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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

I have 1tb of data on icloud, including all my photos. Moving to a different platform is literally not an option (I was a happy Dropbox paid user until they decided to shut down the photos app, and Google Photos is a huge no no for multiple reason). The only alternative I can think of is self-hosting, which on itself is a nightmare, or a home NAS (not an option for me specifically). The lock-in is real.

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Dropbox recently broke (accidentally or intentionally) hosted images/thumbnails from their Paper docs product (which they're quietly but noncommittally killing off) and that was a good wakeup for me to stop trusting hosted storage. And I'm saying this as a former Dropbox engineer of ~6 years who has plenty of free Dropbox storage for life. The brain drain and profitability crunch is real.

Recently bought a 14TB HDD and downloaded my entire Dropbox, Google Photos, and Lightroom photos. Planning to set up an off-site copy as well, and will probably build out a proper NAS within a few years.

Dropbox is just hard to trust. I used to pay for it, until they suddenly decided to shut down the photos app. Then the password app, recently. I don’t expect Apple to shut down Photos any time soon, so I find it easier to trust them with my data

Why is moving to a different platform literally not an option? 1TB of data is tiny. You don't even need a NAS, 1TB is a trivial amount of data.

If you don't want to self host (which has actually become quite simple with immich), you could switch providers (even if you want to avoid google).

which alternative platform exists? Onedrive is absolutely awful (it gets stuck in sync and crashes on Mac frequently), Google Drive/Photos doesn't respect your privacy and actually changes the resolution of your photos. The only alternative is Dropbox, which doesn't have a photos app anymore, or a bunch of disjointed small apps that together would cost multiples of what I pay for iCloud.

Name me one service outside of Google and Apple that’s seamlessly tied to your devices. Once you buy into the system you’re basically stuck. Apple is quickly becoming Oracle.

Samsung?

Disclaimer: not touched a Samsung device in over a decade

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