Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

blog.golivecosmos.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 158 posts

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#91

Post by dijit »

theshrike79 wrote: post #67
ryanjshaw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I used to think. Then you read horror stories of people being lifetime banned by a Cloud provider with robot-only support. Also, do you really want all your personal documents and stuff accessible on your phone to anybody who grabs it while you walk around with it unlocked on a call? Yes you might be using some security locks on folders but are you 100% sure you didn't miss any path to anything interestin…

> people being lifetime banned by a Cloud provider with robot-only support Just don't use GCP then? Every time I've worked with Amazon (from 5 person companies to 2k+ global corps) it's been extremely easy to contact an actual human with very minimal costs. Currently we have 3 AWS people on a Slack channel and we can ask questions from them at any time, they've even given suggestions on how to optimise costs and have…

I feel like people just have wildly varying experiences with these hyperscalers.

For me, I've always had a point-person inside google I can ask, and I'm not a big customer or anything.

However AWS has always been either sales guys who very much did not give a solitary shit about me or robot support. FWIW I'm based in Scandinavia so I wonder if it's a geographic thing.

However one thing is absolutely certain: you are giving up control. After that it's just about trust. As we know about trust: it's exceedingly fragile and difficult to cultivate. One wrong move and you'll realise how powerless you were the whole time, and that's a gut-wrenching feeling.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#92

Post by rakoo »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #89

Security and cost tend to be less of a win locally than you might expect. I'm a huge advocate for going local and owning your stuff, but it depends on circumstances. 2 TB from dropbox is $120 per year. A 2 bay Synology is $448. Brand name 2TB harddrives are ~$50, so all in you're looking at $550 for a reasonably nice home NAS. That will probably use around ~20 watts on average, or 1 kwh per 2 days, working out to 175…

If you repatriate content locally, do you need a NAS ?

I see the alternative to the cloud as being ~50, or more realistically ~100 for a usable external drive. No consumption when it's not used. Higher longevity than a NAS with the same drives. I don't think the alternative is a self-hosted cloud with requirements of being online, reachable by multiple devices, etc...

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#93

Post by AndroTux »

epups wrote: post #43
pmlnr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. So your credit card expired, and the provider cleared your cloud data. How do you retrieve it? See, each has issues.

This is not a good example. One of them is under your control, the other isn't.

I read many posts of people complaining about some cloud service deleting their data for „no reason“ (= user error, mostly not reading emails) every month, while I can’t even remember the last post of someone losing their data due to a fire (except OVH bursting into flames ;) ). So I think it’s a valid argument to be made.

Bottom line: have a backup, and utilize cloud as well as local storage.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#94

Post by mortify »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #89

Security and cost tend to be less of a win locally than you might expect. I'm a huge advocate for going local and owning your stuff, but it depends on circumstances. 2 TB from dropbox is $120 per year. A 2 bay Synology is $448. Brand name 2TB harddrives are ~$50, so all in you're looking at $550 for a reasonably nice home NAS. That will probably use around ~20 watts on average, or 1 kwh per 2 days, working out to 175…

For the home NAS, Assume a 5-6 year lifespan for the drives so in those 10 years you will spend another $100.

Of course this assumes you just need storage while a NAS can provide other services allowing you to consolidate calendars, shared note-taking, password managers, etc.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#95

Post by mortify »

rakoo wrote: post #92
datadrivenangel wrote: post #89

Security and cost tend to be less of a win locally than you might expect. I'm a huge advocate for going local and owning your stuff, but it depends on circumstances. 2 TB from dropbox is $120 per year. A 2 bay Synology is $448. Brand name 2TB harddrives are ~$50, so all in you're looking at $550 for a reasonably nice home NAS. That will probably use around ~20 watts on average, or 1 kwh per 2 days, working out to 175…

If you repatriate content locally, do you need a NAS ? I see the alternative to the cloud as being ~50, or more realistically ~100 for a usable external drive. No consumption when it's not used. Higher longevity than a NAS with the same drives. I don't think the alternative is a self-hosted cloud with requirements of being online, reachable by multiple devices, etc...

