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

blog.golivecosmos.com

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

#111

Post by bithaze »

theshrike79 wrote: post #73

Yeah, gonna jump on the "this seems like autogenerated blogspam" train here. The whole golivecosmos site is filled with similar articles that just link to other places with very little actual substance. Also the submitter's history seems like they've only posted stuff from the same domain...

It's a marketing blog for a service that relies on storing files locally, so that sounds about right. The HN username also matches the blog's author, so it does feel like they're posting exclusively for self-promotion.

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

#112

Post by datadrivenangel »

lukevp wrote: post #103
llbeansandrice wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No one would spend $450 on a NAS and then put 2 TB drives in it. My NAS was $450 and has 3 18TB drives with another slot not yet used. The drives were $250 each or so on sale. So for $750 + $450 I have an always-on home server that runs my home automation, DNS Adblock, local webservers, media server with hardware transcoding, ip cam to HomeKit adapter, a Nintendo switch homebrew e-shop, a software controller for my O…

This also adds to the cost. You start looking at 1-2k in equipment minimum for a good amount of space, and it adds up fast. Best way to get that more storage, but it's not cheap.

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

#113

Post by datadrivenangel »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #99
mortify wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you go cheap, you could probably cut the cost of self-hosting in half in terms of obvious cost. The cheaper you go the higher the maintenance tends to be though, so it may not be a real win.

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

#114

Post by datadrivenangel »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #90
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…

Don’t forget to adjust for inflation.

One of the big factors in this is how the costs go up! Will the cloud provider raise their price? Probably. Will your cost of electricity go up? Probably. Becomes a highly dimensional decision with no single obvious optimal answer, as a lot of low probability high risk events will dominate cost. If you're scared about house fires, the expected realized lifetime of the hardware goes down. If you're scared about OVH fires... likewise.

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

#115

Post by vinay_ys »

You can deal with this problem only if you are very disciplined about it, like GenX and prior generations were with their physical photo albums and paper financial records.

At some regular cadence (say weekly or monthly, whatever is your balance for loss tolerance vs discipline is), you will have to organize (tag) and archive your digital assets (photos, finance/health records etc), compress and encrypt it, and then do an offline disk backup as well as upload it to a cloud storage like S3. You will have to keep your encryption keys, S3 credentials etc safe and secure. And you will have to do it serious discipline, at the cadence you decided or at least upon completion of major life milestones, to save your digital life.

Then, every once in a while, at least once a year, you will have to download your entire archive, decrypt and decompress and verify that your system of tools and processes still work.

If you skip any of these steps, you are likely to find that you have screwed up and lost your digital life irrevocably.

Btw, just like your GenX parent/grandparents kept physical photo albums and file folders, you can keep digital equivalent in BD-Rs.

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

#116

Post by thunfischbrot »

vinay_ys wrote: post #115

You can deal with this problem only if you are very disciplined about it, like GenX and prior generations were with their physical photo albums and paper financial records. At some regular cadence (say weekly or monthly, whatever is your balance for loss tolerance vs discipline is), you will have to organize (tag) and archive your digital assets (photos, finance/health records etc), compress and encrypt it, and then…

Organizing and keeping a photo album seems a much lower barrier and mental load for most people than the steps in paragraph 2. Let alone paragraph 3.

I am all for it, and practice something similar. I don't know anyone else though.

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

#117

Post by lukevp »

vinay_ys wrote: post #115

You can deal with this problem only if you are very disciplined about it, like GenX and prior generations were with their physical photo albums and paper financial records. At some regular cadence (say weekly or monthly, whatever is your balance for loss tolerance vs discipline is), you will have to organize (tag) and archive your digital assets (photos, finance/health records etc), compress and encrypt it, and then…

You should do this even if you use Dropbox or some other service provider. There’s still data loss potential. Google has lost entire Gmail accounts for example. The durability isn’t 100% after all… those extra .9’s aren’t to cover durability issues in the architecture, they’re to cover “oopsies” where the provider loses your stuff.

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

#118

Post by mannyv »

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…

Add me to the list of people who have no problems contacting AWS. They've always been plenty responsive and have no issues setting up calls when needed.

I've heard of larger companies that can't get anyone, and it must be that they don't know who to call or what they want. All of my AM's have been super responsive...and these are in shops that are anywhere from 200 to 3 people.

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

#119

Post by mannyv »

mannyv wrote: post #118
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…

Add me to the list of people who have no problems contacting AWS. They've always been plenty responsive and have no issues setting up calls when needed. I've heard of larger companies that can't get anyone, and it must be that they don't know who to call or what they want. All of my AM's have been super responsive...and these are in shops that are anywhere from 200 to 3 people.

It could be that I actually know what I'm doing most of the time, so generally can bypass level 1 and level 2 support.

I've talked to product engineers occasionally.

Maybe they have a bit on the contact database that says "non-bozo?"

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

#120

Post by theamk »

pmlnr wrote: post #36
JeanMarcS wrote: post #25

Ok. So now your house is on fire. How do you retrieve your datas from the melted local NAS ? Or a buglar come and empties it. Don't get me wrong, I'm full "move away from the cloud" in the "proprietary cloud" way. But getting some drive space on a different location is important if you care about your datas. Could be in a relative's or friend's place (so almost no per month cost) or on a cloud drive (I personnaly use…

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

You missed a step here.

1. my credit card expired

2. I've started getting warning emails about data being cleared, and giving me a few weeks to fix this (because my provider does want me to keep paying.. it's their business after all)

3. I put in a new credit card and it all works again

Compare it to: you came back home and your data is gone. Or you power up your PC after power outage, and the disk fails. Or even worse, you are sitting in front of your computer, and the cryptolocker/ransomware window pops up.

(And one of those is much more likely to happen than others. I don't think I've ever heard stories about cloud data deleted for non-payment, but I've had plenty of first-hand experiences with disk failures and send-hand stories about ransomware)

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