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Comment by datadrivenangel | Hacker News Reader

Security and cost tend to be less of a win locally than you might expect. I'm a huge advocate for going local and owning your stuff, but it depends on circumstances.

2 TB from dropbox is $120 per year. A 2 bay Synology is $448. Brand name 2TB harddrives are ~$50, so all in you're looking at $550 for a reasonably nice home NAS. That will probably use around ~20 watts on average, or 1 kwh per 2 days, working out to 175 kwh per year, or ~$52 if you're paying $0.30 per kwh in a high cost of energy place like California. Assuming you get ten years from the NAS box, that puts you at $1,070 for the NAS versus $1200 from dropbox...

So you get into big questions of who do you trust to last longer: hardware or the current storage provider pricing. Also which one do you think will be less of your time to manage. You should still 100% have an offline backup for either one, so that's another $50 for both for a external HDD that you store in a closet.

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I setup storage and replication for my father between Florida (primary) and a midwest state (secondary) using two Synology NAS devices. 30TB (VMs and install images because he likes to tinker with tech being retired, as well as lifelong personal data) corpus he was carrying with him on external drives, ~50TB usable after accounting for RAID whatnot. To store this in Backblaze B2 was going to be $180/month ($6/TB). He breaks even in ~6 months at ~$1200 for equipment outlay. Power costs are immaterial outside of California (less than 10 cents/kwh at both sites, rooftop solar on both properties, YMMV).

I really wanted the cloud solution to win, because I am not around often and don't have time to troubleshoot mouse trap tech setups. I can twiddle cloud primitives from anywhere, which is very appealing for obvious reasons. But in this case, the math was clear.

(no affiliation with Synology or Backblaze, but a big fan of both, infra/devops engineer in a past life, I also pay for Dropbox personally)

Synology is mostly web based configuration or ssh… maybe install Tailscale so you can remote admin it easily?

Indeed, we use Headscale [1] to maintain a Wireguard mesh. Synology NAS devices can act as Wireguard endpoints, but we also pick SMB routers that can do the same. I'm partial to Glinet at the moment (GL.iNet GL-MT3000 (Beryl AX) [2]), but the recent HN thread on the UniFi Express [3] has me keeping an eye on it (no Wireguard support I believe).

[1] https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

[2] https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt3000/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38504027

Or just set up openvpn, really only takes a few minutes on say pfsense/opnsense.

I'm quite a fan of self-hosting, but I can certainly acknowledge that sometimes cloud solutions are better. But it's not fair to only compare to a Synology NAS. If you're fine just running a standard Linux distro, rather than Synology's software, you can do much better in terms of hardware, for much cheaper. An Optiplex is ~$100-150 on eBay, has better hardware, and you can either just save that money or invest it in more storage.

It's worth acknowledging that it uses more power, but still, that's $300 less than the Synology up front. Some extra power draw doesn't add up that fast. Plus, IMO there's a lot of value in being able to control it all yourself. If something breaks (which isn't that common, assuming this simple setup) you can fix it yourself, and you have full control over your data.

I'd like to emphasize that it's worth taking into account the time and stress to run a NAS, it's not a perfect fit for everyone, even technical people, and priorities vary from person to person, but assuming you're just running a basic NAS with Syncthing, especially if it's all in Docker, it's very simple and low-maintenance. Hell, use an RHEL clone and set up watchtower, and you can have automated updates for a decade - that is, until it's not supported anymore.

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Synology NASes, I haven't used one myself.

If you repatriate content locally, do you need a NAS ?

I see the alternative to the cloud as being ~50, or more realistically ~100 for a usable external drive. No consumption when it's not used. Higher longevity than a NAS with the same drives. I don't think the alternative is a self-hosted cloud with requirements of being online, reachable by multiple devices, etc...

It depends on your use case. If you just need storage as a backup for a single device, then there's no need for a NAS, but if you're backing up multiple devices and/or want to share data between devices, then a low-power NAS is a good option.

Yes, it's good to remember that use cases differ, and that not everyone has a few TB to share between multiple devices. Of all the people I know who still use cloud storage, none of them pay for it because it's not needed, and the free quota (15GB) is largely compatible with a sync-everywhere strategy where all files are always copied everywhere, thanks to Syncthing for example. Even for photos this is doable.

For the home NAS, Assume a 5-6 year lifespan for the drives so in those 10 years you will spend another $100.

Of course this assumes you just need storage while a NAS can provide other services allowing you to consolidate calendars, shared note-taking, password managers, etc.

Are the economies of scale really that aggressive here? A feature-rich cloud solution ending up cheaper than self-hosted by around 10% just using napkin math?

No one would spend $450 on a NAS and then put 2 TB drives in it. My NAS was $450 and has 3 18TB drives with another slot not yet used. The drives were $250 each or so on sale. So for $750 + $450 I have an always-on home server that runs my home automation, DNS Adblock, local webservers, media server with hardware transcoding, ip cam to HomeKit adapter, a Nintendo switch homebrew e-shop, a software controller for my Omada network, a Tailscale node to access my home network from anywhere, and many more services, AND it has _36 TB_ of storage with parity so it’s safe from a single drive failure. I replicate everything important to an 18TB external drive on a PC with Backblaze Personal which gives me offsite backups of 18TB+ for $60 a year. Nothing is really competitive with this if you have a lot of data you want to keep (my wife has a lot of video content for her work.)

This also adds to the cost. You start looking at 1-2k in equipment minimum for a good amount of space, and it adds up fast. Best way to get that more storage, but it's not cheap.

If you go cheap, you could probably cut the cost of self-hosting in half in terms of obvious cost. The cheaper you go the higher the maintenance tends to be though, so it may not be a real win.

Don’t forget to adjust for inflation.

One of the big factors in this is how the costs go up! Will the cloud provider raise their price? Probably. Will your cost of electricity go up? Probably. Becomes a highly dimensional decision with no single obvious optimal answer, as a lot of low probability high risk events will dominate cost. If you're scared about house fires, the expected realized lifetime of the hardware goes down. If you're scared about OVH fires... likewise.

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