Yeah they increased my price to $20 USD per month per user. I did my calculation using that.
The UK price per user per month is significantly higher than the US at the equivalent of over $29.
Shame on him/her, and thanks for letting us know. In my book, deleting other people's data without giving them a chance to copy it somewhere else is as sin right next to cannibalism and selling one's own mother to a Cairo bordel.
This is The Way.
I'm doing it myself, but then we buy into a entirely different set of problems: having to sysop that infrastructure, provision spare hardware in advance of failures, read logs/set up alerts, worry about power (consumption, stability, cleaness), physical security, etc.
Oh well. But as Popper once wrote, "All life is problem-solving" (and in more ways then he originally meant)
If that's indeed the case, it would not be a problem for me: most of my data obeys the "WORM" (Write Once Read Many) access pattern, and a lot of it even WORN (Write Once, Read Never ).
The problem is that I've been reading about glass/quartz laser-encoded storage since 1992 or so (after a great article published at Byte Magazine at the time). That article predicted it would put hard disks and magnetic tapes out of business, and would be in the market "in just a few years"... and here we are, over 32 years later and the old is made new again...
Moreover, I would not trust my data to a corrupt and incompetent company like Microsoft, ever. May they go eff themselves in the lake and go burn in hell, not necessarily in that order...
Sorry to hear about it It never fails to astonish me how the Brits are still getting effed over the complete disaster that BrExit was...
I agree that Brexit is a total disaster but unfortunately it cannot be blamed for Google gouging customers in the UK.
You sure? Last time I checked BrExit was getting blamed even for the rise of tides and the African sparrow extinction...
Totally correct man , I would trust idrive or IBM ¿but microsoft ? .the inventors of clippy the assistant. nahhh I ain't that crazy.
And Clippy is the least of their messes...
There is still no valid Google alterenative, right?
Some people find Telegram to be an alternative, it offers unlimited cloud storage free of charge.
Telegram Terms of Service: unlimited cloud storage
I.e. the teldrive project makes the telegram storage accessible using rclone; a lot of people have 100s of TBs there.
The buts are that transfers are rather slow (2-5MB/s), and that you will probably have to start over if Telegram should kick your account for unspecified reasons.
And if you skim this thread, you will find that some people have concluded that the only currently valid alternative is putting up your own storage
No thats complete dog shit sry. But teledrive is not a solution at all, just a gamble until telegram delete all data and acoounts and stoped abusing the service.
I mean real alternatives with fair prices but wasabi and idrive are still to expensive.
Not sure why you would call local storage complete dog shit.
But yeah, if you don't particularly enjoy getting kicked, then Telegram might not be for you
So far I haven't heard of any kicks related to storage though, the kicks appear to be mostly about the use of non-regular phone numbers. Some voip number and other virtual number ranges are more or less automatically suspected of being used for illegal purposes.
And yes, nothing beats Google with regards to prices. The 5TB increase/user/90 days leaves the competitors in the dust.
Just putting this idea out there and it need more thought.
Has anyone thought about or worked up to what would be required to do a colocation storage solution?
Quick back up the napkin idea/math:
- Refurbished or ebay Dell R730xd 12x3.5” Bays: ~$850USD
- WD 20TB Reds: ~$585USD
- Colocation service (Smart Ape) 2RU|1000W| Unlimited 1000mbps: ~$354USD/Month
Upfront cost ~$656/Drive Slot, ongoing ~$30/Drive Slot or upfront ~$33/TB, ongoing ~$0.7/TB (no RAID setup, JBOD)
The upfront cost is a killer if you where to do it by yourself ~$7,600USD, but sharing could work.
If anyone is interested more than happy to hash it out and turn it into a full fledged idea as there are some hurdles to overcome. (maybe start a new thread and link me in)
For that price, simply rent a Hetzner storage server. For 340 euros you get the server in there, with hardware warranty, A W-2145 Intel CPU, 256gb ECC RAM, 2x3TB SSD and 14x16TB HDD for your data.
Or OVH for $282 a Ryzen 5 Pro 3600, 128GB ECC RAM, 2x512GB SSD and 6x12 HDD.
Personally, it makes sense to self host if you got the connection at home and do not need Colo, otherwise even a drive failure will be a headache to buy a new one, ship it, and pay to have it replaced vs just opening a ticket. Also to whoever is going local, RAID is not backup and ideally you want an offsite backup copy as well...
I'm slowly building my own solution, will buy new hardware and send my current/old to my parents house basement for offsite. We both have unlimited gbit internet and will do initial sync in same network and drive the hardware. Do some RAID on both sides and keep an additional copy in the cloud for the "can't lose data" for that additional security copy.
I am not quite sure what you think such amounts of cloud storage costs the provider?
The only thing which is absurd is, that a lot of people think they can use hundrets of TB for less then 20usd/month.
Those people are the reason everything is shutting down - so YOU are part of the problem.
Why do you need 125TB anyhow if you cant afford it? If the price is absurd, why do you not just make a local setup - it will be much cheaper, will it? lol.....
