A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by RajT88 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 5:06 PM UTC

infecto wrote: post #78

RajT88 wrote: post #16

My local setup - please critique as you like. For NAS, I am running Windows Server 2022 (I have a rational reason for this). It hosts many things. * IIS, for my local browser start pages, I configure with "new tab redirect" plugins * JellyFin - Basically a personal Netflix for all my ripped media * DokuWiki, thumbdrive version - for documenting house stuff * Twonky - Because it's the least-bad DLNA solution I've used…

Slightly off topic, on the client side how do you use JellyFin? I tried both browser and some of the iOS apps that just wrap that browser interface and it never worked well. It perhaps was also an issue on the JellyFin server itself. I went back to Plex only because it was plug-n-play for me. Just seeing if you have any additional tips here.

Browser, WebOS, Android clients. They all seem pretty great to me.

Android client has issue talking to a port other than 8920. There's multiple people debating on github if it is a bug or not.

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

#122

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 5:08 PM UTC

stef25 wrote: post #110

theshrike79 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the service is billed as a "backup" not as "cheap cloud storage". If they allowed people to back up unlimited USB drives and networks shares, /r/datahoarder would be all up their business with 1PB storage. This is why they limit it to only stuff you're actually using. If you want generic cloud storage with infinite retention, they have B2

They mention in their docs that this is why they forbid (not limit) NAS. Afaik you could still connect as many 8TB USB drives to your machine.

And as long as you keep them connected regularly, they are backed up.

What you can't do is connect a 20TB USB drive, back it up and put it in your cupboard for a year and expect the data to still be there.

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

#123

Post by theshrike79 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 5:11 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #91

theshrike79 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Scandinavia here too. Our support folks are based in Stockholm, AWS has some sort of permanent presence there IIRC.

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

#124

Post by RajT88 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

jim180 wrote: post #31

RajT88 wrote: post #16

My local setup - please critique as you like. For NAS, I am running Windows Server 2022 (I have a rational reason for this). It hosts many things. * IIS, for my local browser start pages, I configure with "new tab redirect" plugins * JellyFin - Basically a personal Netflix for all my ripped media * DokuWiki, thumbdrive version - for documenting house stuff * Twonky - Because it's the least-bad DLNA solution I've used…

I am very honestly curious, what's the reason for Windows Server 2022?

A few reasons, in order of my priorities:

- Win10 / 11 seem to be more and more crabby about talking to SMB shares, so I reasoned I needed to be able to exert more control over the file server. I can't tell you for my old nas how many times after a reboot I found myself running "net start mrxsmb10".

- Much of my professional life has been on the Windows stack, so when things aren't working right, I can troubleshoot it a lot more efficiently. Think: Sysinternals tools.

- I get free windows licenses through my MSDN through work, so it didn't cost me anything.

- It's nice to have an RDP host I can use to have some separation from my work stuff.

- I had some existing software licenses on stuff that only runs on windows: PlayOn, Twonky, TVersity. It turns out these older versions of PlayOn and TVersity are mostly useless these days.

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

#125

Post by askiiart » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

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'm quite a fan of self-hosting, but I can certainly acknowledge that sometimes cloud solutions are better. But it's not fair to only compare to a Synology NAS. If you're fine just running a standard Linux distro, rather than Synology's software, you can do much better in terms of hardware, for much cheaper. An Optiplex is ~$100-150 on eBay, has better hardware, and you can either just save that money or invest it in more storage.

It's worth acknowledging that it uses more power, but still, that's $300 less than the Synology up front. Some extra power draw doesn't add up that fast. Plus, IMO there's a lot of value in being able to control it all yourself. If something breaks (which isn't that common, assuming this simple setup) you can fix it yourself, and you have full control over your data.

I'd like to emphasize that it's worth taking into account the time and stress to run a NAS, it's not a perfect fit for everyone, even technical people, and priorities vary from person to person, but assuming you're just running a basic NAS with Syncthing, especially if it's all in Docker, it's very simple and low-maintenance. Hell, use an RHEL clone and set up watchtower, and you can have automated updates for a decade - that is, until it's not supported anymore.

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Synology NASes, I haven't used one myself.

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

#126

Post by justsomehnguy » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

tallanvor wrote: post #84

stef25 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah here https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217665398-Backi... > Backblaze will backup external USB and Firewire hard drives that are detached and re-attached as long as you remember to re-attach the hard drive at least once every 30 days. If the drive is detached for more than 30 days, Backblaze interprets this as data that has been permanently deleted and securely deletes the copy from the Backblaze data…

I mean, they also email you after two weeks and then again at 21 days, so it's not like they're hiding this from you.

