UKH

My current method of backing up and storing thousands of photos is to have a couple of large capacity hard drives that I switch on a random basis. If one goes down I only risk losing a small number of files. My worry is that there are two types of hard drive: ones that have failed and those that are yet to fail! So I'm thinking of storing in the Cloud, I would need around 3-4TB. Does anyone have any advice, top tips or recommendations. Thanks

In reply to Ice Nine:

If you a Amazon Prime member you have unlimited storage for photos. It isn't a clever storage, ie it doesn't(as far as I can see) do incremental back ups automatically so you have to remember to do the backups and the conditions of storage could change at any time.

Dave

In reply to Ice Nine:

Create your own cloud storage which you can access from anywhere in the world. 

The initial setup fee is high but after a couple of years it pays for itself with no subscription fees. 

You have complete control and don't have to worry that the Cloud company will delete your images by mistake.

In reply to The Lemming:

How?

In reply to The Lemming:

Is it kept in your house?
If so, won't you lose everything in the event of a house fire, etc.?

In reply to FactorXXX:

You can keep it in what ever location you like. It could be your house or your place of work.

For extra redundancy, you have two options.

The cheapest is to back up your cloud storage device to an external hard drive that is kept off the same physical location as your cloud storage device.

The second option is to have two exact same cloud storage devices in different houses, towns or countries which mirror eachother.

If you followed the 3-2-1 Backup strategy then this would not be a problem with or without cloud storage.

In reply to abcdefg:

You buy yourself a Network Access Storage device which is connected to your Router. You are only limited by the complexity of the NAS box with its software features and how much storage you need.

An example off Amazon for 8tb of cloud storage would be:

Synology DS223J 2 Bay Desktop NAS, White https://amzn.eu/d/h35uPkW
 

Two of something like this

Seagate BarraCuda, 8TB, Internal Hard Drive, 3.5 Inch, SATA, 6GB/s,, 5,400 RPM, 256MB Cache, for Computer Desktop PC, FFP (ST8000DMZ04/004). https://amzn.eu/d/2P7gFiI

This would initially set you back about £450 ish for 8tb storage of what ever you want. It’s your personal cloud so you can have photos, music, movies and personal documents at your fingertips from anywhere in the world.

A quick Google shows that BT gives 50tb at £3 a month.

This may be a cheaper alternative with little investment apart from not knowing if your data will be deleted should you forget to pay or the service stops at some point.

But it’s an option

In reply to The Lemming:

It’s 50gb which is nothing nowadays.

In reply to Mike-W-99:

I thought it was Terabytes not giga.

Makes a home solution all the more cost effective after initial outlay of cash.

In reply to Ice Nine:

In the UK my "broadband" upload speed is about 8 Mbps on a good day. To upload 4 TB would take me 1 month, 19 days and 22 hours! 

In reply to The Lemming:

I bought one of those, it bricked just out of warranty. Fortunately I didn’t have anything important on it so no need to extract the drives from it.

MS one drive or Apple cloud seem easy to use depending how much you need to buy, but depend on a reliable internet connection. Lightroom automatically backs up its catalog to one drive. I may consider paying for more storage to back up my photos too

My current solution is to use a number of portable SSDs and I will still do so if going to one drive

In reply to Ice Nine:

I'm interested in your question, for the same reasons as you give in your OP.

Just googling now, I see that Amazon Prime claims to give unlimited photo storage. That could be worth investigating.

In reply to kevin stephens:

How long ago did this NAS box die?

And are you up for a good old fashioned fight with your Consumer Rights Act 2015.

Basically something has to be fir for purpose and last a reasonable amount of time. The Consumer Rights Act allows for up to 6 years for something to not work as long as it should. It stops the excuse of things breaking just outside of warranty like for one year.

Many years ago when Jessops was still alive and kicking I bought a lens. Admittedly it was only a few hundred pounds but that was a lot to me so I cherished that lens. The lens died just before its third birthday.

I read up on the Consumer Rights act and took the view that a lens should last considerably longer than three years and should be more like decades going off all the vintage lenses up for sale which were older than me.

I stuck to my guns, and after six months of wrangling, Jessops reimbursed me the full amount that I paid. They tried to say that the lens was out of its one year warranty. And that I should have bought the Three Year Warranty because they were unable to help any further.

