[frostix]

Differential backups or any sort of versioning seemed like one of the most obvious culprits (that and or total redundant storage to preserve the file) but the issue with all of this is it’s entirely opaque.

Ultimately you’re increasingly tethered to some service for your storage that you pay for periodically based on total storage yet you have little-to-no information how to best optimize that storage if you want to operate in a fixed cost bracket or lower storage/cost ratio. So as a consumer, do I just wave my hands and keep throwing more and more money at the problem, especially now that devices are increasingly pushing everything, including storage, as a subscription service to meet my actual functional needs (that realistically could be met by local storage options if manufacturers didn’t have a vested interest in pushing me towards service based storage solutions)?

The modern business strategy in technology is simply hiding behind complexity. The cost is too complex for you to understand, it gives too much information away about our internals to competitors, and so on. Yet somehow these metrics are derived to assure the business is operating above cost because when the rubber meets the road it must be done, yet when the consumer wants to understand it’s suddenly too complex. The problem is that tech in many cases is growing to scales that really is too complex and business managers know this, so it’s often a valid excuse to hide behind. Conveniently that’s where they focus on investment and padding margins though.

[Dalewyn]

>So as a consumer, do I just wave my hands and keep throwing more and more money at the problem,

Yes.

I can go and buy 1TB of Microsoft OneDrive or 2TB of Google Drive for less than a Franklin a year, and most people won't even need 1TB let alone 2TB. Both Microsoft and Google also offer 100GB plans for a Jackson a year, which is what I purchase myself. The average person can get by paying a Washington per month to Apple for 50GB of iCloud.

The amount of money I would save from managing photos myself locally isn't worth the time spent nor the money spent on the hardware.

EDIT:

For the downvoters, consider this: If I were to manage all this myself, I would need at least three storage mediums with one being a different form factor to satisfy the 3-2-1 backup scheme. I would also need to procure arrangements for that third backup copy in the 3-2-1 scheme. And I would need to spend time managing it all.

That is going to cost me more than a Franklin per year. Life is short, my time is precious, and my money is ultimately expendable.

[Terretta]

Presidents on US currency:

  - $100,000: Wilson
  - $1,000: Cleveland
  - $500: McKinley
  - $100: Franklin*
  - $50: Grant
  - $20: Jackson
  - $10: Hamilton*
  - $5: Lincoln
  - $2: Jefferson
  - $1: Washington
  
  * not a president

> I can go and buy 1TB of Microsoft OneDrive or 2TB of Google Drive for less than $100 a year, and most people won't even need 1TB let alone 2TB. Both Microsoft and Google also offer 100GB plans for a $20 a year, which is what I purchase myself. The average person can get by paying $1 per month to Apple for 50GB of iCloud.

While we're at it, iCloud+ offers these monthly storage plans now:

  United States:
  50GB: $1
  200GB: $3
  2TB: $10
  6TB: $30
  12TB: $60

See everywhere in the world here:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238

[averageRoyalty]

Thank you, I had no idea what this person was talking about.

[chaxor]

"640KB is more than anyone will ever need"

It's a little absurd to think people don't need more than 2TB - especially on HN. Gamers will likely have 2TB in games alone, videographers often have many TBs of videos and photos from weddings and events in their life, many that care about health may have a few TB in genomic data mirrored on their computers to analyze, etc.

I would imagine it's hard to find people that wouldn't have TBs of data, if they were allowed to do so. The reason many people don't have TBs of data is they're limited by these exact companies you're claiming 'solve the problem' by offering limited storage.

It is notable however, that having better tools to organize, deduplicate, and compress data would be helpful to reduce some of the size of data that many people have. Over the years I've noticed my family will have multiple tar.gz archives, zip archives, etc, which (after extraction/unencryption) will share 20% files here, 10% files there, a 4kb jpg that's the same as a 100MB PNG here and there, etc. So yes, those 10TB archives may end up being 5TB if someone spent the time to really comb over, understand, make good decisions, and organize that data. But I have not yet seen anything that can scratch that surface yet, other than perhaps https://github.com/jjuliano/aifiles - but I won't use it until it's local only and has guarantees not to destroy data without explicit permission. An overlay filesystem that shows compression/deduplication with LLM capability like aifiles is probably the best option here.