It takes up to a month to recover from some situations. You maybe even heard about the one infamous three years ago.

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

#127

Post by RajT88 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #79

RajT88 wrote: post #16

My local setup - please critique as you like. For NAS, I am running Windows Server 2022 (I have a rational reason for this). It hosts many things. * IIS, for my local browser start pages, I configure with "new tab redirect" plugins * JellyFin - Basically a personal Netflix for all my ripped media * DokuWiki, thumbdrive version - for documenting house stuff * Twonky - Because it's the least-bad DLNA solution I've used…

Do you store stuff on multiple disks? I struggle with windows as a NAS. Windows storage space sucks hard (particularly their RAID5 style parity which has unacceptable performances, but also I had it failing without reporting it, and it doesn't handle parity with column size >8). The native windows software raid is deprecated, and can't handle disks of different sizes. I use stablebit drivepool for a secondary backup…

> The native windows software raid is deprecated, and can't handle disks of different sizes.

First I've heard of the deprecation! I'm not sure the second part is true though. I recall during setup my 14tb drives were not exactly the same size, and I found some way around it by just creating a volume of the same size as the first. My OS/Scratch is mirrored 10tb drives, which didn't have the same issue. These were refurbs since I didn't want to break the bank on scratch space.

> I think in 10-15 years you will struggle to find anything to read a CD or DVD, like you would struggle now to read a Zip or floppy disk.

CD/DVD drives were wayyy more prolific than floppy drives. Personal computing exploded in the 90's when optical drives were the standard.

> The most durable and cheapest way to do long term of storage is to replicate your data on new media regularly

Yeah, basically where I'm at. My prior NAS, I went through a few sets of drives. The latest ones I didn't even wait until one of the drives crashed, I just swapped out the hardware once the drives hit 5 years of age. I'd love some backup solution where I can archive stuff, and just leave it for decades, hence MDISC.

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

#128

Post by justsomehnguy » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #104

cm2187 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you store stuff on multiple disks? I struggle with windows as a NAS. Windows storage space sucks hard (particularly their RAID5 style parity which has unacceptable performances, but also I had it failing without reporting it, and it doesn't handle parity with column size >8). The native windows software raid is deprecated, and can't handle disks of different sizes. I use stablebit drivepool for a secondary backup…

I've got nearly 30-year-old optical drives that still work fine today. I can plug a 3.5" floppy drive into my Android phone and it still works. Sure, there's a chance in a decade or so SATA ports disappear, but USB adapters still work. Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB? ZIP drives had a number of mechanical issues (click of death). That's probably the biggest rea…

> Do you really think in 10-15 years it will be hard to find a device that still talks USB?

It would take some time to find a miniUSB patch right now, especially a good one. Sure, now I can find it. In 10 years?

N=1 anecdote: two years ago I helped to recover data from a 2.5" USB drive, which was left in a desk for 5 years. I was forced to use R-Studio and still I got only 90% of data in good enough condition.

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

#129

Post by Gys » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 5:38 PM UTC

rakoo wrote: post #96

Gys wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Actually I am on iOS and this is an Android solution. But from one thing I found another and finally got to Resilio Sync (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/resilio-sync/id1126282325) which might be a good solution.

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

#130

Post by janwillemb » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 5:50 PM UTC

justinclift wrote: post #18

janwillemb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used local drives for my data for decades. I have data since 1995. Nowadays I also have a remote offline backup somewhere. It seems to work for me so far.

With your setup, is that having your data on a single local drive at any time, or was it generally copied onto a few? aka "making sure you're not hosed if a drive goes bad"

It started with floppy disks in a large box. They actually went bad quite often. From the moment we had a 20MB hard disk[1] for about €400 all went on that hard disk, I think we made copies on the floppy disks just in case (not sure though). It was not important: private stuff, school stuff, programming for fun.

After I got a windows computer, I started hoarding stuff on the harddrive. I don't think I bothered to make copies. When I started doing paid stuff, I bought an external drive for backups. Have been doing that since, in various configurations. My configuration is now: all computers in the house backup to a central server in the house. I rsync to an external HD from that server every now and then. The external HD is stored on a different location.

I have realized that the data is the most vulnerable when I am doing the backup. If the house goes up in flames at that moment, I loose everything. I should get a second HD to prevent that.

[1] https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/47582/Atari-SH205-Ex...