A bit of standing up for my consumer rights and a product being fit for purpose and lasting more than six years was to be expected. My product died in half that time.

If you still have your NAS device maybe you could give this a try?

In reply to The Lemming:Amazon seller a few years ago when I was too pre-occupied to chase it up

In reply to kevin stephens:

Hmmm.

I don't think you would have got very far. However Amazon's A to Z service is exemplary.

I had a problem with an Amazon Seller a couple of weeks ago refusing to accept that their electrical product had broken in under a month. They refused to cooperate. Amazon paid out provided I gave the seller a chance to fix my faulty goods.

In reply to Ice Nine:

Does anyone use Flickrpro? It does seem to be a neat solution at relatively sensible cost

In reply to The Lemming:

Thanks, that does seem like a good option to be able to access anywhere. It's a similar system to what I am using now with the two large hard drives but with the access anywhere option. I do keep one of my two storage devices (with Apple time machine backup) away from home just in case the house goes up in flames.

In reply to kevin stephens:

I've had the free account since 2007. However I have less than 1,000 images on there.

In reply to Ice Nine:

There's a good Youtube channel called NAScompares that is a wealth of knowledge and advice about NAS boxes and the software that is bundled with them.

I've been using Synology devices for at least ten years. What I learned was that I should have bought a 4 Bay box from the outset. I could have started with two HDDs and added more as I needed extra storage. I initially bought a 2 Bay box but after a few years ran out of space taking photos and then progressing to video. With a 2 Bay box I was limited how far I could increase storage.

At the moment I have a 4 Bay box with 32Tb storage that can show stuff on my TV or be viewed or accessed from anywhere I choose.

In reply to Ice Nine:

Building your own home-brew cloud storage with a consumer NAS and an abundancy of high-capacity spinning rust drives sounds like a sure fire recipe for data loss.

Just stick one copy of the data in Wasabi and another in Onedrive or Google Drive.

In reply to Ice Nine:

As a couple of (obvious) notes:

1. Such a system doesn't address what is (I think) your primary concern. The discs - or the NAS itself - will go wrong eventually, which will then be your responsibility to deal with.

2. If the system is visible to you from anywhere on the Internet, it's equally visible to everybody else. Be rigorous with security.

3. Unless you have a fixed IP address at home, things will change under your feet in respect of access from outside.

4. You will almost certainly not be able to deploy a similar system based at your work site (as I think was suggested above): your network team probably won't allow it.

I'll be interested to hear if you do decide to go for a true 'cloud' solution. Please post back with whatever you decide. As mentioned, I'm also interested for the same reasons.

Good luck.

In reply to abcdefg:

Since I started using NAS boxes only one HDD has died. All mechanical things die, however the NAS box warns you when the disk bites the dust. All you have to do, is swap out the dead HDD with a fresh one and forget about it and get on with your life.

As for the entire NAS box going boom, every now and then I attach an external HDD which automatically copies the entire NAS box. I then remove the external drive so that it is not physically connected to the NAS box for two reasons.

Reason number one, is if my NAS box is ever hacked by Ransomware then I have a safe copy of my NAS box to save the day. As far as I know my brand of NAS box, Synology, has very good built-in security features to make becoming caught out by Ransomware very very hard to happen. Not impossible, just very slim.

Reason two is that I have a back-up of my NAS box which I can put in a different physical location.

As above, a back-up of my NAS box on an external hard drive physically removed from my NAS covers this problem. How many people even have a Ransomware solution for their own computers and personal data?

Just about everybody's home computer is connected to the internet. The hacker first has to break through that setup and if so, your NAS box is the least of your problems.

Never had to worry about using a fixed IP address at home ever and I've never had a problem.

If the OP works for an employer then this is a non-starter. However if they are self employed then this is a good possibility.

