
Ask HN: What's your cloud storage option? - malmsteen
Hi guys, I&#x27;m looking for the best &quot;long-term safe, large (100gb+ but I think 1To is better) and cheap&quot;, &quot;easy to use&quot; cloud option which I can also trust. Right now I saw these interesting offers:<p>dropbox:<p>- 1To: 99 euros&#x2F;an<p>drive:<p>- 100go : 20 euros&#x2F;an<p>- 1To : 100 euros&#x2F;an<p>pcloud:<p>- 500 Go : €47.88 &#x2F;YEAR<p>- 2 To : 95.88 &#x2F;YEAR<p>- 500 Go : 125 euro &#x2F; lifetime<p>- 2 To : 250 &#x2F; lifetime<p>Zoolz:<p>- 2To : 49 dollars &#x2F; Lifetime (expiring offer in 5 days)<p>Mega:<p>- FREE	$0.00	50 GB<p>- LITE	€4.99&#x2F;month - €49.99&#x2F;year	200 GB<p>- PRO I	€9.99&#x2F;month - €99.99&#x2F;year	500 GB<p>- PRO II	€19.99&#x2F;month - €199.99&#x2F;year	2 TB<p>Amazon:<p>- 100 Gb: 12 per year<p>- 1Tb: 60 per year<p>Which do&#x2F;would you use and why ? I&#x27;m tempted to go with the giants &quot;google&#x2F;amazon&#x2F;dropbox&quot; for trust issues rather than the small &quot;zoolz&#x2F;pcloud&quot; but the small options seems really interesting.
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BjoernKW
Dropbox fares quite well in terms of reliability, data safety and security. In
general I'd say they're trustworthy.

There's one trust issue I have with Dropbox though, which goes by the name of
Condoleezza Rice. Since 2014 she's been serving on the Dropbox board of
directors.

While Dropbox probably approached her because she undoubtedly is a very
talented woman and not because of her political background the agenda
implemented by the administration she was part of, particular the surveillance
measure, leaves a sour aftertaste.

As a company for which protection of user privacy rights should have paramount
importance how do you justify hiring someone who obviously couldn't care less
about these rights?

~~~
fancyfacebook
Any company that grows to that size has to get in bed with the government to
various degrees depending on their industry. If you don't think Dropbox (and
Amazon, and Google, and Twitter, and Facebook, and everyone) isn't in cahoots
then you're just naive. Individual rights matter little, all files on all
these providers are constantly scanned, you have no expectation of privacy at
all.

~~~
BjoernKW
Perhaps discharging her (or not hiring her in the first place) wouldn't change
all that much in the grand scheme of things. Maybe, opposing a well-known
proponent of a shady agenda in such a position is just a feel-good measure, a
drop in the ocean that ultimately doesn't change anything.

However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be doing something on principle
because ethically it's the right thing to do. Obviously, I failed to do so
myself in that case because I still have a Dropbox account. After all, one
specific name on the board perhaps really isn't all that important for users
to switch to another service that might not offer the same benefits as
Dropbox.

Still, it's a slippery slope. I think both shareholders and customers have to
hold companies accountable for their behaviour.

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ladberg
I use a bunch of providers for different use cases:

My photos are all stored in iCloud because of the great integration between
all my Apple devices. I have 2TB free from an old job but will have to switch
to the 50gb for $0.99/month when that runs out. Also, I store my third-party
password manager keychain in iCloud (I personally believe it has the best
security).

The files I actively work on or have worked on semi-recently (school stuff,
personal programming projects) are all in my Dropbox because I often need the
files actually stored on my computer but also easily accessibly online from
somewhere else. I only have 2.2 gigs of space, but it's fine because I'm
usually storing plain text documents.

I use Google Drive for backups and any large files I don't need stored on my
computer because I get unlimited space through university. This is usually an
"upload and forget" type thing where I almost never go back and access the
files, but still want them saved somewhere.

I use Youtube for saving video (I have a lot of drone footage). I upload
hundreds of gigs of video to a private playlist. I don't need the original
full quality videos, and would rather have ease of access from anywhere, so
this works well.

~~~
j_s
Seconding YouTube -- better than losing video.

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kejaed
I used Backblaze B2 for cloud storage backups for a commercial blog I run IT
for.

[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/transparency-in-cloud-
storage...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/transparency-in-cloud-storage-
costs/)

I use free accounts on Dropbox and Google Drive and paid top tier iCloud
storage (2TB) for personal items mostly because of ease of use of iCloud for
photos on every device. Photos also backed up (compressed) for free to Google
Photos so there isn't a single point of failure for all my family's photos.

~~~
banterfoil
I am also in the process of switching to B2. I had previously used Dropbox but
really don't like the direction they are taking with the Google Docs clone,
and showing me a bunch of thumbnails from my photos. I just want a simple,
affordable storage service.

FreeNas has recently added a "cloud sync" feature. So I have my NAS just
automatically syncing to B2. It has been easy and transparent thus far.

