[problems]

> Huh? What kind of 500 GB SSD costs $50?

Definitely not $50 to my knowledge but for ~$170 you can get a Samsung 850 EVO which is rated for 98k IOPS. They're fairly reliable drives and much, much faster than anything you'll get on EBS. You could be running that full 3x replication in less than a year of paying for EBS.

> Oh, and good luck creating snapshots of your home RAID!

LVM, ZFS and Btrfs all do snapshotting quite nicely. FreeNAS - commonly used for consumer grade NASes will automatically manage ZFS snapshots for you too. Amazon will sell you extra space to store snapshots, sure, but increasing the size of your devices usually solves that problem. And quite cost effectively as you can probably tell by now...

[phonon]

...and Dropbox can be replaced with SFTP and rsync. Can you roll your own? Sure. Will it work as reliably and effectively as EBS? Can I scale it easily? How many people are comfortable using snapshots on their own?

[problems]

It's tried and true tech that any competent ops person can use quite easily. Been around much longer than EBS quite frankly.

Dropbox targets end users who don't have the knowledge required to use the alternative, if you're smart enough to use EBS you're probably smart enough to use ZFS snapshotting just as easily. Or could within a day or two. It's really not that hard.

Like I said, there are systems that pretty much manage the whole thing for you and just warn you when something is about to blow up like FreeNAS.

[tomc1985]

It could be replaced with Nextcloud

Shadow volume replication is entirely possible with several filesystems or Hot Copy kernel mod. Also LVM does snapshotting fairly easily

I may have got my prices a bit mixed up (I saw 120GB at Fry's for $60 last month) but my point stands.

Also why is discomfort such a big problem for folks? Learn stuff.