What's more cost feasible for home data storage? Large hard drives or cloud backups

[RelaxTheMind]

i have around ~150-200%+ data overages (300gb cap) every 3 months or so from all the back and forth from my cloud storages. luckily all i ever get is an email telling me to check for viruses and such. Not as much when im not in an upgrade frenzy. if your ISP isnt anal about overage then cloud is can be more feasible given you have a decent upload/download from the ISP and the cloud storage host.

A decent off lease raid or cheap NAS is a well worth it one time buy... as long as you arent a data hoarder.

externals just scare me. i treat them as disposable media.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

A decent off lease raid or cheap NAS is a well worth it one time buy... as long as you arent a data hoarder.

This. I use a Synology DS413j (filled with 4 TB drives) as the backup device for my main server whereas my second physical server has a USB drive. I should probably just carve the NAS up and back both of them up to it, but the second server really isn't that critical and USB will work for the minimal amount of data I'm backing up on it.

Crashplan is a great cloud backup tool. I have about 3 TB backed up to them so far and that will just keep growing and growing. Unfortunately I can't back my VMs up to it or I'd have about 7 TB backed up there.

 

[Kaido]

Serious question: How have you (or others) been burned by online storage?

My cat pictures and such might be pretty important to me when I'm old. Right now all my pictures and personal documents go on the MS Skydrive. It seems reliable but I've always wondered.

Am I an idiot?

Usually hiccups with the cloud backup software. I've seen issues with everything from Mozy to Crashplan to Backblaze. Unless they can remap your backup, you'll have to start over, which isn't fun if you've got say 40 gigs of photos to backup. That's why I like having a local backup as well - if your online stuff does bork, you're not totally hosed. I use Time Machine on Apple & Genie TimelineX on Windows (same concept as Time Machine - automated incremental backups). I also do an occasional full drive image (using SuperDuper on Mac & Macrium Reflect on Windows - both are similar to the classic Norton Ghost). If I do a clone, I don't like to leave it connected to the computer - 2.5" 2TB USB drives are like $99 these days, so it's not too hard to fire off a simple backup & throw it somewhere for safe-keeping.

It's also really important to have easy access to your backups. I have a friend who went a little nuts on his backups, had his boot drive die, and had no idea how to get things back. Had 2 or 3 different cloud services - one specifically for photos and one for everything, plus manually-copied backups to a backup drive. Total mess. You HAVE to have a good workflow. That's why I like the cloud/incremental/image system - the cloud system is automated; if your comp dies, either download your backup or have it shipped to you for $99 or whatever; if you need it quicker, just pop in your backup drive. If you need it restored ASAP, use your image. Computers are just computers; the data is what's important, unless you're just surfing, in which case you can just snag a Chromebook. I have friends with literally years of family photos on defective hard drives because they didn't back up & don't have the $3,000 handy to send it to a cleanroom for revival. Stinks. Protect yourself! Murphy's Law can and WILL happen to you at some point.

 

[Red Squirrel]

why!?

Because why not? :awe: I got them for free. They were basically destined to a recycler. Though, I took them thinking I could put my own, bigger drives in there, which unfortunately I can't. I can't really trust it for anything as if drives fail I can't replace them. I have a large raid 6 array that uses two enclosures, I occasionally fire it up and run a backup job to it, and that's about it. It also uses like 200 watts per enclosure. Don't have enough UPS capacity to keep it running with all my servers too.

 

[BurnItDwn]

quiet, low power, easy option ...
$300ish for a cheap 4 bay home NAS
$500ish for 4x 3TB WD Red drives
Run them in Raid 5

9TB of space with some redundancy for $800ish

If you want more space ... then I would build a server with supermicro board, xeon, 16GB ECC, and a nice big case with lots of properly cooled 3.5 inch bays, an SSD or even a flash drive for the OS .... Base components around $700 and up

Then build a ZFS array with unraid ... if you use 3TB drives, then 8 drives, with 2 drives parity ... would give you 18TB usable space for under $2000 ...


If you stick a couple of pci express SATA cards, you could possibly use that $200 mobo and a very big & well designed case and fit 20 or so 3TB drives before you run into power or thermal issues ...

Then you could add additional drives with ESATA DAS enclosures...


If you don't need redundancy, then cost per TB goes down, if you want to do it truly ghetto style, you could just use a cheap used mobo + CPU, but then you would likely lose ECC ...



In any case ... if you want to store many TB of data, it's cheaper to do it at home, but if your house burns down then you lose the data.




My biggest issue with cloud storage is not the cost of cloud storage, but ISP caps and upstream bandwidth limitations.

I have Uverse, and the highest Tier available here gets me like 20mbit down, but only around 1.5mbit up.

If I uploaded 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, at the max speed, it would take almost 600 days for me to upload 9TB. That makes cloud storage for large home data storage completely useless for shoddy/slow ISPs.

If you have an ISP and you get 15mbit or more upstream ... then essentially you could handle around 4-5 TB per month in uploads to the cloud ... But there would likely be lots of fees for using so much bandwidth...



Anyhow ... Cloud is great for backing up important files. So, use it for the most important stuff ... trivial things that you horde ... don't bother