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Comment by ianburrell | Hacker News Reader

I am excited by the durability. We need an archival storage mechanism that can last for long time. Hopefully, this will be cheap and come in smaller size for home use.

For example, backing up photos is annoying. Hard drives are unreliable, cloud storage can go away, and tape is expensive.

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Use cloud storage the unorthodox way, like I do. Make multiple accounts, then create a big file with your backup data (pictures, projects, etc) and write it in a VeraCrypt file. Then split this file in multiple files and upload each to accounts (I use protonmail, yahoo, gmail - a few different vendors in case one goes belly up I can still access the backup from the others).

It's a hassle at beginning to create the accounts but you can create a program that has an embedded browser (I use chromium) and then you can automate the tasks. Basically you just simulate keyboard and mouse over the chromium surface and the vendors are none the wise. I keep my info of each account into a local SQLite DB and the program does the automation, requiring minimal interaction from me. So the only real backup I need is that SQLite file. Rest is scattered around in the cloud with none having access to it but me.

If you need cloud storage for archival, consider Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive. $1/TB/month and S3 is probably the last storage service on the Internet to "go away".

Retrieval costs are pretty awful but helluva lot better than losing everything.

Why do people pay for things like Google Drive or Dropbox when S3 storage is so cheap?

Why use Dropbox when 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, back in 2007 even?

I understand some of these words.

It's a reference to the comments of the "Show HN" of Dropbox back in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Because I can't store my gmail and Google Docs documents on S3, and because Google Photos is easier to use than cramming my stuff to S3.

Yup. It's not just that I use Docs, but I don't know what I'd do without Google Drive Search across all my documents. Same with searching photos using text search.

Also Google Drive for Desktop. I'm sure there's an equivalent for S3 but I don't know if it works as well.

S3 may be last storage service on the internet to go away, but if you stop paying for a while (forget, credit card expires, medical issues), then your data will dissappear.

Every backup restore test will also be quite expensive with glacier

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