I keep copies on three local machines, and one remote (family member) with sync changes being able to be done over home grade ADSL. With your volumes you could do off site sync via usb disk easily enough for new large ingests, and propagate smaller changes over the wire. Having a friend or family in the same city is very convenient compared to trying to hunt down the best all you can eat deal du jour, with no need to handle the regular t&c changes those services suffer. Good reciprocal opportunities too, of course.

I'm using restic with a Backblaze backend and I couldn't be happier.

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