Our team got the 5 years plan with dropbox and we are pretty happy about their offer. we have roughly 35tb per person for a decent price of ~20usd/month.
I'm not @mylogon, but I feel his/her pain -- so here's my response, based on one of the less expensive rclone-compatible metered providers out there (iDrive e2):
-
They charge $3000 anually for 100TB (forget the $1500/year initial price as no one is going to the effort of uploading 100TB of data to stay in the service for just 1 year, and I'm sick and tired of bait-and-switches).
-
For less than $2712 total, I can buy:
- 14 x 16TB disks at $150 each, $2100 total Amazon.com
- 2 x 10-port USB3 hubs at $36 each, $72 total Amazon.com
- 1 x 16GB RAM mini PC at $200 total Amazon.com
- 2 x 8-outlet, 1000W manageable UPS at $170. total $340 Amazon.com
Grand total: $2712
And this is for nothing less than 224TB total raw disk capacity (and 160TB net capacity if you organize it as 2*(5+2) RAID6/raidz2 for very reasonable redundancy plus performance.
If you put this in a friend's or relative's home, with the remaining $284, I'm pretty sure you'd be able to pay for all the electricity you need, plus a good share (or upgrade) of whatever internet provider your friend/relative uses right now.
And this is just for the fist year... afterwards, you only pay for the electricity/internet.
And this is for NEW stuff, available right off the shelf, right away: order today and it gets delivered to your home in 2 days, with Amazon's no-questions-asked 30-day returns in case you don't like any of it. If you hunt for promotions and/or buy used/refurbished, it's bound to cost a LOT less.
And most of it (and specially the disks, which by having the most moving parts, are the most susceptible to break) comes with 2+ years of warranty.
So let's say (for argument's sake) the above lasts for just 2 years, and then you have to throw it all away and buy it all again new... you pay $3000 total for first year, and then just $284 (electricity+internet) for year 2. Total for 2 years: $3284.
iDrive for just 100TB (much smaller than the 160TB you'd get above) would cost $1500+$3000 = $4500.
So this is why I consider current storage provider prices to be absurd: a hobbyst, buying new stuff off-the-shelf on Amazon, with NO bargain hunting and NO gains of scale, and with absolutely minimum effort, can provide 60% more storage than iDrive, for 37% less money.
And that's why I'm going that route myself. Please wake me up when these providers decide to be a bit less price-gouging and start providing at least the same cost/TB than I can do myself in my basement...

and then just $284 (electricity+internet) for year 2
I am absolutley not sure in which world you are living.
i am from europe and a setup with 14x 16TB Disks which would consume around 70W-100W in idle will cost about 200-350€ for electricity only. lets say you will end up with 90W in the long run, ~70W idle + much more when using it.
In the US the current electricity price is around 19cent per kwh, which would be basically only 150usd per year for the elecricity - even in the US.
Now we are coming to the internet provider.
The maximum i can get where i am living is 1000/500Mbit which would cost me a bit more then 100USD per month (83€ + service fee per month) and i will only have 500Mbit upload (i dont care about the download speed to much)
What you are saying is that you can have electricity + internet for 284usd per year? 24usd per month? really?
Nope, i do not believe that.
and comparing a mini PC with 14 usb harddrives to a real cloud storage with 10k SAS drives is some kind of a joke.
You could maybe compare it if you would buy serious server hardware, but you will need to pay a lot more if you like to have 14 SAS/SATA Ports.
By the way, you are paying for the time it takes to maintenance everything as well. if something is failing, it can be very time consuming.
Overall, i would go the "real" (not such a joking external usb harddrive way) homeserver way if i would be able to actually get at least 1000/1000Mbit for less then 50USD/Month.
BTW: your 16TB usb drives looking like the cheapest trash and even the details are wrong. in the packaging list is something written about 18TB. For a real reliable setup i would buy NAS drives, Seagate EXOS or similar and you cant get those for less then 14-16USD/TB.
choosing the cheapest crap and then comparing it to real cloud storage is not the way, just my opinion.
Edit: i just checked the world internet costs comparison and in the USA the avarage internet price is 0.45USD per Mbit, which is much more than i thought, just around 15% less compared to my country but very depending on where you actually living ofc. Never the less, 284usd per year for both, internet and electricity is a joke of course. with a decent connection you will end up paying 70-80usd per MONTH.
I have several vServers and can easily have hundrets of megabyte per seconds up and down to my dropbox in parallel (around 120MB/s per 2.5gbit server up and down, i do not get more even with 10gbit servers)
you would never go anywhere close to those values with your external harddrive setup, even if you would have a 10Gbit syncro connection, as your mini-pc only has a 1gbit port, which gives you an output of not more then ~800mbit == 100MB/s maximum (!) and buying a 10Gbit server structure is much more expensive...
Realistically, there are no unlimited options that aren't insanely expensive or don't have hidden "un-limits".
Jottacloud is about the best option for up to about 5-6TB. Otherwise either resign yourself to paying big bucks, or build a decent home storage server (also big bucks).