In reply to Ice Nine:

I rely on the Apple auto-backup for my iPhone photos, which costs a couple of pounds a month (also backs up the rest of the phone). This is large majority of my photos. I also use Dropbox for other photos not taken with my phone, and for lots of other things - work stuff, music making, life admin essentials. Basically anything I wouldn't want to lose if my laptop crashes, having been stung in the past by catastrophic failures. There's an annual or monthly fee, I think it's about £17 a month for 3TB. Would be cheaper in the long run to setup your own cloud storage, but my logic is that Dropbox take care of the backing up for you, with multiple fail-safes. Plus there's the usability of the sync system. They also have a very handy password storage system - generates long complicated passwords for things that you can then autofill from your phone or computer.

I have the Dropbox app on my computer and it syncs the files and folders on my computer with the cloud storage. So any changes made to my files on the computer then get updated in the cloud. I run two laptops, and the files are synced between them, so any change on one is updated on the other. It works really well. Can take a while to setup if you have large folders, as they have to upload to the cloud first. Then it just updates them as needed. 

In reply to The Lemming:

I used to build enterprise grade servers (with reassuringly expensive drives). You'll be amazed at how many fail or even come DOA still shrink-wrapped.

In reply to Mike-W-99:

Yep I've killed quite a few drives, through user stupidity, and had a couple arrive DOA as well in the post.

In reply to The Lemming:

To be honest I prefer to offload the responsibility for accidentally losing my data to a cloud provider rather than doing it myself.  It's cheaper, less effort and there's someone else to blame.

I think that you're a lot more likely to suffer data loss if you manage your data personally on a NAS than if you simply put it in eg Dropbox.

In reply to Summit Else:

Just make sure you have enough physical backups yourself in multiple locations as well.

Cloud is only a fancy name for another person's computer, and cloud providers tend to make errors too.

Or you could end up like UniSuper, Australia's 5th biggest retirement fund, whose entire Google Cloud backup vanished in a microsecond due to Google's error – and couldn't be restored. They sensibly had other backups elsewhere, but it still took them a few months to get fully up and running again.

And while a $120 billion client accident got even the Google's CEO scrambling, good luck getting any cloud provider support or compensation for losing your photos – "sorry, here a £30 free Amazon voucher for ya, bye!"

This is IT we are talking about. Stuff happens all the time.

In reply to The Lemming:

I don't want to (further) derail this thread, but there is a significant difference. While, of course, everybody's home computer network is connected to the Internet, the firewall on the home router on most such networks will be blocking all incoming TCP and UDP connections. But, in your case, the firewall has open holes for incoming connections directed at your NAS box. (It must do - otherwise you couldn't initiate connections to that box from outside your own network.) That means your NAS box is directly accessible from - and attackable by - the entire Internet.

If you are happy with your own setup, that is great. And you have certainly offered one option to the OP. For myself, however, I am now interested to hear of practical experience with true cloud providers.

Frankly, considering all the costs and things one has to learn and strictly adhere to when doing digital backups, I almost long for the days of film!

In reply to Frank R.:

I don't recall making backups of film being all that simple either!

In reply to Marek:

No, but at least then I didn't get so much grey hair from just trying to understand all the cloud services' obscure ToS & pricing plans, reading through long threads of "best backup strategies", wondering if all my offsite backups were written properly (a backup that's not verified is not a backup), hoping that all the WD drives don't die at once after just a few years (that happened, caused quite an outrage), that I got a proper backup rotation in place to guard against ransomware, paying £80/month for cloud storage...

Granted, with film you just accepted that all is gone in a fire, but even that remote possibility was quite a bit less stressful than all of this

In reply to abcdefg:

1. NAS: I use it at home, no need to give it any internet access. You still need to do separate offsite backups, of course!

   A NAS is pretty useful as it has a RAID for some redundancy and only wakes up from sleep when I need to increment the backup over my ethernet of access some old photos.    

   Mind you, I'd say it's always a good idea to use HDDs of the same specs, but different makes in it – too many scandals of e.g. multiple WD drives failing nearly simultaneously with age.

––––––––––––––––

2. Cloud: Very carefully check their ToS and obscure pricing. A free service isn't really free. Cheap is not really cheap. Cloud is at least around £5‑10/TB/month, so that's a hundred quid for me each month – in addition to any normal offsite HDD or tape costs, as cloud shouldn't ever be your single backup, ever.

   Amazon Prime – might restrict "unlimited photos" any time they want, just like Google Photos did a few years back. Do you have the means and ken of quickly migrating your cloud backup elsewhere when (not if) that happens?

