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Comment by JeanMarcS | Hacker News Reader

Ok. So now your house is on fire. How do you retrieve your datas from the melted local NAS ? Or a buglar come and empties it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm full "move away from the cloud" in the "proprietary cloud" way.

But getting some drive space on a different location is important if you care about your datas.

Could be in a relative's or friend's place (so almost no per month cost) or on a cloud drive (I personnaly use the Hetzner 10€/m 5TB drive), depending on your choice of backup solution.

But it's important.

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Ok. So your credit card expired, and the provider cleared your cloud data. How do you retrieve it?

See, each has issues.

Or you don't read the small print and Backblaze deleted the backup of your external disk if you don't connect your computer for X days. Happened to me, very fucking pissed. Even when you're an "IT guy" think you've got it all covered it can still blow up.

Do you have any pointers to such fineprint? I can't find it nor did I notice it when I just very recently began using Backblaze.

yeah here https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665398-Backi...

> Backblaze will backup external USB and Firewire hard drives that are detached and re-attached as long as you remember to re-attach the hard drive at least once every 30 days. If the drive is detached for more than 30 days, Backblaze interprets this as data that has been permanently deleted and securely deletes the copy from the Backblaze datacenter

It's a real fucker like if you have your stuff in storage for a while and then reformat the drive and then try to download everything from Backblaze (what I do every time I get a new computer), only to discover it's not there. Left a REAL bad taste.

It's because the service is billed as a "backup" not as "cheap cloud storage".

If they allowed people to back up unlimited USB drives and networks shares, /r/datahoarder would be all up their business with 1PB storage.

This is why they limit it to only stuff you're actually using.

If you want generic cloud storage with infinite retention, they have B2

They mention in their docs that this is why they forbid (not limit) NAS. Afaik you could still connect as many 8TB USB drives to your machine.

Boot your windows machine using an iSCSI storage block supplied by your NAS. I’ve wondered if this would work with Backblaze or not. I don’t really care if I lose my plex media so I’ve never tried it.

And as long as you keep them connected regularly, they are backed up.

What you can't do is connect a 20TB USB drive, back it up and put it in your cupboard for a year and expect the data to still be there.

As is clearly stated in their FINEPRINT.

I mean, they also email you after two weeks and then again at 21 days, so it's not like they're hiding this from you.

They email about "missing computer", that I'm aware of and is fine but I'm not aware of them mentioning deletion of data of the external disks. Fully admitting I may have missed it.

It takes up to a month to recover from some situations. You maybe even heard about the one infamous three years ago.

I don't really get that example. Assuming that your using the cloud solution as a backup, you'd still have the original and can restart the backup, either on the same or a different cloud provider.

If your house burns down there's a good chance that you're losing both the original and the backup.

Ideally you have the original, a local backup and a cloud backup. The cloud backup can be updated a few times a day, and the local every few 10 - 15 minutes.

This is not a good example. One of them is under your control, the other isn't.

I read many posts of people complaining about some cloud service deleting their data for „no reason“ (= user error, mostly not reading emails) every month, while I can’t even remember the last post of someone losing their data due to a fire (except OVH bursting into flames ;) ). So I think it’s a valid argument to be made.

Bottom line: have a backup, and utilize cloud as well as local storage.

I thought I stated in my comment that you should have both, sorry if it was not clear

You missed a step here.

1. my credit card expired

2. I've started getting warning emails about data being cleared, and giving me a few weeks to fix this (because my provider does want me to keep paying.. it's their business after all)

3. I put in a new credit card and it all works again

Compare it to: you came back home and your data is gone. Or you power up your PC after power outage, and the disk fails. Or even worse, you are sitting in front of your computer, and the cryptolocker/ransomware window pops up.

(And one of those is much more likely to happen than others. I don't think I've ever heard stories about cloud data deleted for non-payment, but I've had plenty of first-hand experiences with disk failures and send-hand stories about ransomware)

Well it's an important point, but I don't think the author of OP argues you shouldn't do that.

By the way: have a look at restic, it's great (if you don't require a GUI).

yep, agree backups are important and that could've been pointed out in the OP. Any storage plan will also mean including a backup plan so if something goes wrong you can restore.

> So now your house is on fire. How do you retrieve your datas from the melted local NAS ? Or a buglar come and empties it.

I fully expect my possessions and my data to be perishable. Losing it in a fire is still better than giving it to others. I will cry a little, when that happens, but as a consolation to myself, I'll say: at least it wasn't stolen from one of those big companies and won't be used to harm anyone.

Why is losing data better than “giving” it (an encrypted version if you care about privacy) to others?

Who says it's going to be encrypted? The service provider may screw up in more ways than one...

The data that may be plausibly stolen from me alone doesn't have a lot of impact if I'm the only victim. It starts to matter a lot more if it's stolen as a part of a larger heist. Eg. if someone knows I'm saving money to buy a particular brand of car, then it doesn't matter really, but if someone knows that among a million people 3KK want to buy that particular make, they may have a valuable insight about making investments into car manufacturing industry. Of course this isn't limited to cars and investments. Suppose, someone stealing data discovers a trend in health problems which would increase demand for a certain drug... same idea.

I have a raspberry at a family member's house with an encrypted backup on an external HDD I sync with rsync.

I used hetzner before but the problem was I needed about 1.5TB and their only options in that range are 1 and 5TB. The 5TB option was a bit too wasteful.

I use the same, just I sent incremental encrypted ZFS snapshots. These are a game changer since the target can import them and verify that they work without ever needing the key

yes, a backup solution is an important part of the overall setup. Didn't mean to make a case for a permanent move away from all cloud storage, but wanted to understand the shortcomings of cloud-only storage, especially from proprietary cloud companies. Setting up backups, whether they are with other cloud providers or local NAS, is important to safely store your data.

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