Sorry to disturb you again and for the new thread.
I am very pleased to use rclone since years and I appreciate a lot the effort Nick spends on this tool and the help of everybody.
I started 20 years ago using NAS at my home to store movies and music; at the beginning I was used to have separate phisical disks in the NAS box for production and for backup, then I split the production NAS from the NAS used for backup.
Years ago, when Amazon started to sell unlimited space on Amazon Cloud Drive, I moved the backup from my home to the cloud; then moved from Amazon to Google, where I am.
So… an HP Proliant server at my home running Ubuntu and SAMBA as a NAS server with about 10 TB and an rclone\sync script running every night to backup data on Gdrive with encryption.
Maybe it is time to definitely remove my 10 TB from home and trust just GDrive.
WHat do you think? is it a good idea? I will save power, space and… espensive hard disks.
If this approach is correct, since all my device need SAMBA, my idea is to use rclone to locally mount and decrypt my GDrive instance and then export the local mount point with SAMBA, READ ONLY mode.
I will use rclone copy to move files into the GDrive, because, even if I can successfully mount with SAMBA in write mode, I have problems and I am not 100% sure not to loose something.
In this way I will switch off the Proliant and its 10 TB HDDs and use just a little VMWare VM with Ubuntu just to mount the GDrive and export to my home network.
I started using rclone mount just some days ago and there are so many switches… so I am asking also to you, the expert ones, wich settings are the best for this scenario.
I am not using backup to recover deleted files or something like that, but only to have a copy of my data in case a drive fails.
The first setup, 20 years ago, was to have two sets of drives inside the same NAS server using rsync to the backup set aligned to the source; the second setup was to have two NAS server, again aligned with rsync; the third setup was to sync the surce to the Amazon Drive with rclone; now I moved to Google Drive.
If I decide to trust Google Drive, I can stop using the local NAS and setup a small and simple Ubuntu just to mount the remote and exporting with SAMBA, read only, to make the remote available to Kodi, Western Digital TV, smart TV, pCorePlayer, JRiver and all the other devices I have around.
The reason is that the Proliant I am running is quite old (6 years) and so the HDD inside it and I need to spend money to refresh the unit (600 € for the server and 400 € for the HDDs).
I have another Proliant (ML30) running ESXi and I could setup a Ubuntu VM mouting the HDDs pulled out from the NAS (raw device mapping) but I do not trust anymore these WD RED HDDs (too old) and so I have to spend my 400 € for new HDDs.
I wouldn’t trust any cloud provider as a sole source of important data. But you can sync it to a cold storage as a redundant backup. I use b2 for that.
I technically have 2 Google drives I 100% sync together and then I have b2 cloud at .002 cents per GB to store a subset of data that I can’t lose (family pictures, important docs, with). I think my b2 store is about $2 a month for about 500GB. The Google drives have 8TB. @Ajki has a better approach using drive and Dropbox based on his size. But I’m fine with that 500GB on b2 for now.
I like b2 for the versioning. Incase of a bad sync where I erase all my data, I can still get it back with versioning on b2. It is safe.
I suppose your solution should be designed based on your level of risk acceptance and the cost. I decided to spend a little more on cloud for a few reasons. 1) no hardware to maintain and cloud is fault tolerant at that level. 2) a home backup can be fried by electrical spikes or fire and then you lose the backup and the primary. 3) a home server is size restricted by disk size array.
My concern with cloud storage with a single provider stems from two major things I’ve seen.
what happened with Amazon cloud drive and 2) my sister’s account was locked by Google because her account was associated with spam. Thing is she wasn’t spamming anyone. Lol. she’s an attorney and lost a lot of client data. To this day we have no idea how or what caused that as Google wouldn’t tell her and wouldn’t unlock her account. If you Google this, you will see this has happened to others. After a month of trying she finally created a new account and lost all her personal/business things stored on her other one.
Lesson, you can lose your data at a cloud provider just like you can lose all your data stored at home. Always have a primary, backup, and second backup.
Thanks a lot. Very interesting, unfortunately.
Lesson learned 1: never trust just a unique source. OK.
Lesson learned 2: use two different technology.
In this way having primary at home and backup on GDrive, it is more than OK.
If I would remove the primary at home, then I have to find a second store on the cloud different than Gdrive.
Gdrive cost 12 $/month for unlimited (with 10 TB I am ok) and I am ok with the price.
The other store on the cloud should cost less or not more than an home backup (more ore less the same cost as Gdrive) and need to be in sync with Gdrive.
The only providers that I’ve found in that price point for that much data is google drive. dropbox is close if you share the access across 3 user accounts at $20 a user. for unlimited.
You could accept the risk of a single provider on different gsuites and hope google never enforces the 5 user minimum. There aren’t a lot of options at that price per gig.