Given the current "enshittification" of Google in general and GoogleDrive in particular, I'm looking for alternatives for my currently ~35TB of data; I know nothing is truly "unlimited", but I mean for that volume of data and working reasonably well, ie not throttling access speed to unusability, not frequently erroring out for no reason, and specially not eating my data. Here's what I've seen so far:
Dropbox: highly recommended by our own @Animosity022, apparently can be had for $72/mo (3 users at $24/user in the "Advanced" plan). But I'm worried about this (the part that concerns me is "same policy as Dropbox, once you reach the storage limit, if you are an enterprise standard or higher user with 5 or more users, they will increase storage upon request, but it will be up to [their] discretion on how much storage you will get." Is that actually how things are working with Dropbox?
Opendrive: $9.99/mo for "unlimited", but with the small letters stating that "Mass storage of media libraries and NAS/SAN devices not permitted on this plan"; interpreted strictly, that is not the case: I'm certainly not storing any NAS/SAN data there as I don't own any, and re: "media libraries", as all my data is stored encrypted, it's totally opaque to them whether any of these files are "media" or not (and most are not, BTW -- they are basically backups of my personal machines, which may contain "media" files but most files are otherwise).
LayerOnLine: $11/mo for "Unlimited Google Drive". They seem to be some sort of Google reseller, not sure if/how they're being affected by the latest GoogleDrive changes. In the past I asked here about these guys, but no one replied. They seem to have a good reputation on Reddit (eg 1, 2, 3), but these testimonies are kinda old -- I will ask for an update there and report my findings here.
All other options I've seen so far are either too expensive (Wasabi, Backblaze B2, let's not even mention Amazon S3) or already totally enshittified (Jottacloud).
Currently in the same boat, and have been testing.
OpenDrive - Far too slow, hovers around 10mbps
FireLoad - Cannot upload more than 100GB
ShareFile - Service begins to fail after uploading a few TB. (Per support, this is typical, and is meant for under 10TB per org)
DropBox - Currently testing, however support seems OK with giving out 100TB of space for an initial transfer. (Will reply my findings)
LayerOnLine - Going to test, though I suspect this is now limited to the 150GB shared drive limit.
In the interim, I've been using Storj, seems to be the most reasonable of the many block based options.
Hi @Turner, thanks for sharing your experiences. A few questions/comments:
This souds very promising, as I don't predict I will need more than 100TB in the short/medium term. Can you please tell us what kind of plan and how many users are you paying for?
(Will reply my findings)
Looking forward to that, TIA!
I'm very interested in hearing about anything you find about them, please keep me posted.
Wasn't aware of StorJ, thanks for bringing them up! I just checked and they charge $4/TB/Mo, which while still economical when compared with the $5/TB/Mo and up the rest of the S3-clone crowd (Backblaze S2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2, Contabo, etc) charge, is still way too expensive in my case: for my current 35TB of data, their price adds up to $140/mo, and this means that in less than 11 months I'd have more than enough money to buy 4 x 20TB drives like this and assemble a 40TB 4-disk-raidz2 NAS at a friend's house and store all my data there (I already have the rest of the hardware, and the friend ) But I was pleasantly surprised to see they allowed me to create an account with only my email address (no credit card 'we won't ever NEVER ever charge you' BS) and therefore they might be interesting for a couple of smaller projects. Thanks again for mentioning them!
Still about StorJ, they mention a $7/TB bandwidth cost. Does this mean I would have to pay 35*7= $245 just to upload my data in there?
Please keep us posted on your further findings on these matters!
Also interested in other options, have close to 100tb and the most likely candidate seems to be Dropbox, I will probably get the service and offer here the other 2 slots when the time comes, my library is only media that can be downloaded/uploaded again if necessary, I have enough local storage for the personal stuff
Some years ago I signed for an unlimited Opendrive account.
Needless to say, when I had about 10 TB of data on my account, they started to complain about the amount of data I was storing there, so better forget about it. It wasn't the fastest service, BTW.
I'm looking at sync.com ($15/month unlimited data). Reviews out there are good, but I have not seen that service mentioned here... No specific rclone remote AFAIK, also.
Also interested in learning this, but there shouldn't: Dropbox themselves refer to "Dropbox for Teams" and us, 'Team Rclone", AFAICS are not forced to belong to the same country, company or whatever...
As far as I know, no, you could have an organization with members around the globe anyway, it would be a bad restriction (but understandable I suppose).
I think there was another thread with people trying to coordinate the same though, in case someone needs to get one sooner, since workspace is still working perfectly fine for me, is difficult to tell when they'll screw me
The price is great, but I just checked and found this: How does unlimited storage work?
