
Apple's 2TB iCloud plan will only cost $10 a month - ingve
https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/06/icloud-2tb-plan-10-dollars-a-month/
======
redm
I use mostly Apple devices, iPhone, Mac Pro, Airport Extremes, Apple TV. I
love the tight integration.

For me, the choice isn't about price; it's about functionality.

I desperately wanted to like iCloud, but Apple missed the mark on this one.

First, the way they try to "integrate it" makes it difficult to manage your
data. Don't want your iCloud stored on your root partition? Huge pain to move.
Second, it's hard to tell exactly what it's doing, when it's syncing, what's
in sync, partially syncing content, etc. In other words, clarity to what's
occurring is lacking. The list goes on, but this was enough for me to drop it.

Google Drive got it right, which is what I'm using. (Of course so did Dropbox,
who pioneered it)

Until Apple allows more flexibility as to what's synced, how it's synced,
where its synced, I won't be going back at any price.

(Note: I do use iCloud for photo storage just because it's easy, but I'm not
using anywhere close to the current limits).

~~~
qeternity
I hear you on a lot of these issues, and as someone who uses Apple everything,
I too rely on GDrive. But my girlfriend pays for the 200gb plan and loves it.
She doesn't know what a root partition is, and she doesn't want to understand
how syncing works. She just wants her stuff to be everywhere as she has come
to expect it. This is where Apple shines. I wish they would open it up a bit
to allow power users to really fiddle with it, but I would argue that they
nailed the intended functionality which is specifically to abstract away all
of what you mentioned.

------
AdmiralAsshat
The choice of the word "only" is an interesting one. It may be better than
Drive or Dropbox, but from my perspective that comes out to $120/yr, which is
still double the price of a Crashplan or Backblaze yearly subscription, both
of which are unlimited.

I don't have a Mac, so many someone can explain whether the iCloud integration
into MacOS and iOS is worth the price premium. For me, it wouldn't be enough,
as I have _way_ more than 2TB of data.

~~~
olegkikin
Also Amazon Cloud Drive is $60/year, and is unlimited. They also have an
unlimited plan for photos for $12/year.

~~~
david-cako
ACD just royally fucked those of us that use rclone with it. I've now just
bought a bunch of hard drives and a recent model optiplex to keep at a family
member's house for my offsite backup. Not worth the "convenience" of a managed
service when they pull this shit, especially with how expensive it really is
compared with owning the equipment and keeping it at a friend/family's house.

Apparently rclone violated amazon's TOS by having an API key in the source
code instead of authing with a central server? The cynic in me says "whelp,
that's what we get for actually utilizing an 'unlimited' service".

~~~
mahyarm
How is their local internet connection going to handle that? Do you have the
same kind of professional reliability like data centers do?

You should be doing a local NAS type thing like you do with your optiplex at
home and a cloud service to diversify your backup types.

~~~
david-cako
I think the 99.99% uptime that most residential internet has will suffice for
my incremental backups that I run daily from all of my machines. ACD with
rclone had relatively mediocre throughput and slow stat-ing compared to a
basic rsync, so if anything I'm in better shape than before for performance.

I already have internal, networked, and cold backups. I just needed one
offsite. Doesn't matter to me whether it's a 15 minute drive away, or across
the country. If my entire city gets nuked I have bigger things to worry about.

------
Arkanosis
To put things in perspective, Hubic's 10 TB plan costs 50€ a year, that's
about USD 4.7 a month.

That doesn't mean anything about features / reliability / whatever, though.
I'm no user of either of these services.

~~~
hackerboos
Reads are really slow. Thumbnail previews take ages to load.

------
gumby
I'm surprised engaget included Amazon in their comparison as Amazon lacks
filesystem integration (on MacOS and Linux; dunno about Windows) which doesn't
really make them competitors for Dropbox, Box, Google Drive or iCloud.

Dropbox seems to have the best integration despite their underhanded use of
Accessibility capabilities.

Our company has tried to use Google Drive, but found too often the client
would claim that the sync was up-to-date while in fact it had simply stopped
synching. We now have a Frankenstein system of google docs for text, GD for a
library of PDF literature (for historical reasons), and DB pdfs, powerpoint
and excel, and code. Sucky.

We used Box at a previous company. Meh. It seems to be aimed at F500
companies.

Oh and I continue to get a stream of confidential documents from another
previous employer who standardized on Google, despite my efforts to stop it.
Lucky for them I'm a nice guy since I'm no longer covered by NDA ;-).

~~~
_acme
Amazon Drive doesn't provide filesystem integration? What is it by "filesystem
integration" that you mean that it doesn't do (on MacOS and Windows, at
least)?

~~~
gumby
Well blow me down: when I go to the Amazon Drive page there's now an "app"
button and if I click on it there's something that implies it's a FS driver.
Either it's new or I was blind when I looked at Amazon before.

Prime gives you free Amazon storage, so I had a preference to use it instead
of paying for DB. I'll give it a try, thanks.

------
hendersoon
If you own your own domain, Google's GSuite for Business costs $10/month/user
and offers unlimited storage. I'm fortunate to have fiber at home and upload
to GDrive at around 90 megabytes/second.