It depends on your use case. If you just need storage as a backup for a single device, then there's no need for a NAS, but if you're backing up multiple devices and/or want to share data between devices, then a low-power NAS is a good option.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#96

Post by rakoo »

Gys wrote: post #41
buro9 wrote: post #17

Syncthing is a dream. Photos sync'd from phone to laptop making pics taken instantly available to share via desktop apps. Also add in the NAS and you have three copies before you consider RAID or BTRFS or anything. Replace Dropbox with syncthing and you have multiple folders and can choose which folders go to which devices. Put a NAS at a second location and you have the ability to power up and power down the remote…

What I like about Dropbox is all files are available (browsable) from their ios app. Do you happen to use a similar app for remote browsing?

I've never used it, but there's a syncthing app that doesn't sync anything but allows you to browse what's in the share: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.syncthing.lite/

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#97

Post by rakoo »

mortify wrote: post #95
rakoo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you repatriate content locally, do you need a NAS ? I see the alternative to the cloud as being ~50, or more realistically ~100 for a usable external drive. No consumption when it's not used. Higher longevity than a NAS with the same drives. I don't think the alternative is a self-hosted cloud with requirements of being online, reachable by multiple devices, etc...

It depends on your use case. If you just need storage as a backup for a single device, then there's no need for a NAS, but if you're backing up multiple devices and/or want to share data between devices, then a low-power NAS is a good option.

Yes, it's good to remember that use cases differ, and that not everyone has a few TB to share between multiple devices. Of all the people I know who still use cloud storage, none of them pay for it because it's not needed, and the free quota (15GB) is largely compatible with a sync-everywhere strategy where all files are always copied everywhere, thanks to Syncthing for example. Even for photos this is doable.

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#98

Post by toomuchtodo »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #89

Security and cost tend to be less of a win locally than you might expect. I'm a huge advocate for going local and owning your stuff, but it depends on circumstances. 2 TB from dropbox is $120 per year. A 2 bay Synology is $448. Brand name 2TB harddrives are ~$50, so all in you're looking at $550 for a reasonably nice home NAS. That will probably use around ~20 watts on average, or 1 kwh per 2 days, working out to 175…

I setup storage and replication for my father between Florida (primary) and a midwest state (secondary) using two Synology NAS devices. 30TB (VMs and install images because he likes to tinker with tech being retired, as well as lifelong personal data) corpus he was carrying with him on external drives, ~50TB usable after accounting for RAID whatnot. To store this in Backblaze B2 was going to be $180/month ($6/TB). He breaks even in ~6 months at ~$1200 for equipment outlay. Power costs are immaterial outside of California (less than 10 cents/kwh at both sites, rooftop solar on both properties, YMMV).

I really wanted the cloud solution to win, because I am not around often and don't have time to troubleshoot mouse trap tech setups. I can twiddle cloud primitives from anywhere, which is very appealing for obvious reasons. But in this case, the math was clear.

(no affiliation with Synology or Backblaze, but a big fan of both, infra/devops engineer in a past life, I also pay for Dropbox personally)

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#99

Post by llbeansandrice »

mortify wrote: post #94
datadrivenangel wrote: post #89

Security and cost tend to be less of a win locally than you might expect. I'm a huge advocate for going local and owning your stuff, but it depends on circumstances. 2 TB from dropbox is $120 per year. A 2 bay Synology is $448. Brand name 2TB harddrives are ~$50, so all in you're looking at $550 for a reasonably nice home NAS. That will probably use around ~20 watts on average, or 1 kwh per 2 days, working out to 175…

For the home NAS, Assume a 5-6 year lifespan for the drives so in those 10 years you will spend another $100. Of course this assumes you just need storage while a NAS can provide other services allowing you to consolidate calendars, shared note-taking, password managers, etc.

Are the economies of scale really that aggressive here? A feature-rich cloud solution ending up cheaper than self-hosted by around 10% just using napkin math?

Re: A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions

#100

Post by justinclift »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #54
justinclift wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, cloud storage really does have reliability issues. A recent case in point, though there are many more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-i...

So in other words, Google in particular has a reliability issue (big news flash there). Unless you're nitpicking for its own sake, you presumably know there are many other cloud options out there for which you can even use your own encryption system (think boxxryptor, cryptomator, reclone, etc) for maximum privacy. It's neither expensive or hard to run simultaneous, fairly simple multiple cloud backups of one's devic…

> It's neither expensive or hard to run simultaneous, fairly simple multiple cloud backups ...

Yep, that would potentially be a suitable workaround. Not sure I'd really agree with the pricing aspect not being expensive, but that's probably one of those things that depends on each users circumstances.

Post reply on HN