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Comment by federona | Hacker News Reader

If you use terabytes of storage on consumer oriented free or nearly free services you are going to get burned sooner or later. Switch to b2 or s3. Your data will be there for a much longer time. b2 costs $5/terabyte. If you don't access this stuff, it's probably at most $10 - $20/mo.

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I'm not really looking for archival storage or disaster recovery. After all, the 80MP scans are just low-resolution copies of the originals. I have hard drives for local storage. Yes, if my house burns down I lose the scans and the negatives, but I don't care enough to spend money on it.

The reason I used Google Photos was for one-click sharing. I could make a link, and viewers could pan and zoom and see all the details through a pleasant web interface. S3 doesn't do per-photo per-user access controls, and doesn't have a user interface for sharing or viewing. It's object storage, not photo sharing. As object storage, it's a lot more expensive than negatives in a binder, but about as useful.

It would not be hard maybe a week or two of hacking to make such an interface on top of an object store if you were motivated. A simple php or python app with a time limited key stored in a db of some sort. There though are already open source free apps that do provide user management, etc. If you are looking for an ideal solution, but you have to pay for it with money or time.

It would be a nice exercise but relying on it doesn't make sense to me.

We had to write a text editor in our first semester of our CS undergrad program. I'm not going to use my own text editor in favor of say MS word or Google doc.

Your data is secure on b2, it's simply an interface. Code is on github. DB should be dumped and saved to b2 daily. Not really unreliable.

A week of coding is a long time, and you have to keep it up to date. (It's basically a quarter of a month of salary. That's a lot of money.)

Depending on contracts with an employer, there might be legal hassles as well.

Or you can just spin up Nextcloud, point it at your B2 storage and call it a day.

It really is drop dead simple and you also don’t have to host it yourself. Every hosted provider supports external storages so you’re never locked in with them. And since you’re not actually using any of their storage you can stay in their free tier forever.

I self-host on DO and it works amazingly well.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but if you don't access data often, why not just buy an external HDD of say 10TB or such? Yeah, it's possible that data may fail, but is quite unlikely particular if you're not using it often.

Remote storage, redundancy, and portability. At $5/mo/tb. you can still access any of it anytime you want, you just pay for what you actually download.

shucked hard drives go for around $15/TB on sale. Buy three for redundancy and it's $45/TB. The break-even point for that setup would be 9 months.

Well, plus a lot of hassle.

You're also paying for spatial distance and independence. Redundant backups in the same location can all fail together. See https://youtu.be/OAI8S2houW4?t=285 for one amusing case.

Ipfs eventually.

Yeh or a cheap Synology NAS or similar. Remotely accessible, raided, simple to setup.

House fires, power surges, theft, natural disasters.

Interesting use case for Sia of Skynet etc. Something like about 3 dollars a terabyte at the moment.

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