------
ktpsns
What about home-brewn? Buy a 8TB hard disk for ~200EUR (source:
[https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hde7s](https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hde7s)), a cheap
computer like an Intel NUC, Raspberry PI or Mini-ITX based one (another
200EUR) and you have a reasonable _online_ system which you can run at home.
Then you can still order a long-term backup service (such as Amazon glacier --
or just encode your data as photos and store them for free at Google photos)
with the big advantage that you can encrypt your data before uploading them
there.

~~~
terminalcommand
Or better yet buy a bunch of cheaper 2TB hard drives configure them as RAID
with redundancy. Or you could use ZFS for extra fun.

If you're going to host this at home you'll probably want/need a firewall, I
hear OpenBSD is great in that area.

~~~
ktpsns
Valid points, but they raise the initial hurdle. I run a dead simple and cheap
(<200EUR) NAS at home for 5 years, just connected to the internet with DynDNS
and masqueraded tcp ports http and ssh from my local internet uplink. I made
regular backups to a USB hard drive. It was cheap, fast at home and usable
from remote. Using only 20W, it was also reasonable cheap, roughly 40 EUR/year
of energy costs, so over 5 years the system costed 6 EUR/month. For this I did
not only get lot's of storage but also a reasonable computer to host arbitrary
services on.

Today, you would probably classify this as _indiweb_ or _decentralized_. I
would just call it _DiyO_ and always prefer it against some subscription.

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caio1982
The fastest transfer rates I could get were all with Dropbox (specially
upload, as I have fiber at home and I expect a decent paying service to be
prepared for customers). I decided to cancel my iCloud subscription because it
was terribly slow for my godzillions of small files. I still pay for some
Amazon Glacier storage too, for real long-term backups of memories and
personal archives (haven't touched them in the last 5 years). If only Dropbox
Smart Sync was cheaper I would pay for it so I don't have to sync all my stuff
everywhere or selectively check out some folders only.

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indescions_2018
Google Drive is probably perfect for you use case.

I know you asked about cloud storage. But the rise of Vloggers and Youtube
creators and their 4K video requirements is driving a lot of innovation in
hard drives. That $100 could also get you something like this sweet rugged
portable 1TB SSD unit. Perfect companion for drone cinematography in the great
outdoors ;)

[https://www.lacie.com/professional/rugged/](https://www.lacie.com/professional/rugged/)

------
DKnoll
I use Backblaze B2 right now for offsite backups, I've previously used S3. I'd
like to use Rsync.net but I can't afford it. I'm using restic to perform the
backups.

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Kagerjay
Google drive has some terrible integrations to 3rd party apps, making it
extremely messy to manage alot of folders at times (folder endpoints are in
the root folder, but dropbox uses /apps folder to make things clean). You
don't see 3rd party integrations to google drive as often as dropbox because
its API is subpar.

Google drive also can get someone confusing with how it integrates with things
like google spreadsheets when you want to keep non-google things seperated

Dropbox has the fastest sync rates by far, and the largest number of
integrations. You also have useful features like selective sync as well

Icloud has some subpar sync rates from when I use it. Personally, I do IT for
family members who own apple products and I can definitely tell you I have
spent at least 3 hours on tech support with a apple lvl3 tech just to resolve
some basic issues. Dropbox never had that problem.

Amazon, I have not tried it. Dropbox used to use a lot of AmazonS3 until it
migrated to its own storage solutions last year? so you can't necessarily go
wrong with them. However again, 3rd party integrations is not there

Mega while its doesn't offer a lot of 3rd party integrations, and I can't
attest to any of its quality

I used to be in the same boat as you comparing prices to GB of storage, but
this is a highly inaccurate way of benchmarking cloud solutions.

Your benchmark needs to consist of

\- Cost vs. Storage Size

\- Folder complexity VS. sync/index times

\- File size VS sync/index times

\- Number of 3rd party integration

\- Privacy concerns

\- Other features (selective syncing, revision control for 1 year, etc)

At the end of the day I use dropbox since $99/year is not a whole lot anyways.
I'd rather pay more for a better solution.

I have a few personal files encrypted using boxcryptor that I run alongside
with dropbox

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quietbritishjim
I have a Microsoft Office 365 subscription, which comes with a free (well, no
additional cost) 1TB of OneDrive storage. I plan to use something like
duplicity to encrypt and backup my files on that.

I don't expect this to be widely used option by other commenters here :-)

Edit: another way to look at it is that the subscription price (£80 per year
in the UK) is fairly reasonable fot 1TB of cloud storage but you also get MS
Office for free. Again, this won't be very convincing to most on HN, but to me
it's an unbeatable deal.

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Spooky23
I use Google Coldline for irreplaceable archive storage. Pricepoint is close
to Glacier without the complexity of the business/cost model.

I use Dropbox for everyday, but I’m probably going to drop it becuase of the
premium pricepoint and less than premium features. Services like OneDrive and
Google Drive suck less than they once did and offer useful features like
search.

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sidcool
Google Drive wins it for me.

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tetek
I have a lot of data, and I moved most of it to sia.tech just recently. Not
the easiest software to use, but saves me tons of money.

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romanovcode
OneDrive:

    
    
      - 1TB
    
      - Comes with Office Suite
    
      - 60 EUR/year

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SkyLinx
I use Dropbox for sync and main storage and Crashplan for proper backups.

