[haiku2077]

You're not joking. If you're like most people and have only a few TiB of data in total, self hosting on a NAS or spare PC is very viable. There are even products for non-technical people to set this up (e.g. software bundled with a NAS). The main barrier is having an ISP with a sufficient level of service.

[kube-system]

Sure, hardware is cheap.

However if you actually follow the 3-2-1 rule with your backups, then you need to include a piece of real estate in your calculation as well, which ain’t cheap.

[dismalpedigree]

I have true 3-2-1 backups on a server running proxmox with 32 cores, 96gb of ram, and 5TB of ssd disks (2TB usable for VMs). Cost me $1500 for the new server hardware 2 years ago. Runs in my basement and uses ~30w of power on average (roughly $2.50/mo). The only cloud part is the encrypted backups at backblaze which cost about $15/mo.

Its a huge savings over a cloud instance of comparable performance. The closest match on AWS is ~$1050/mo and I still have to back it up.

The only outage in 2 years was last week when there was a hardware failure of the primary ssd. I was back up and running within a few hours and had to leverage the full 3-2-1 backup depth, so I am confident it works.

If i was really desperate i could have deployed on a cloud machine temporarily while i got the hardware back online.

[johnisgood]

Only $1500? How much would this setup cost today?

[dismalpedigree]

Some quick checking on Newegg and I came up with this. https://newegg.io/64113a4 About $1200. I didn’t look into the power draw for this setup. Added bonus there is space for a GPU if you want to do some AI stuff.

[haiku2077]

Each 2TB of SSD is like $85, double it if you want local redundancy in your software RAID.

The rest is basically a nice custom PC minus a cool case and a high end GPU. A 9950X is $500, a 2x48GB kit is maybe $200. A few hundo more for a mobo, PSU and basic case.

[palata]

If you self-host your NAS, then your server has access to the data in clear to do fancy stuff, and you can make encrypted backups to any cloud you like, right?

[haiku2077]

Some people I know make a deal with a friend or relative to do cross backups to each others' homes. I use AWS Glacier as my archival backup, costs like 3 bucks a month for my data; you could make a copy onto two clouds if you like. There are tools to encrypt the backups transparently, like the rclone crypt backend.

[dinosaurdynasty]

You don't need homomorphic encryption for a backup, normal encryption suffices.

[bcraven]

I keep a small backup drive at my office which I bring home each month to copy my most sensitive documents and photos onto.

All my ripped media could be ripped again: I only actually have a couple of Tb of un-lose-able data.

[adastra22]

FHE is so much more expensive that it would still be cheaper.

[hoppp]

But if you have a lot of data, self hosting is still cheaper.

Its always gonna be cheaper because you don't have the cloud provider's profit margin, which can be quite high.

[ralferoo]

It can be quite high, but it doesn't have to be. For instance, I have a 7TB storage server from Hosthatch that's $190 for 2 years. That's $7.92 per month, or £5.88 at today's exchange rates. That's under 20p per day.

Just on electricity costs alone, this is good value. My electricity costs are 22.86p/kWh which is pretty cheap for the UK. That means that if having that drive plugged in and available 24/7 uses more than 37W, it's more expensive to self host at home than rent the space via a server. Also, I've not needed to buy the drive or a NAS, nor do I have to worry about replacing hardware if it fails.

[crtasm]

Do they offer deals like that often? List price is "from $24/month" for 6TB (no further details provided without registering an account).

[ralferoo]

They tend to do promotions, typically only valid for 24h and only advertised on certain forums like LET, a couple of times per year - typically at least around their company anniversary date or Black Friday.

There are others too, e.g. Servarica who keep their Black Friday offers running all year round.

[Forgeties79]

> There are others too, e.g. Servarica who keep their Black Friday offers running all year round.

I don’t understand the logic here so I’m going to assume I’m being obtuse. Doesn’t that just mean that’s their standard price? Why or how would you ever pay more?

[ralferoo]

Yeah, I kind of agree in the latter case. Black Friday deals often have lower priority support etc.

I guess with Servarica, they have their standard deals, but for Black Friday deals are generally thin margins, but still enough to cover costs. Typically every year, they have special deals that are a bit different to their previous offerings. As a result, some people prefer the previous deals, some prefer the new ones, so they keep them all going. It's a bit unusual. They've also got a few interesting deals, like start with N TB and it grows a bit every day. If you keep these more than about 3-4 years, these are probably better value for money, but I think you're paying too much in the first few years. It's interesting if your primary use case is incremental backups.

Hosthatch's deals are a bit different as they're usually preorders and at almost cost with basically minimal support, whereas they keep their normal stuff in stock and have higher support levels.

I should also add that I've not personally used Servarica, even though they look interesting - just because they only have a Canadian datacenter. I have 4 Hosthatch servers spread all over the globe so that I have more redundancy in my backups. I only buy them when they have deals, assuming I don't miss them as they're only for 24h.

[haiku2077]

For very large amounts of data, the cloud provider can hit economies of scale using tape drives ($$$$ to buy a tape drive yourself) or enterprise-class hard drives (very loud + high price of entry if you want redundancy + higher failure rate than other storage). That's why storing data in the slower storage classes in S3 and other object stores is so cheap compared to buying and replacing drives.