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Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

I recently converted to iPhone and one of my largest frustrations has been icloud. As people keep reminding me, it’s apparently a “sync” service rather than a “backup” service, which means that you cannot control the behavior of when things get uploaded/downloaded, data versioning, or even access the data in a file-like way.

This left me really puzzled who the users are that are requesting 12TB of storage. I see such huge storage requirements as firmly in “power user” territory, yet the service lacks the administration tools that I would think power users would expect. IDK, maybe it’s just me, I would just be very nervous uploading multiple TB of precious photos/videos into a service that has no concept of versioning. I’m using Google Photos as well as OneDrive in addition to iCloud because it feels difficult to trust.

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For a product Steve Jobs dismissed as a feature rather than a product, Dropbox is still as far ahead of iCloud today as it was when he allegedly said that. Ridiculous that a company of Apple’s resources has mangled this so much.

Another related note: I just learned the hard way that Microsoft Office no longer auto-saves (nor is it capable of auto-saving) files unless they are in the OneDrive directory. What the fuck? This was a feature for as far back as I’ve used Word and they’ve just cut down its functionality to push people to use a single syncing folder, presumably to drive OneDrive adoption.

God I hate tech in 2023.

I'm a long way from 12TB, but I was relieved to see the new plans since I know I will eventually pass 2TB. As you mentioned, I consider iCloud basically for syncing and short-term backup of convenience, but I wouldn't trust it as a single point of failure for anything.

Photos I take with my real camera are backed up separately on a computer, separate drive, and off-site (Arq Backup to Wasabi). Photos I take with my phone are synced through iCloud to a computer with "Download entire library" enabled, which then has the same local and offsite backup.

The iCloud syncing has gotten more reliable over the years though in my experience. So I'm increasingly comfortable with it, but I'd still never fully trust my priceless data with any of the easy-but-no-control mainstream services like Apple or Google Photos.

This is the way, Arq is dead simple, cheap, and so is Wasabi.

Why Wasabi and not Backblaze?

Wasabi has a pretty much static price, whereas B2 has you pay for storage and misc fees depending on how much api calls and bandwidth you use.

I used to love Backblaze until I dug in a bit more and realized the product is unreliable.

Quoted from my own past comment[0]:

1. The client will lie to you and you never know what’s really backed up. Even if you use the secret alt-click to force a full drive scan, it can still miss files and tell you fully backed up when files from days ago are still nowhere to be found. Luckily I’ve never actually needed to do a restore, but I almost thought I did one time and would have been furious at all the missing files I noticed.

2. This might not matter to some people but absolutely no meta data is backed up.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16301626

> who the users are that are requesting 12TB of storage.

Photo and video resolutions just keep going up and up.

I think the target group must be people that film a lot of video and take a lot of pictures.

Maybe there is some more LIDAR capture that Apple has planned too, or any other kind of 3D content, that will take a lot of storage

So much this. I use Shapr3D on my iPad, my Macbook and my Windows desktop. I often need to export STLs or 3MFs for 3D printing from one to the other. On Windows, iCloud is an absolute trainwreck. It'll often get stuck on a single file and not update anything else. You never know when it will update. You actually never know when the iPad or iPhone is going to upload to iCloud. It's frustrating. There's no way to force it.

Obsidian is worse. I have an iCloud vault and often files will get duplicated for no reason on Windows.

If the iCloud app ever gets updated, the update notes are obtuse at best. Actually, I don't know if it's ever been updated since I was forcibly switched to the Windows Store version of it.

I don't understand the rationale at all.

I used to be one of those people that had no clue why anyone would need more than 256 gb of storage for anything.

Until I started recording 1-2 hours of 4k video per week (40-80 GB / week). That comes to about 2-4 TB per year if I keep up at this rate.

Why not transcode the data after use to significantly reduce filesize? If the videos are uploaded elsewhere (e.g., YT) they're most certainly transcoded on such services anyway

transcoding sucks on phones IME. Samsung added a built in, pretty barebones transcoder but even then it's very slow (obviously) and doesn't run in the background. you can do it on a computer instead, without any cloud service, but then you are back to having to deal with manually transferring your files and managing them.

You're right - not ideal to manually transfer. Maybe iCloud will offer transcoding as a service next haha.

Many smartphones support recording H.265 encoded video directly and the resulting file size is tiny and quality is amazing. Not sure if it's the default setting (or possible) on iPhones though.

Yes, iPhones support recording to H.265 directly and have defaulted to it for a while.

Congrats! How old is your kid? ;)

Nope!

Got a drone (DJI mini 4) and record on most flights.

80GB/week is ~4TB/year.

Oops, fixed. Thanks

More space is just more space, I wouldn’t expect Apple to suddenly have pro tools for more space unless it’s a brand new product. Usually people use the space for photos/vid/icloud files

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