However, I wouldn't imagine that most people's life data is less than 2TB even with all of this - it's mostly imposed as an artificial constraint by these companies.

[vel0city]

> Gamers will likely have 2TB in games alone

If I were to install all the games on my steam account it would be many hundreds of terabytes of total storage. In the end I have about a terabyte of games on my computer. And of that 0 bytes are in my cloud storage.

I've been an amateur photographer for over 15 years. I tend to curate the photos I keep, largely because I don't need 20+ pictures of the same scene. Its more of a burden to casually flip through my photos if the majority of them are near duplicates. In the end my total collection is only several hundred gigs.

Most people aren't videographers.

Most people in my family have far less than even 50 gigs of actual data they care about. They maybe take a dozen compressed photos a week, maybe 30 minutes of videos a month. A lot of my friends take even fewer photos and pictures.

[CitrusFruits]

You could argue all your games are in the cloud since of the hundreds of terabytes of games you have, you're only keeping 1TB of them on the computer.

[vel0city]

Its even more than that; easily half to three-quarters of my gaming these days is on cloud gaming so I'm not even installing any content.

But in the end, that's not the same as my cloud storage where I'm being metered by my bytes.

[ebiester]

Now, consider a world where you are making $42,000 a year. That's 20 dollars an hour and a very common wage. How do they handle the same when there are so many competing Franklins for them?

[naltroc]

bump this, and the implicit vendor lockin that this ideology creates

[chrismeller]

This is the same argument behind paying for a streaming service. Could I "find" everything I want to watch somewhere else and maintain it myself on a Plex server? Sure, but the cost-benefit analysis just doesn't make sense to me.

Particularly the older I get the more I value my finite free time. Throwing $20 at something to remove a problem that would take me hours (not to mention a large startup cost) to do myself is just an obvious choice.

[mysteria]

As someone who has a Proxmox cluster at home (storage on RAIDZ, hot backups with PBS, cold backups on external HDDs) I literally recommend cloud storage for most people that ask me about backup solutions as it's simply not worth it for the average user. Those people already have all their data in the cloud anyways and share it on Facebook et al and they don't really care about the privacy side.

Remember it's not just buying the equipment, it's maintaining and understand it as well (e.g. I have to be familar with how ZFS works, how to restore a failed node, write some scripts, etc.). And with every backup solution you also need to be familar with the restoration process and test it occassionally to make sure it actually works as expected.

[theshrike79]

I've just upgraded from a Synology 4 disk setup to a custom-built Unraid system.

Wouldn't recommend it to Joe Normal. I've spent a good 5-6 days just rebuilding parity while switching disks. During which the server makes a godawful noise and the performance is degraded because of constant disk load.

It's great to have 40TB+ of storage right next to me though, the performance is great and I can run every self-hostable service imaginable with it.

But I still subscribe to Apple One for the whole family, it just works for every device (3-4 phones, 3 tablets, 2 laptops). I do have some backups running from those to the local system, but mostly it's for quick restores.

The only thing I'm adamant about is to keep your generated content for yourself. Don't trust FB, Instagram, Youtube or whatever to be the only storage of anything you create. Keep the master copy where you control it, publish it to other services.

[nytesky]

Yeah I have always backed up to external drives and had cloud storage. But now I learn there isn’t rot, so I have to either build a RAID and have refresh software that rewrites and validates, or just buys a new drive every 3 years and backup all over again. And that’s a simple setup.

[plagiarist]

Another danger of doing it yourself I have found is that if you give a dev a Proxmox, they are going to play around making toy Kubernetes setups instead of implementing the backup system they intended to make.

[nirvdrum]

> For the downvoters, consider this: If I were to manage all this myself, I would need at least three storage mediums with one being a different form factor to satisfy the 3-2-1 backup scheme. I would also need to procure arrangements for that third backup copy in the 3-2-1 scheme. And I would need to spend time managing it all.

> That is going to cost me more than a Franklin per year. Life is short, my time is precious, and my money is ultimately expendable.

