I know this topic has been raised before over the years (searching through older threads), but I’m looking for some up to date info.
I suspect what I’m looking for is 5TB of cloud storage. I currently have my files almost full on 4TB NAS with RAID 1, that I back up on my portable 4TB HDD.
I find the process slow & I don’t have peace of mind, which is perhaps the main reason I started looking yesterday evening at possible Cloud options.
Obviously the options are many, the prices vary considerably & so too does the usability e.g file size, bandwidth restrictions and so on.
Can anybody recommend a cloud solution they have been happy with please that perhaps would suit large storage needs? I’d ideally like to purchase a yearly subscription or better still lifetime if there’s such a thing.
Hi.
I have my music on a Synology NAS and have 5 terabytes of cloud space in Microsoft OneDrive. The Synology has an automatic backup app that works with several cloud services. When I add files to the collection, the process run transparently over the night and back it up on OneDrive. At the beginning the process took a couple of nights (2TB collection), but I didn’t feel it because it was transparent.
This is good advise for everybody, not just OP. Offsite backups are critical, don’t neglect your data like you are neglecting your car’s oil change…
A 4TB 2.5" disk is like $100. Put your music on it and take it somewhere. I have three 4tb disks in my desk drawer at work. Two are encrypted computer data, and the third is all my music, That lets me sleep at night.
Keep in mind that you’re probably looking at their Personal plan, which means you can backup PCs and external hard drives, but not network drives and or NAS devices.
If you’re looking to backup network devices, check out B2 Cloud Storage. It’s a pay per storage + download plan, but it’s also more flexible. I run it on my NAS, which autobackups any file directly to B2.
As others mentioned, make sure you have more than just the cloud (ie. off-site) backup.
@Nepherte Yes, it’s my NAS I want to backup, although I could just backup my backup (portable HDD).
Looking over the B2 Cloud storage plan, I don’t really understand what they constitute as a download. Does that mean if I wanted to stream in my car. Is that a download? Otherwise, given it’s back up, I can’t think why I’d want to download as I’d have those files.
This is where reading through various sites and trying to make comparisons gets me bogged down in computer jargon that isn’t clear to me and I get lost!
Yea. It gets completed real fast. B2 is similar to how Amazon S3 / Azure / … work (but cheaper). It thinks more in terms of costs for specific ‘transactions’.
Basically:
Uploading data to cloud is free
Storage in the cloud is $0.005/GB/month
Download from the cloud is $0.01$/GB/month
Referring to your example. Streaming from B2 constitutes a download. As a reference, I roughly pay about $6.5 dollar a month for 1.5TB of data. You can do a pretty easy price calculation on their website: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
I strictly use it as a backup service (the storage is quite cheap) to recover from a worst case scenario (all your backups are gone or inaccessible). No downloads here. Then again, if you stream 10GB a month on your mobile plan, It’ll cost you $0.10. Not exactly the end of the world.
If you don’t mind that your backups are not always 100% in sync and don’t mind the occassional backing up of your external hard drive to the cloud, their unlimited personal backup might be more for you.
What really pulled me over is their upload speeds. My 1.5TB of data took a day to upload. Compared to the service I used (Amazon), it took about 7 days.
Thanks again @Nepherte Bart. I suppose I like less fuss and that means without the need to connect my HDD, but it wouldn’t be a great loss if I had to I suppose. Upload speeds are definitely worth consideration, so that’s also great to hear.
I’ve just sent backblaze an email. I assume they won’t respond until they are back at work Monday (perhaps not), by which time I’ll have a firmer idea what I need/want.
The price of streaming is cheap indeed. I’d not use that all the time, but convenient for my 20min drive to work and then back if I wanted to hear something specific I didn’t have on my sd card.
I’m the sort of person who’d prefer a one off payment or yearly, rather than worry about month to month, but happy with monthly if that’s their only system.
Odd I never found blaze online when punching into Google something like recommended cloud backup storage. Pleased I have now!!!
More food for thought Slim…as a rule I do try to avoid Amazon and similar companies where possible. However, I’ll not do so at all costs. That said, I’ve never bought anything via Amazon. Although, if there was some great deal or item not found elsewhere I certainly would.
Love it…tortuously slow.
I’m on holiday now, hence beginning my search and am prepared for 4TB upload being slow. I find my HDD bloody painful as is, even when uploading a few files.
This is when I get more confused: I don’t even know what ‘frequently used’ data means. They need to speak English to noobs!
|S3 Standard - General purpose storage for any type of data, typically used for frequently accessed data||
|—|---|
|First 50 TB / Month|$0.025 per GB|
|Next 450 TB / Month|$0.024 per GB|
|Over 500 TB / Month|$0.023 per GB|
|S3 Intelligent - Tiering * - Automatic cost savings for data with unknown or changing access patterns||
|Frequent Access Tier, First 50 TB / Month|$0.025 per GB|
|Frequent Access Tier, Next 450 TB / Month|$0.024 per GB|
|Frequent Access Tier, Over 500 TB / Month|$0.023 per GB|
|Infrequent Access Tier, All Storage / Month|$0.019 per GB|
|Monitoring and Automation, All Storage / Month|$0.0025 per 1,000 objects|
|S3 Standard - Infrequent Access * - For long lived but infrequently accessed data that needs millisecond access||
|All Storage / Month|$0.019 per GB|
|S3 One Zone - Infrequent Access * - For re-createable infrequently accessed data that needs millisecond access||
|All Storage / Month|$0.0152 per GB|
|S3 Glacier ** - For long-term backups and archives with retrieval option from 1 minute to 12 hours||
|All Storage / Month|$0.005 per GB|
|S3 Glacier Deep Archive ** - For long-term data archiving that is accessed once or twice in a year and can be restored within 12 hours||
|All Storage / Month|$0.002 per GB|
Plus 1 for Backblaze. Fantastic setup. Set it and forget it… hopefully forever. It just works away in the background. Nice.
I also have several additional backups - Time Machine and bootable backups. I have 2 bootable backups with my music on, one of which lives offsite in my car.
and I get lost!