  Backblaze – sounds like a great deal at just £80 a year for "unlimited" storage. Yet read the fine print, it's not really unlimited. You need to add £5/TB/month if you want to keep archival backups of your old works past 30 days, or they get all purged unless you connect them to your computer running their app each and every month. Miss that deadline, tough luck.

   Computer mirroring services (Google Drive, One Drive etc.) – just like Backblaze home tier, not really much of an archival backup at all!

   B2B solutions – ever tried pricing up Amazon AWS? There are entire IT courses taught about all the intricacies of using it and navigating their obscure pricing! Glacier Deep Storage sounds really great at around £4/TB/month with free uploads, but it's billed by "objects", and the final retrieval fee for the full archive can run from £hundreds to £thousands. Glacier is still a pretty nice "backup of the last resort" when everything else fails, just be ready for the retrieval price, if that ever happens.

––––––––––––––––

3. External HDD backups: Time Machine on Mac is great whenever I accidentally delete my current project, but not really a backup either. It purges the oldest when it gets full. One client of mine found out the hard way. Test and verify your physical backups. Rotate your physical backups. Heck, even test your restore procedures!

   You'd be surprised at the amount of businesses who lost everything after finding out that their LTO tapes weren't ever written properly in the first place, or something like that.

Sorry, but it all just isn't really easy

In reply to Ice Nine:

I use a Google Workspace Business Plus account.

This provides around 7TB of storage at £13.80 a month or £167 a year.

I set up the account about a decade ago when I had a one person company.

I store all my photos via Google Photos, which is linked to the Workspace account.

I only take JPEGs, but have 73GB worth, dating back to 2003, many of which are sorted into numerous albums.

The storage feels very secure with lots of security measures and 'two factor authentication' to access the account.

I am now retired and don't really need a business account, so I am looking at cheaper alternatives.

However, it's complicated.

The obvious solution would be a Google One account, which would provide 100GB for £1.60/month to 2TB for £8/month.

But transferring 73GB of photos from one account to another is not easy.

There appears to be no way of transfering the albums, just the photos.

I also have my own domain that I use for email, but this can only be used with a Workspace account.

I have concluded that cloud storage is very convenient and safe, but very expensive. 

I could have some free storage, but only 15GB.

As with so much of the digital world, once one has used a particular system for a while, moving to a different system is complicated.

Ian

In reply to Ice Nine:

I've got all my photos stored at home on a Synology NAS with 2 mirrored hard drives in it (RAID1).  Synology provide an app that lets you backup to Amazon Glacier, which is the cheapest cloud option that I found (note comments further up the thread about potentially high retrieval costs if complete disaster strikes).

In reply to Ian Carey:

You need to be aware that if you upload to Google Photos (not the same as Google Drive) your photos will be compressed and lose some quality.

You can use rclone to upload to Google Drive. There are plenty of instructions on YouTube about how to configure it to upload to Google Drive. Rclone works out what photos you have already uploaded and uploads new photos, or if you have edited a photo locally it will then re-upload that photo.  

You can set rclone to run daily, or whatever interval suits you. You need to work out how to do this on your platform. I use Linux, but rclone works OK on Windows (don't know about Macs).

In reply to Frank R.:

Not quite true Frank.  It is a great deal (but see below)

I've been using Backblaze since 2016.

Now on their '1-year' Computer Back-up Option.

This give me 'some' peace of mind from Ransomware and fire/theft etc etc

This is Unlimited Storage, and gives me access to file versions from the last year.

I have just under 4 TB stored.

Currently $118 US dollars per year (i.e.. there is no extra cost per TB/month)

And it you have a complete failure, they can post you hard drives with all the data on.

The only downside is that this Backblaze option is that it wont allow back up from NAS storage, but that's not an issue with the way I've set up my QNAP 4-Bay NAS, multiple main hard disks and external back-up.

BUT, if I was starting over again, I'd also consider IDrive on-line back up.

Also have Flickr-Pro, which replicates some of my image library.

In reply to ChrisJD:

You still need to run their app at least once a month (every year in your case, I guess) and have all the external storage connected at the same time, unless you pay the additional premium £5/TB fee. That's simply not viable for me as I don't consider that any archival backup storage, since the point of a cloud archive is that it's not connected to my computer all of the time.