When you're looking at cloud services, you need to perform your own off-site backup. Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. will maintain copies that they'll restore in the event of a hardware failure. But, if your account gets compromised or a buggy sync or bad API event happens, your data is gone. They're not going to go restore it from tape for you. This is a big part of why I do have an in-home NAS. Maybe you have everything sync'd with a laptop and that has you covered, but Apple's expanded storage options are outlandishly expensive so I doubt many with the 2TB+ plans are able to do that. (Yes, you could use external storage, but that's also rather inconvenient for a Photos.app library.)

We could both get what we want if these storage operations weren't wrapped up in proprietary APIs. If I use iCloud I get a seamless experience on macOS, but no access at all on Linux. If I use Dropbox I get access on Linux, but little more than photo sync on an iPhone. Given the decades of precedent with filesystems and I/O APIs, I suspect we could have an abstraction layer and an implementation layer that would allow for interoperability. Anyone that wants to pay for iCloud are free to do so, others could use their preferred storage engine. But, allowing access into the walled garden is far less profitable.

For most people, storage needs are going to increase over time (more + higher resolution photos & videos, larger apps, document storage, etc.). 6TB for a family is not unreasonable and that's what? Three Franklins and three Jacksons per year + whatever for an external drive for your offsite backups. What comes after the 6TB option? Storage costs have decreased drastically over time, unless you're using a proprietary service; consumers are not benefiting at all from those gains in efficiency.

[ValentineC]

> Three Franklins and three Jacksons per year + whatever for an external drive for your offsite backups.

I know you're just following the theme set by the parent commenter, but there are a bunch of us folk on HN who aren't US residents, and have no idea how much those presidents mean in terms of currency.

[nirvdrum]

I'm sorry. I use the currency and had to think about what the values were. I was trying to follow the theme by the previous author, but I can definitely see how that'd be hard for others to follow. It's $360 USD (Franklin = $100 USD, Jackson = $20 USD).

[astura]

In addition to being confusing for non-Americans, it also confusing for Americans because $100 bills in American slang are "Benjamins," not "Franklins." It's most notable use is in the song "It's All About the Benjamins"

[Dalewyn]

I've heard it both ways myself; I like Franklin better since the others are all last/family names too.

[dblangford]

A Franklin is more or less two Turings and a Jackson is just less than a Turner.

[Dalewyn]

>6TB for a family is not unreasonable and that's what?

Microsoft in particular has a 6TB for $100/year family plan, sharable with up to 5 other family members for a total of 6 persons each with 1TB. Google's plans can all also be shared with up to 5 other family members, though their bytes-per-dollar can't compete with that particular Microsoft family plan.

Basically: Local storage with personal management needs to be very easy, cheap, and carefree (which it isn't) to compete practically with cloud storage.

The only exception is if one's needs are niche and specific. I actually have a Synology NAS at home that I keep most of my data on, but that's because my data is mostly "bottle of rum" and "Linux ISO" in nature and thus not something I can throw on cloud storage in the first place.

[Terretta]

> What comes after the 6TB option?

Well, 12TB.

And if you are head of household and share storage, you can combine storage plans. Mine currently shows “2.3TB of 14TB used”.

[nirvdrum]

Thanks. I overlooked the 12 TB. I'm not sure doubling the capacity and doubling the cost is really ideal for many, but it's nice to know it's there.

[a_vanderbilt]

Hackers don't understand something that regular people more readily do: It works, it's cheap, and I'm paying for the convenience. We can all have our ideals about how tech should be, but these choices are driven by practicality.

[nobodyandproud]

Partly you’re getting downvoted because you’re not accounting for the value of the content to the user. Even if the chance of a cloud provider cancelling an account or deleting content is 0.0001%, the value of a single photo to Microsoft will be magnitudes less than to an individual.

I imagine the other reason is because they’re not mutually exclusive: For instance, Synology makes it easy to have both an in-home NAS and cloud sync.

[briffle]

You still need to manage backups. You’re trusting everything to the vendor. I run a docker image weekly that pulls my google photos, copies to my USB drive in my pi, and also copies to backblaze b2.

[eunice]

got a link for this image?

[prettyStandard]

And if you invest that $100 at 7% that becomes after x years...

,End Balance after x years, 4% per year

10, 1,578.36, 63.13

15, 2,788.81, 111.55

30, 10,207.30, 408.29

40, 21,460.96, 858.44