Yes, it says you only get unlimited with 5 users (at $10/month apiece) but it
works with only one.

I have just under 17 TB in mine-- I point Crashplan to a Google Drive mounted
via FOSS rclone[1], saving $120/year for my old Crashplan family plan. And of
course it's great for storing whatever you want, movies, pictures, etc.

One major disadvantage for iOS users is that you can't store your iOS backups
on Google Drive. So I also pay Apple $1/month for the 50GB plan, simply
because their base 5GB plan is insufficient to backup 2 iOS devices.

[1] [https://rclone.org/](https://rclone.org/)

~~~
milankragujevic
That's going away, because of rampant abuse of Google's services and their
inability to shut down pirate movie sites that use redirectors and fetchers to
steal links from Google's CDN.

~~~
geostyx
Source?

~~~
milankragujevic
Well given they're shutting down GSuite accounts which upload movies and their
continued insistence on increasing difficulty for get_video_info methods to
fetch video source, I give it 1-2 months before they stop offering unlimited
storage with GSuite.

~~~
geostyx
The accounts recently deleted were sold on ebay against TOS.

------
rocky1138
To anyone seriously considering this, I urge you to check out Syncthing. It's
free. You install it on all your machines and it syncs the files to each. If
you lose a computer all of your files are available from one of the other ones
in your setup.

~~~
nine_k
Syncthing is great for file sync.

If you have a 2TB RAID box somewhere, preferably offsite, preferably backed up
to Crashplan, things start to look similar to cloud storage.

BTW running ZeroTier on your machines _and_ on a small cloud box with cheap
traffic makes for a great LAN-like setup, when you e.g. have easy time syncing
with your home machine behind NAT from anywhere.

------
Jayakumark
Apple charges $1 for 50gb . By default I have 5GB and have a 16gb phone ,
constantly fighting for space cleaning up to install apps or take a photo. Why
can't they make default storage 50gB which is more than enough for many. I pay
$700 for my phone can't they spend like $1 per month on me to give 50GB, they
have $250 billion in bank doing nothing. Google gives unlimited storage for
photos and 16megapixel. Why can't apple do something similar

~~~
caliagent
Why would they? You already overpaid for their hardware and ecosystem because
you believe in it. A smart consumer would, given the defined variable if not
wanting to switch to android etc, buy a bunch of microsd and backup to them.
They sell dongles that plug into any phone's port and hold a microsd. You can
even overwrite the card for free. And use its contents when you have no
signal. Cloud debates are hilarious to me.

~~~
nine_k
Have you seen a MicroSD die before your eyes, failing writes, then reads? I
did several times.

A RAID array of MicroSDs, or maybe other flash devices, could be more
reasonable reliability-wise, but it would be anything but a sleek consumer
device.

OTOH, Apple is selling the "experience", the polish and automagic features.
Maybe iCloud integration leaves a lot to be desired, it still beats a dongle
99% of the time.

(Disclaimer: Android user since Android 1.x.)

~~~
caliagent
Yes I have and it's no less horrifying then thinking you can access your cloud
server when you suddenly cannot. My point is for a small amount you could
afford to buy microsd cards in bulk and backup every day. Or even
CD-R/DVD-R/BR-R. But I was trying to keep the discussion to direct transfer
from a cellphone as per the parent.

~~~
nine_k
A relatively hassle-free, alternative local backup solution makes sense! Does
it exist? For being realistically useful, it should work either over w-fi, or
over cable when attached to a computer.

~~~
caliagent
Yes as I already described amd you chose to ignore. Pick your choice or backup
program that asks what drive and select your sd card. They are also available
with wifi dongles.

------
Angostura
Looks like you will be able to share that 2TB across the family too, which
makes it quite attractive

~~~
eridius
Where do you see that?

~~~
Infernal
Very bottom of the page here: [https://www.apple.com/macos/high-sierra-
preview/](https://www.apple.com/macos/high-sierra-preview/)

"iCloud storage plans. With room for the whole family. Now you can share an
iCloud storage plan with your entire family. Choose 200GB or 2TB and give
everyone enough space to store photos, videos, documents, and more."

Strangely this comment is the only mention of it I have found outside of
Apple's own site. I'm desperately looking forward to when this will be an
option though.

------
gressquel
I have an iPhone and use Onedrive for photo and video storage. Apple can do
one with their greedy fingers. Besides now i get added functionality that
iCloud cannot match: Share video and image with friends. Quick browsing on
Desktop with folder like structure.

Added Office 365 ++ much more

------
romanovcode
That's $10 too much.

------
VikingCoder
How much is the version that doesn't auto-share with hackers?

~~~
raxip
$100 for a 2TB hard drive.

Monthly fee to maintain access to your own data: $0.

Monthly fee to keep hackers from stealing your information and spreading it
all over the Internet: $0.

Monthly fee to keep some slimy corporation from handing your data over without
your knowledge in response to a secret warrant: $0.

~~~
rakoo
One-time fee for when you want to restore data for the first time in years and
bit rot has eaten everything: priceless

~~~
soupbowl
But of course he was smart and used ZFS so there is no issue with bit rot.

~~~
rakoo
I was under impression that ZFS on a single disk is pointless, because while
an error can be detected it can't be fixed. Am I wrong ?

