Very good - free to up to 3x what you store. So if you store 100TB you can download 300TB per month. After it is "usual" $0.01
How does the free egress policy in IDrive® e2 work?
The free egress policy in IDrive® e2 is designed to ensure that users can store, download, and access data at a reasonable rate without burdening our service. Here are the guidelines used to determine a good fit use case for e2's egress policy.
Good fit - If the monthly egress (download) is less than or equal to thrice the storage volume.
Example: If you store 100 TB with IDrive® e2 and download 300 TB or less within a monthly billing cycle, then your storage use case is a good fit for our policy.
Note:
If your use case exceeds the guidelines of our free egress policy, we reserve the right to charge $0.01/GB/Month. In the case of free accounts, your account will be suspended.
Up to 10 Gbps connection speed available for egress.
Yes. And it is proper S3 storage. No limit on number of buckets, no limit on number of objects, max. object size 5TB.
No API throttling nonsense, no minimum charge per object (AWS charges 4KiB minimum for example - I saw people shocked when they saw billing when storing tones of tiny files) etc.
If you do test them, would be very nice to post the rclone config, any restrictions related to S3 (I am not familiar with it outside extremely basic use case), anything that might help a fellow rclone user, as it does look like the most sane choice for XX TBs of storage.
Some people have mentioned there are businesses that run on cheap unlimited storage. That is true and can work to some certain degree.
However most people will only know about well-known companies (google, dropbox etc.) which often addresses regular consumers. There are b2b companies that offer unlimited storage and some have unlimited storage basically hidden in their portfolio. The cheapest I know starts at 50$/m at yearly terms. But most often you will see 150-250$/m for unlimited storage.
Those prices are obviously not interesting for any regular datahoarder nor are the prices in most cases publicly displayed (get a quote). The products those companies sell include way more that businesses actually need.
So in the end most businesses can be safe. All those excessive hoarders or rather abuser simply ruin it for smaller hoarders or genuine people. Lots of people take dozens of pictures or make videos and ever since 4k reached the mainstream the storage needs increased significantly. Just think of all those people that had camcorders last century and all those boxes full of memories.
I have called them. Apparently they do not offer custom plans. So it's either 100TB or 200TB.
While I understand the need to provision ahead, if agreeing to a custom plan before subscribing this approach seems really counterintuitive to me.
And the solution offered is to pay $4 per extra TB on a monthly basis. Which leads to a $48TB yearly cost, almost 2.5 times the standard plans costs. How can this be thought as reasonable is beyond my understanding.
I wonder whether among the tons of functionalities offered by rclone there is one to create some sort of JBOD among different accounts. That would make everything better in this regard. Since one could buy lower tiers to increase more granularly their storage.
Edit: a quick search brought me here Union and here Combine
I don't understand the difference between the two solutions and I don't know whether the resulting "merge" would then be mountable normally.
A search for JBOD did not provide much on the forums.
Yes so iDrive lacks plans flexibility. Still with 200TB plan and only storing 140TB it is $2.4/TB/month beating other providers. With B2 it would cost $5 + extras like transactions and egress. Wasabi $7 + extras.
Everybody has to do own maths and decide.
Yes there is union remote - it potentially could do the trick. But it has its own issues.
Combine only "combines" two or more remotes. So you can have remote:
/
- dir1
- dir2
where dir1 is on one remote and dir2 on another.
With union you can have dir1 and dir2 on both remotes. when you save new file union can be configured to randomly (or other rule) decide where to write it. It effectively makes two remote to act as one.
Actually I see the reason behind it. pay-as-you-go requires maintaining free capacity nobody pays for. You can upload 100TB and delete it next week.. With yearly plan provider knows what to reserve and it is paid for upfront.
With 100TB vs 200TB plans it means that if you have 100TB and go over with pay-as-you-go then 200TB plan is only cheaper when you store more than 142TB. No point of switching earlier.
Yes maybe iDrive won't be for everybody. But with a bit planning can meet most people requirements I think. Especially for lower tiers if you have anything between 5TB and 50TB where plans increase gradually by 10TB (you can always upgrade your plan when needed and they only charge difference in given billing cycle)
And if you reach your plan limit $4 is still competitive pricing - especially if it is only for overspill over your plan quota. Then is time to decide if upgrade plan or not.
Sure, I wasn't dissing the service. My main point is if one goes in already knowing they need more than 100TB but significantly less than 200TB. In that case they could plan ahead just the same for, say, a 120TB annual plan.
For the start more union members you add slower everything becomes. As when you ask for a file all remotes have to be checked where it is... 2 or 3 should be ok but with 10 it will be noticeable.
Secondly only rule here applicable where to create new content is random - as S3 does not have concept of free space (many other rules are like put file to remote with most free space etc.). It means that you can't mix 100TB plan remote and 50TB one... and forget it.
Everything depends at the end how you use your data. As you could always fill to the brim one remote then make it "no new content - :nc" here and add another one to the union.
Many options here:) in your 120TB example. If you have 20TB of data you know it never changes then I would put it in 20TB plan - made it :nc, and add 100TB read write second union member.
Overall it is a lot of extra planning and maintenance.
Let's forget about AWS, Azure, GCS - they are fantastic enterprise solutions with plenty of features most people do not need and have no reason to pay for. So it is not apple to apple comparison. Also let's forget all "unlimited" options. They make any comparison impossible - and doubt will be around for long.
Now storj is fantastic concept and very clever technology behind it. But price wise it is nothing special.
Roughly estimates for 50TB local NAS (RAIDZ2) is about $3,000 - TrueNas mini or Synology - going DYI you can do this even cheaper. To have proper solution I need two NAS machines - one off-site. There is electricity and sometimes things break. All together for 10 years it is $10,000 - $1000 per year.
This is what I use as a baseline when I compare cloud storage prices.
With Storj to store 50TB would cost me $2,400 per year, and if I download my data a lot - lets say 50TB download - another $4,200 per year. Total = $6600 per year.... or more...every year. You can buy two high quality 50TB NAS machines for this... every year:)
For me cloud storage becomes competitive when buying NAS is too much.
We discussed iDrive here. To store 50TB it cost me $1000 a year... this starts to be interesting vs buying NAS. And no egress fees.
Only when prices drop even further to something like $1/TB/month ($600 for 50TB per year) it will be no-brainer to go cloud vs local NAS. At the moment financially cloud makes sense only for small amount of data as a place to keep most valuable data off-site.
Only AWS Deep Glacier meets my price requirement - and indeed it is what I use for long term backup. It cost the same as buying local NAS for 50TB - and I have nothing to maintain:)
EDIT: I checked prices - for 50TB high quality NAS it is rather $4000 - e.g. TrueNas mini R with 12 bays ($2000) and 5x 20TB disks ($2000) - 60TB free raw capacity with RAIDZ2 - 50TB usable. Still it makes storj very expensive in comparison.
Storj is realy bad for this purpose. Take a look at this egress fees, its terrible terrible expensive. If you compare Backblaze B2 is much cheaper at all.
