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

Thanks D for the update! Keep us posted on your tests! BTW Do you see any option on their panel to choose a specific region? Or they have only the US right now? How's latency and U/D speeds? Where their servers are located?

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You are welcome, and will do!

BTW Do you see any option on their panel to choose a specific region? [...] Where their servers are located?

On their activation email they provided me with two "Endpoints", one called "America" and the other "Europe". From its hostname the first one would be in the US (but see below), and a traceroute to it indicates it's indeed in the whatbox.ca domain (as @mvjunkie had previously indicated) and this is also confirmed by WHOIS. Geolocation for the respective IP indicates it's somewhere in Toronto, Canada.

For the Europe address, the hostname indicates it's in NL, and both the traceroute and the WHOIS info on the IP validate that, and additionaly I can see it's also (colocated?) at whatbox.ca, while geolocation places it in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

From my initial testing, I can see the US location has ~10ms average ICMP RTTs from my NYC test point. Upload/Download speeds seem capped not by Quotaless but by limitations on my test point itself, at about 10MB/s both upload and download.

EDIT: forgot to mention that their NL location is apparently non-responsive right now, rclone is reporting "connection refused" errors when trying to connect to its endpoint. Opened a ticket, let's see how they respond.

They responded in ~16 minutes with "Please refresh your computer's DNS cache and try again", which I did, and it's now working. Better support than I've seen during the weekend!

If this is on Whatbox.ca systems then this seems expensive. Quotaless.cloud site says it's 60 euros for 10TB plus 20 euros setup. On whatbox.ca you can get 21.7 TB for 59 euros with no setup fee.

Unless I'm misunderstanding...which is possible!

Thanks for pointing that out, I wasn't aware that whatbox.ca was also a cloud storage provider -- which I can now see that they are: Plans ยท Whatbox

The difference is that the Quotaless EUR 60/mo fee is for "unlimited" -- over 10TB you only pay the initial EUR 20/10TB setup fee. And on whatbox.ca (according to URL above), the largest they sell is 21.70 TB for CAN 64 (~EUR 44), so for eg 40TB you'd in principle have to pay 44+44= $88/mo. That's why I stated a few posts back that Quotaless prices started looking interesting for those storing about 30TB or more.

To add to this whole quotaless scenario, I went through the process of acting like I was gonna purchase storage plus a 1 month membership. It gives me the correct total, and then the only way you can pay is via PayPal. Ok I thought, lets see where this goes. Click on the pay now via PayPal link, and it brings up my order, but I notice the payment is NOT being sent to any company name or anything, it said "you are sending $xxx.xx" to a personal proton e-mail address.
That is a little suspect. I did not complete the order.

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You can backup anything thats attached to your computer. It is an "endpoint" enterprise backup software. You can backup everything on your computer ( which would include all external drives, any network shares, etc)

I know this software is not supported by rclone, but the general consensus of this topic is "where can I store my data now", so im throwing this option out there. When you download the companys own program, before you click download, there is a box that says "set my own encryption key". The TOS states if you do NOT set your own, and they detect something funny, they CAN see you files and will go through them. Setting your own eliminates them from seeing your files, all they can see is your total usage.

Im on the 7 day free trial and its almost up, but im going to renew it for 1 month @$10.00 to see how it goes.

For me, this is just a backup of my TrueNAS server, backing it up via a network share. I do have redundancy in TrueNAS, but you can never to be too safe with your data.

As far as backing up external drives, then removing them etc. The software will detect the folder as "missing", but it wont delete the files if you turn off automatic clean-up in settings. I also removed all the exceptions for types of files it did not want to back up, so now, it backs up every file I have.

The key to keeping data that has been backed up from a source that is no longer present is to never delete the location from the backup locations you put in.

For example, I started a backup of a single folder on my NAS. Worked great. Then I wanted to just do the whole server, so I de-selected the folder for backup, and then selected the entire network drive letter. When I started the backup, it still said I had 8TB stored even tho I was not currently backing up that old location anymore.