Archive is not simple mirroring. Even if that's "mirroring with benefits" in their case.

I did consider their B2B offer which was a bit cheaper at £5/TB without any basic £80 yearly fee, but then than also had unclear costs of retrieval.

Your "'1-year' Computer Back-up Option"? Can't find it on their website. They don't advertise it anywhere. Do they even offer it still? That's what I talked about – Cloud storage terms can change anytime and even if not, can be really hard to get a true price.

Anyway, what's the ToS of it? Because I certainly don't want my 10 TB of nearly two decades old pics purged if I don't connect all the external drives to it every month (or year, in your case). That's still not a backup, period.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but last time I checked, their "unlimited" consumer products purge any files not connected to the computer every [month/year/whatever] period. That's the main problem with their "unlimited" plans – they are just mirroring, not an archival backup. Archival backups simply run £5-10/TB/month in the cloud, and there is no shortcut from that.

In reply to Frank R.:

The app runs in the background Frank; that's how it works.

Info really not that hard to find:

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/personal

Three length of time options: 'Restore old versions up to 30 days, one year, or forever'.

Not quite sure why you are so angry over it.

In reply to Frank R.:

They are very clear, all on the website, to be found in a few clicks:

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/restore

An amazing restore service; essentially free if you send the hard drive back

Restore by Mail

You can prepare a USB drive and have it shipped to you by FedEx anywhere in the world. After signing in to the Backblaze site, you can prepare a mailed restore on the 'View/Restores Files' page.

‍USB Hard Drive up to 8TB for $189

Shipping and handling included. Depending on the size of the restore it might take several days to prepare and ship the drive. You may choose to have your hard drive encrypted during shipping for an extra level of security.

‍Restore, Return, Refund

Send us the hard drive back within 30 days for a refund of your purchase. Just mail back your drive, and we'll refund what you paid for the restore. Include your name and account email with the drive and send it to:

In reply to kevin stephens:

I do. A big drawback is that you can't store RAW files on it.

In reply to Frank R.:

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup/features/extended-version-history

You Decide How Long

Your Backblaze account comes with 30 days of Version History, with the option to enable One Year Extended Version History for free. And, you can upgrade to Forever Version History for just $0.006/GB per month.

In reply to 65:

I do backup my RAW files on an external drive but generally once I’m happy with the high quality jpeg export I don’t need to refer to the original RAW files again

In reply to kevin stephens:

Each to their own. One of my greatest joys is going over old RAW files and processing them in a different way as my editing skills and aesthetic sensibilities evolve.

In reply to ChrisJD:

One potential problem I discovered is that the Backblaze servers are located in the USA. However, this might not still be true.

Uploaded speeds were much slower than using a company which has servers nearer home.

In reply to wilkesley:

Our broadband upload speed is the rate limiter; max possible for us is ~ 6 mbps (download is >30).  We are on the end of the pipe.

The first upload took many many weeks.

In reply to Frank R.:

I think describing as another person’s computer is a little simplistic compared to what happens.

In my work I manage a cloud storage account of around 1.5 perabytes of data (not that much in gloaval terms I know!) all in various tiers of AWS S3 we feel pretty confident about this as boasts of a 99.999999999% durability rate (in other terms, if you were to store 10,000 data files, AWS may lose one file every 10 million years). 

They’re able to achieve this as each file is uploaded to 3 availability zones by default, and there will be multiple copies on different types of storage on each of these zones.

In short they have backups, of backups of backups… 

of course the Google cloud incident, and the recent LucidLink outage aren’t great, but I think in general terms cloud storage ought to be viewed as far safer than anything you put together yourself on the ground.

In reply to Iamgregp:

Since you obviously know a lot about AWS in the context of your job, are you able to give a specific suggestion regarding the 'optimal' use of that service for a home user who has, say, 4 TB which he/she wants to be safeguarded against permanent loss?

That is, if a home user has about that much local data that they want to keep local, but also want to have safely backed up to the cloud in case of hardware failure at home, what kind of offering from AWS would be appropriate, and what would it cost?

Thanks.

