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Comment by roca | Hacker News Reader

Security: with local storage it's on you to make sure that your NAS or whatever is constantly up-to-date with security patches. And that's assuming your NAS provider keeps providing patches. It's on you to do all necessary monitoring for intrusion detection etc.

Reliability: with local storage it's on you to keep backups, make sure those backups work, replace failing drives, don't accidentally wipe the drive, and make sure you have distribution across geographies. Good luck with that.

Cost: sure, local wins here.

If systems administration is your fun hobby, or you are incredibly cost-sensitive due to large scale, by all means manage storage locally. Otherwise pay professionals to do it.

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> Reliability: with local storage it's on you to keep backups

With cloud storage it's still on you to keep backups, never forget that.

First, the cloud company may spontaneously lock you out forever with no recourse. You better have backups.

Even if that doesn't happen, they might lose your data. If you are a personal (non-commercial) account you very likely don't have any SLAs, so anything can happen. Even on commercial accounts, SLAs ultimately only provide liability, not a guarantee of service.

So it's always on you to have backups.

My experience setting up a Linux NAS server on a HP Proliant N54L is that once you’re past the initial set up cost (doing Linux sysadmin things which is very time consuming and sometimes frustrating) it’s basically done.

Sure you’ll have to apply updates and reboot from time to time, but that’s almost nothing.

As for security, set things up correctly (proper samba auth) and use firewalls. UFW on the box. I have a Linux router and only computers on the right Ethernet ports can touch the the NAS. Done.

Security: with cloud nobody cares, things leak all the time w/o much consequences

Reliability: unless you’re multi-bilion customer nobody cares, Google can simply ban your account and they won’t assign a human intern to perhaps reconsider dropping all your data because the effort would never pay

With local storage there is at least one person who cares about those problems. With cloud there is none.

>Reliability: unless you’re multi-bilion customer nobody cares, Google can simply ban your account and they won’t assign a human intern to perhaps reconsider dropping all your data because the effort would never pay

Because of course it just has to be Google that you use for your cloud storage? We can't consider any of the dozens and dozens of cloud alternatives also available with much better customer service involving real humans?

This is starting to become one of my pet peeves.

People just tout "lol every cloud provider only has AI support with no humans" - when it's just Google - a trillion dollar company - skimping on user support.

Meanwhile there are dozens of alternatives, small, medium and large where you can contact an actual human and get help. No algorithm will ban your account automatically without the right to object.

Security: you don't need a NAS because your files don't need to be accessible "online" -- they're already local to your own computer.

Reliability: with local storage, you have the ability to make backups without re-downloading multiple terabytes of data each time.

And there's definitely no way your files could just spontaneously disappear from cloud storage, either:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-i...

All of these “cloud is better” reasons have all proven to be no better than some kind of local nas + backup, but a lot more expensive.

for 99% of applications, especially with proper system design, this stuff is super easy now with containers and automated backups

if you’re storing lots of user generated data, probably should have just scrapped the idea

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