"Unlimited" alternatives to Google Drive, what are the options?

Off Topic
1432

Sure, not free -- TAANSTAFL and all that.

But they don't need to be "9-10": with just 5x 20TB disks you get 100TB, add 2 more and then you can do a 7x20TB raidz2/RAID6, where you can lose 2 entire disks before losing any data.

And they don't to need to be NAS disks either: if your bottleneck is going to be the Internet (as I suppose it will always be the case for most of us), the reduced speed of a CMR consumer disk (and at 5400RPM if you can find one as they're bound to consume way less energy, as I previously posted) is more than enough, unless you have multi-gigabit FTTH at both the remote point and at your home (definitely not my case here ;-)).

1433

Not necessarily -- they could be banking on the hypothesis that many (most?) people will have less than 30TB (which would be the magical $2/TB/mo corresponding to their EUR 60 monthly charge), and use the excess (plus the one-time 10TB fees) to pay for the ones consuming more than that.

And if that doesn't work, then eventually they could raise prices -- they are certainly not obliged to charge the same EU 60/mo from here to eternity.

I just hope they do it in a responsible and gradual manner, and not like Dropbox or Google (or worse of all, Box).

1434

No you can not. And I strongly advice not even to try. When you fill in your ZFS/BTRFS file system to the rim you will destroy its performance forever. Then only solution will be to start from scratch. And actually performance degradation will be very dramatic.

20% of free space - always - is what is needed to maintain FS health. And ZFS is extremely unforgettable in this case. You reach 5% free - you will have system so slow you will be surprised. You can then delete all data. Performance will never come back. Unless you send snapshot to other ZFS system, reset all and restore it back.

Unless you have multiple 100s of TB storages you can shuffle data between and fix it.

1435

I'm not so sure about unRAID... convenient, yes, but proprietary -- and I avoid proprietary like the plague, specially for data storage, due to all the reasons.

Me, I'm sticking with ZFS.

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1436

Me too:) I do not want to sound patronizing here but ZFS is enterprise class FS and to use it at home requires a lot of learning and admin job. It is IMO the best FS you can use today. But it does not make admin life easy:) Unless you play very conservative.

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1437

That "at least 20% free" advice for ZFS has long been history -- nowadays it's 10%, and what happens at this point is that ZFS changes its allocation strategy and starts to slow down new writes -- but it's still far from unusable. Here, I fill my archive disks up to 95% (and yes, I could change a parameter (in the ZFS kernel module IIRC) to change those 5% reservation to something even smaller, but I have so far refrained from doing it (I may be crazy but I try not to be too stupid :smiley: )

In that scenario and using RAIDZ2, an 8-disk 20TB set will give you way more than 100TB.

And yes, of course you can do RAIDZ3. But I've been surviving disk failures with RAIDZ2 in some really large arrays (like 8x 10TB ones) with no issues, and IME as long as you keep an eye on the logs, run your SMART diagnostics frequently and can get a spare disk quickly (no need to have one in hand when Amazon can deliver in in less than a day), you should be good as it's extreme bad luck to lose more than 2 disks before managing to replace and resilver one that has failed (and that's for total failure, which isn't even the more frequent scenario: usually disks start developing bad blocks long before total failure, and should be replaced by then and not waiting until total failure).

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1438

Obviously you know what you are doing. Maybe I am too lazy to push things to such limits:)

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1439

Real-time live session transcript:

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Almost 300MB/s (and that with the pool 92% full) is good enough for me, and certainly more than good enough for internet connection speeds (where you won't be able to use more than 100MB/s anyway unless you have gigabit FTTH or something like it.

It could be pushed more, I think I could push it to 98% or 99%. But up to 95% is good enough for me, and I'm not into stressing things till they break (well, most of the time anyway :-D)

1440

Don't think that of yourself man, you know a lot of rclone , which makes you few of the people who know the difference between a Yamaha Piano and a Steinway Piano man . we both know Steinways are the best :slight_smile:

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1441

Not sure about the piano part :crazy_face: but I'm in 100% agreement about the rclone part: I've learned a lot about rclone, and continue to learn, from @kapitainsky. I've been using rclone uninterruptedly for over 8 years now, so I myself know quite a bit -- but he definitely knows more than me.

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1442

Just keeping everyone posted:

And here's the Quotaless response (received yesterday night, about 22h after creating the ticket):

My apologies for the slow reply.