In reply to abcdefg:

So in general terms the s3 tiers have a pay off between retrieval time, and price. The longer it takes to get it back, the less you pay for the storage. But then they’ll also hit you with an egress cost for those cheaper tiers. 

Here’s some comparison figs:

S3 Standard:

Storage Price - $0.024/GB or £24/TB per month

Instant access, no retrieval fee

S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval:

$0.005/GB or $5/TB per month

Milliseconds slower than standard

$0.03/GB or £30/TB retrieval fee

S3 Glacier Deep Archive:

$0.0018/GB or $1.80/TB per month

Standard retrieval - Within 12 Hours - $0.021/GB or $21/TB

Bulk retrieval - Within 48 Hours - $0.005/GB or $5/TB

There are of course no ingress fees for any tier…

If it’s purely for backup of something you have on the ground meaning you’re unlikely to need it, and when you do it won’t be in a hurry then I’d just use S3 Glacier Deep Archive. 

Hope this helps!

In reply to Iamgregp:

Thanks, that's helpful.

In reply to Iamgregp:

So Backblaze for me (at 4 TB total) works out at~ £1.9/TB/month inc VAT.

With a 1 year file version history

... If you don't mind having your data drives visible to the Backblaze software once in a while ...

Or wouldn't you touch Backblaze/Idrive etc with a barge pole (as a home user) given what you know?

In reply to Iamgregp:

You seem to have really skewed numbers for data retrieval, compared to those calculated case elsewhere:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/10gjc46/understanding_pricing_of_s3_g...

https://www.arqbackup.com/aws-glacier-pricing.html

Both go to hundreds of dollars for bulk retrieval at the very best.

Even renting the Snowball data transfer device has outbound transfer costs of $0.04 per GB, in addition to the several $hundreds rental fee. AWS's own examples of exporting 25 TB via it is $1,600.

Something doesn't sound right here, sorry. It might be just different for your org, if you have it all optimised for AWS, no idea.

As I understand it, Deep Archive needs to go into an S3 bucket for bulk retrieval first, so you are also paying the transaction fees for that, charged by object (not MB), et cetera.

Plus most people have limited download speed for bulk retrieval, taking up to a few months for a full multiTB backup to download.

Nowhere I have seen gave me a simple AWS retrieval figures like yours, as AWS pricing can get really convoluted, so I call your figures pretty suspect, apologies if wrong. I guess your figure is only valid for Glacier retrieval to another active bucket, not to the home user? That would be totally irrelevant to a home user.

Still, AWS own calculator shows around $100 per TB per month in outbound fees for bulk retrieval to the internet.

BTW, even BackBlaze B2B charges retrieval transaction fees if you go over 3x previous monthly uploads, IIRC.

Pricing up cloud storage is just insanely difficult for a home customer, seems to me.

I'd love to be proven wrong on that, of course!

In reply to ChrisJD:

As I understand it, they'll still purge your old files if you don't connect all your external drives and run the app at least once a year?

I don't really consider that archival storage, but YMMV, of course...

The unlimited file version history is still $6/TB/month extra. Which sounds fine to me, just need to be aware of it.

In reply to Frank R.:

...

I can't tell from your responses here whether or not you're actually using a cloud service yourself, or have been put off from doing so by the reasons you imply.

To declare my own interest: I have about 4TB of data - in a very complex directory structure - spinning on discs at home. If I lost that, I would be gutted - and it could never be replaced. I have an internal backup/mirroring strategy, of course - but I am now at the stage of wanting to get some external cloud backup, just in case. (Or rather, for when my local arrangements all go tits up - as they inevitably will.)

I worked in IT infrastructure for 40 years, so I generally understand what's going on under the hood. However, in the same way that I now have zero interest in running, say, my own mail server at home, I am quite keen to slave off some of the aspects of disaster recovery.

As a question about cloud services: looking at the Amazon offering, it appears essentially to be tailored to deal with large individual files. What's the strategy to be adopted in the case where one has large numbers of relatively small files, all located within a complex directory structure?

In reply to Ice Nine:

PetaPixel have an interesting review. Came up in my Google Feed.

https://petapixel.com/2024/05/29/nas-devices-for-photographers-on-a-budget-...

