I’m not asking a question or trying to persuade you in any way, just offering up some personal experience and food for thought. I’ve noticed a lot of people, and by a lot I mean 99.99% of posts, are in reference to Google Drive problems and ACD banning rclone and api limits with GDrive, speed issues, etc.
I’m a data hoarder. I wanted to never delete another file again. Dropbox for Business, while expensive, was definitely my top contender. I love Dropbox. I bought the unlimited Dropbox plan, 3 licenses (the minimum), and paid yearly to make it come to $60 a month.
I set up 3 servers with FUSE+rclone mounts, no unionfs or any stuff like that. I didn’t want to figure out how to make all those packages work in sync. As long as I have sufficient CPU available (I do now that I’m not testing) these mounts are stable, solid, and amazing. I’ve got a 5.3 TB media library encrypted on Dropbox, and another terabyte of family and work data.
I don’t have speed issues. I’ve never hit an api limit, it ‘just works’.
Just sayin’.
If you can find friends or family you trust to pay you their share of it, get the Dropbox business account and split it with them. I don’t know if that’s wholly authorized under the ToS, probably not, but how would they know? It’s designed for collaboration. I wasn’t able to find anyone to help shoulder the cost, but that’s okay. I don’t pay for television, I don’t pay for Netflix, I don’t pay for Hulu, Amazon Video, Google Video, so it works itself out I guess.
If I never intended to download another thing, yes although you wouldn’t exactly find a 6 terabyte server for 60 bucks a month. The thing is, when I query the underlying file system there’s a petabyte of free space there. I only have to ask Dropbox for more. I did so today I said I’m at 75% capacity and they added another terabyte to it just for asking. And that’s the guarantee of the account, so that combined with the fact that it has not yet failed me or run so slow that my services can’t run from it even while encrypted, I’d say it’s well worth it. I would even say it’s a better deal than Google drive because I’m not hitting api limits no matter what I do or how many times I scan or edit the file system. I guess what I’m saying is to have a quote on quote unlimited amount of space, High availability that is geographically diverse, and no limits on access, it’s a better value than the alternatives for 60 bucks a month. I don’t even need to use cloud servers for my Plex setup. Everyone who I’m sharing with is a close friend that I trust so I just set up a virtual machine on their home network secure it against them but allow it for me, and I let them use their own CPUs and their own internet connection to interface with my encrypted Dropbox and everything works perfectly. I’ve noticed a trend that Amazon obviously did what they were going to do, and all the Google Drive users are struggling with api limits and slower speeds, because Google is also throttling several of their services in order to maintain the availability of each service.