We're provisioning new servers.
We'll activate your trial account as soon as possible.

An updated version of our terms of use will be published on the website shortly.

Best regards,
Quotaless support team

Today (about 36h from ticket creation) my trial account remains unactivated (so I can't do any testing) and can't find a ToS/AUP (or ToU -- first time I see that) anywhere either.

Doesn't look too good, but then perhaps they're just seeing explosive growth and working hard to keep up. Let's give them a bit more time and see what develops.

1443

Hey all just catching up on this thread - as it happens I went back to having a NAS at home again (old Qnap with truenas raidz2) and now syncing important stuff to an external 20tb drive on another computer backblaze backup - that’s where I am at in this current year

Randomly was browsing and loaded up sync.com which seems to have a “unlimited” plan for $15 a month - not much re rclone here so wondering if anybody has looked at it at all

Thanks

1 Like
1444

Welcome!

Have a look at former posts in this thread (use the search function) -- it has been commented here before. But to sum it up, rclone doesn't support it and probably never will, given sync.com's lack of a documented API.

1445

Expect uploading 20TB to take at least half a year to complete.

And that's not including the time spent cherrypicking every single file you want to sync.

Also, expect it to be impossible to retrieve your data again.

I am not sure what their enterprise offer is, I don't think it has been mentioned in this thread yet.

Can I back-up Petabytes of data?
By default, your data in Sync “synchronizes” across your computers, devices, and the people you share with. As such Sync is not suitable for large scale, one-way backups. If you have over 100 TB, or require a petabyte-scale backup solution, contact us for enterprise pricing.

2 Likes
1446

I read the document and it stated "Run from this cloud service as if it was the black plague itself"

I think for me its more than enough to make my mind that i wont ever use that.

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1447

If you are looking for straight backup, idrive 360 allows for up to 5 computers and "unlimited" storage for 5 devices. Also supports backing up smb shares. 3 days in i have 30tb uploaded. For the 1st year you get 5 devices for $79.00 with "unlimited" storage. It's only a straight backup tho. Im at 30tb now , will update later on as i pump more into it. Definitely setup your own private encryption key when deploying a device.

1 Like
1448

idrive 360 seems like a reasonable deal, but like all of these "unlimited" backup systems you have to use their crappy software with it.

I got burned by Spideroak years ago when their software couldn't handle the volume of data I was throwing at it, and I found the others like tried to be fairly terrible as well.

If they just offered rclone or Duplicati support it would be great, I'd sign up.

1 Like
1449

This is interesting, specially the part about SMB shares.

For the 1st year you get 5 devices for $79.00 with "unlimited" storage.

The price is definitely good, specially for "unlimited".

What does that mean, exactly? "only backs up files in devices directly connected to the computer being backed up" doesn't seem to be the case, as you mentioned above it also backs up files from SMB shares.

And "directly connected devices" would not be bad for my use case, as I have 2 local copies of every single thing I put "in the cloud". They are in sets (ZFS pools, to be precise) made of external hard drives, each set with something like 2TB to 10TB -- and I currently have about half a dozen such sets, which I connect to my computer when needed.

Could I use iDrive 360 to back up those drive sets? Do they have to be connected to my computer all the time? eg, if I disconnect set #1 after backing it up, then connect set #2 and back it up too, will the files in set #1 be removed from iDrive360 (ie, erased from the iDrive "cloud") just because it's no longer 'visible' as local files to the backup program?

Im at 30tb now

This is just about the volume of data I'm looking to store in the cloud, 35TB now and growing a few TB a year.

will update later on as i pump more into it.

Please keep us posted on that!

Definitely setup your own private encryption key when deploying a device.

You mean, using the iDrive client encryption? The problem here, of course, is depending on the security of proprietary software which in general have an absolutely crappy history. I would instead use my own encryption and then have iDrive back up my sets already encrypted.

1450

I never got burned by any proprietary backup software for the simple reason that I never used any :slight_smile: But I agree with you 100%, they are mostly crap and have a terrible history specially re: security.

You and me both, brother! :slight_smile: And I bet most people here too.

1451

Quotaless

So yesterday (about 48h from account creation) I received an "Your new cloud storage account" email from Quotaless containing the details for accessing their storage service both via S3/Minio and WebDAV.

No word on ToS/AUP/ToU yet.