In reply to Frank R.:

Yes agreed, pricing up AWS S3 is insanely difficult, and this makes it really difficult for even rather tech savvy home users to decipher. 

The figures I quoted  my colleague generated as ballpark figs for another department. He’s a qualified AWS practitioner, and probably one of the most gifted technicians I’ve worked with throughout my whole career, so I trust him. 

I think if you and he were to look at this, he’d be able to spot the discrepancy pretty quickly. But he’s not a climber or on here, so we’ll have to leave it as an open case!

In reply to abcdefg:

Yes, I do use cloud storage for my data. At around £5/TB/month at the moment, which looks to me as around the industry average. As part of my wider archival strategy using local NAS and offsite HDD storage as well.

Don't get me wrong – after a few long stint of dabbling in IT, I have exactly zero interest in running my own cloud infra, just like you, and I wouldn't really recommend that to anybody. It sucks enough to care just for my relatives' IT needs by default and that's plenty enough dealing with CVEs for me.

I was just pointing out that some corporate‑focused B2B cloud storage can have pretty confusing price structures or policies, especially for someone not wanting to deal with IT anymore. And I pretty much don't, myself. Have had enough of that during work.

Hence as much as I like the lower initial pricing of stuff like S3 Glacier Deep Storage, I'd rather prefer a clear summary of all the monthly costs and the retrieval costs in the unlikely event of a full retrieval and not having to deal with any hidden price intricacies there. I have had enough of IT in my jobs, and I'd like to keep any of that stuff out of my personal life as much as possible, just like you.

AWS pricing is just so much confusing to me than I could ever care to invest my personal time and energy into investigating it all. Maybe it works well for home users as well, I don't know. Maybe you can get around the transaction fees of single objects by just using huge tarballs or whatever, I don't know. What I know is I am simply not getting paid to tabulate their various fees and usage scenarios for my own personal data storage scenarios, so I am much less likely to use them over some more expensive service that's more clearly priced for home users.

EDIT: I wouldn't really mind shaving quite a few quid from my current cloud storage plan by going for AWS S3 Glacier Deep Storage (or even using it as a secondary cloud backup), it's just that the real prices of the bulk retrieval seem to be pretty hard to figure out. It might still be worthwhile, but I just can't seem to figure it out, at least without becoming an AWS specialist...

In reply to abcdefg:

You can maintain the directory structure when you upload the folder to the cloud. Of course in reality the s3 bucket doesn’t use a traditional folder structure like that, but if you browse your bucket using something like S3 browser it’ll display it just like it was in your windows folder structure.

The only funny is that it won’t upload empty folders. Seems obvious, but that’s one that’s caused us issues with camera cards in the past!

In reply to Iamgregp:

Sorry, didn't want to come up as just all condescending over your post or whatever, only that your ballpark figures didn't exactly align with the ones I got when I had a glance at it previously. I could be all wrong, obviously, as I am not much of an AWS expert at all...

Which was kind of my point – unless you are an AWS specialist, their pricing just looks too hard to figure out for one's own personal home use case to me, even if it might be still potentially cheaper for your own home use case (or not)

And with the caveat that a company's AWS pricing figures might not align well enough with home user AWS pricing figures, as they might all have different usage scenarios (yours possibly just to another AWS bucket already on the company dime, while a home user would mostly want retrieval download back into their own NAS or HDD).

In reply to Ice Nine:

Arq (software only, you configure & pay for the cloud solution) or Arq premium (which is the Arq software essentially integrated and bundled with 1TB of Google Cloud and a transparent price per TB per month above that). In your position I’d just pay Arq premium. 

In reply to Frank R.:

No offence taken whatsoever. This stuff is really, really hard and even for businesses with experienced folk like ours, we’re often not clear we’ve got everything exactly right.

We’re actually going to be bringing in an AWS partner org for validation / queries / support tickets later this year as we’re looking to make  some major changes to our S3 & EC2 estate later this year, and that makes us bloody nervous!

If you’re really tech savvy, setting up an AWS bucket is possible, but tricky. For most of us, a much more straightforward service like Wasabi or Backblaze is way easier to navigate.

In reply to Iamgregp:

I can totally get that! Just remember to always test on production machines, you'll be just fine (sorry!)