The part I found most annoying was that: "300,000 (per user account). Syncing performance may be slower with over 300,000 files per user."
Depending on how much "slower" going over 300k files gets, this would be a major issue for me as I have over 13M files right now...
This is a major show-stopper for me -- no rclone, no deal Also, I checked and it doesn't apparently publish its own API, much less support a standard one like S3... so the prospect of ever having rclone for them is even more remote. But thanks for bringing them up anyway.
The Sync desktop app and web panel: Sync performance can get slower with more than 300,000 files in Sync. This is not a hard limit, and depends on the hardware specifications of the computer running the app (or web browser), as well as network speed, nested folder structure, and frequency of syncing activity. Many customers successfully sync more files without issue.
Also to note, there is a hard limit of 100,000 files per folder (but you can create an unlimited number of folders).
It seems that they are talking about a technical limitation, but that "this is not a hard limit".
Worst thing IMO is
What is the maximum transfer speed?
40 Megabits per second (5 Megabytes per second).
Nothing close to the astonishing Drive speed.
I've also seen box.com (https://www.box.com/pricing). They offer unlimited storage for $15/month or $180/year. The webpage has no info about how their unlimited plan works. rclone includes a box.com remote.
Paid for the first month of DropBox $90 ($30/User Min 3 users) and support was able to bump me up to 100TB for initial transfer. When your account gets close to being full, the platform will auto add 1TB at a time for you. (So you don't need to contact support)
Speed is stunning, just like GDrive.
Be sure to self encrypt any content you store on DropBox (Or any service really) -- they check hashes on everything. Can also increase in cost at any time. (But what web service can't?)
LayerOnLine - A shared Google Drive account (Not a Teams Drive) Not sure how long it'll last, but no storage limit. (Limited to 750GB daily Upload & Download)
Storj - This was just a place to store my files until I could get DropBox (Or an alternative) It is my understanding you only pay for Bandwidth out.
They also require at least three users on the plan, like Dropbox. There's also a 5 GB per-file size limit, although if you plan to break files into sub-5GB chunks using chunker it shouldn't be a problem. I have never used their service, and I don't really know anyone to share a subscription with, but it might be a valid option for some users.
Thanks for the additional details re: sync.com. But regardless, given its lack of rclone support and dim probability of ever getting it, it's out of the game from the start...
Dropbox indeed seems to be the way so far.
And yes, I do always encrypt everything, not necessarily to avoid hash-matching but just as a general keep-the-providers-grubby-eyes-outta-my-data..
I think you'd get a more authoritative/reliable answer from Dropbox itself (ie, opening a ticket there). Besides being more authoritative/reliable, it would also allow you to gauge how responsive their support is (a very important quality in any paid service IMHO).
Whichever way you go, please continue to keep us posted.
Welcome to our community and forum, may your stay here be fun and productive!
Just checked and they charge $0.015/GB/Mo -- outrageously expensive and wayway over the competition which is charging from $4/TB/Mo and up (ie, $0.004/GB/Mo, less than a third of rsync.net's price)
Backblaze B2 too
Already covered and discarded as too expensive, but thanks.
There are also workarounds like using a private telegram chat or files encoded in unlisted YouTube videos, but those are much harder to automate.
The worst part of these "workarounds" IMHO is unreliability, and this misses the whole point of cloud storage as a backup, because when accessing a backup is needed, it's really needed -- failure is not an option at all.
$15/mo for unlimited would be a great price! Thanks for pointing them out.
OK, So 153= $45/mo for unlimited. Still cheaper than Dropbox at 243= $72/mo.
There's also a 5 GB per-file size limit, although if you plan to break files into sub-5GB chunks using chunker it shouldn't be a problem.
For my use case, the vast majority of files is under that limit -- so for those that are above it (only 172 in over 18M files), I could also split them locally before uploading them and avoid adding yet another layer to my remote...
I have never used their service, and I don't really know anyone to share a subscription with, but it might be a valid option for some users.
[...] if you [...] Copy the config file with a box refresh token in and use it in two places
then rclone will return an error which includes the text Invalid refresh token.
AFAICS, this is just like Jottacloud and the main reason their service was unusable for me (I routinely access my remotes from more than one machine.
) But I was pleasantly surprised to see they allowed me to create an account with only my email address (no credit card 'we won't ever NEVER ever charge you' BS) and therefore they might be interesting for a couple of smaller projects. Thanks again for mentioning them!
Also, I checked and it doesn't apparently publish its own API, much less support a standard one like S3... so the prospect of ever having rclone for them is even more remote. But thanks for bringing them up anyway.