Anyways, I get about 2gbps upload speed from home ( im on 5gbps fiber ), and im at 50TB with 20 more to go, so far, no issues.

I have multiple locations where my data is backed up, if this is another viable option just to have more peace of mind, its worth the price IMO.

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Wait. Wouldn't my Google Drive mount appear as a network share to iDrive? Hmm. Wonder if I should try to back it up and test my new 50Gbit fiber. Dont want to break their unlimited though.

Yes, the software can see mounts. I have several mounts as folders, and it see inside the folders and download the data to be backed up to their servers.

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You just said the quiet part out loud! :rofl:

Thanks for the greatly detailed answer, @mvjunkie! Much appreciated! :+1: :+1: :+1:

A couple of questions/observations:

The problem with proprietary software is that you never know if there's a backdoor built into the encryption, or (even more difficult to detect) if the encryption was (purposefully or not) weakened (eg, by using a not-so-random PRNG for the keys) so it can be trivially broken by anyone that knows the flaw is present.

Depending on what data you have and/or on your privacy concerns, this can be a real showstopper.

One solution would be to use rclone in some kind of "reverse encryption" mode, where you define a remote on top of a local dirtree (containing plain data) and accessing this remote gives you an "encrypted view" of that local dirtree; this remote could then be rclone mounted and given to the proprietary backup software as the place to backup.

@ncw, @kapitainsky (or anyone knowing more than me), is there already a way to do anything like this with rclone, or is it something new that would have to be implemented?

continuing:

Well done. For anyone else reading this (as you apparently knows it already): the golden standard for any data that we don't want to lose is 2 local copies and one remote copy. Redundancy is not exactly "2 local copies" as it doesn't protect you from rogue programs (eg, ransomware) nor operator errors, but (using ZFS) it's pretty easy to make it so with judicious use of zpool checkpoint or zfs snapshot (a friend of mine once survived a ransomware attack via his pools' automatic ZFS snapshots).

You mean, to never delete them from the backup program configuration, right?

Well, you could use encrypted containers like VeraCrypt.

Another option is to have a home server that you do backups to via something like Duplicati, which encrypts them and keeps old versions. Then you can just have the encrypted backups uploaded to iDrive or wherever.

Correct. Lets say you had a folder selected to be backed up to the cloud, it completes, and you delete the local folder to free up space. When you go into your dashboard after deleting it, it will say folder empty or can locate destination. Thats ok, as long as its still selected/listed to backup it will remain in the cloud. 2 ways to ensure the data stays in the cloud. Make sure its still in your listed locations to backup. Next, is to go into settings and turn off automatic clean-up, which removes files from the cloud if they are not present on your local device. There are lots of settings to tinker with, another one to make sure is ticked is one that says upload multiple files at once, and also in settings and goto "throttle" and turn the network throttle up to 100%. This will help get the best possible speeds by using multiple threads when uploading.

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The problem is that I would then duplicate my local storage needs (one for the plain data, and another for the encrypted backup). OK, I could delete the encrypted backup after uploading, but to restore from it I would have first to download it entirely, which is also not very convenient.

With rclone, I could use the cryptdecode --reverse on top of of the directory/file name I want to restore, and then tell the proprietary backup to restore just that directory/file. Or am I missing something?

sssshhhh :sunglasses:

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If only they added Fireload
I guess people would have to donate to have it added, saw a post that it did have an API but i have no clue.
36 dollars/m for 100TB, many here seem to have a huge amount to store so maybe that might have been a good option!
If not enough maybe 2-3 accounts :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Just for reference, it's only 5TB and $8.25 per additional TB.

Oh damn you are right, i thought it started at 100TB.
Might not be an option then for you guys with such big storage needs..

It looks like you know your stuff. Would love to read more on your setup!

Which two USB enclosures did you get? Trying to start from scratch and would love to just get something that its proven to work.