Hi everyone,
I would like to ask your opinions on reliable cloud storage providers for media. I have a media collection that isn’t too big (about 2-3TB) that I’d like to store on the cloud since I’ll be moving in the future and don’t think I can handle multiple hard drives.
What do you suggest? Any issues I should be looking at? I came across Wasabi too, along with the more expensive Scaleway and Cloudflare R2 offerings. For now Backblaze seems fine in terms of reliability, but has anyone come across complaints from them regarding what is stored on their servers?
Thanks!
What about compressing it into 7z password protected archives and uploading it to any good host like MEGA?
I don’t use b2, rather; I have a personal account. Backing up 3 computers and they’ve never said anything over years So. Yeah it’s fine
I have a personal account. Backing up 3 computers and they’ve never said anything over years
Until you need to use the backup and the process is like shit. And takes weeks to months.
I’ve got about 12 TB in Amazon Glacier. Granted, I’m using this as an offsite backup for my NAS, rather than regularly accessed for consumption.
That’s very expensive to recall. Glacier download prices are extremely expensive
But isn’t that the point? You pay a low fee for inconvenient access to storage in the hope you never need it. If you have a drive failure you’d likely want to restore it all. In which case the bulk restore isn’t terrible in pricing and the other option is, losing your data.
I guess the question of whether this is a service for you is how often you expect a NAS (that likely has redundancy) to fail, be stolen, destroyed etc. I would expect it to be less often than once every 5 years. If the price to store 12TB for 5 years and then restore 12TB after 5 years is less than the storage on other providers, then that’s a win, right? The bigger thing to consider is whether you’re happy to wait for the data to become available. But for a backup of data you want back and can wait for it’s probably still good value. Using the 12TB example.
Backblaze, simple cost. $6x12 = $72/month which over a 5-year period would be $4320. Depending on whether upload was fast enough to incur some fees on the number of operations during backup and restore might push that up a bit. But not by any noticeable amount, I think.
For amazon glacier I priced up (I think correctly, their pricing is overly complicated) two modes. Flexible access and deep archive. The latter is probably suitable for a NAS backup. Although of course you can only really add to it, and not easily remove/adjust files. So over time, your total stored would likely exceed the amount you actually want to keep. Some complex “diff” techniques could probably be utilised here to minimise this waste.
Deep archive
12288 put requests @ $0.05 = $614.40
Storage 12288GB per month = $12.17 x 60 = $729.91
12288 get requests @ $0.0004 = $4.92
12288GB retrieval @ $0.0025 / GB x 12288 = $30.72 (if bulk possible)
12288GB retrieval @ $0.02 / GB x 12288 = $245.76 (if bulk not possible)
Total: $1379.95 / $1594.99
Flexible
12288 put requests @ $0.03 = $368.64
Storage 12288GB per month = $44.24 x 60 = $2654.21
12288 get requests @ $0.0004 = $4.92
12288GB retrieval @ $0.01 / GB x 12288 = $122.88
Total: $3150.65
In my mind, if you just want to push large files you’re storing on a high capacity NAS somewhere they can be restored on some rainy day sometime in the future, deep archive can work for you. I do wonder though, if they’re storing this stuff offline on tape or something similar, how they bring back all your data at once. But, that seems to me to be their problem and not the user’s.
Do let me know if I got any of the above wrong. This is just based on the tables on the S3 pricing site.
Aren’t you charged data egress fees/S3 standard storage fees when they are preparing your bulk retrieval?
For a short period of time, nobody will care, especially with almost zero traffic.
But for only up to 3tb, you can easily fit that on a single drive.
Hey on that 3tb thing… can I pick and choose folders or parts of folders from the backups?
Or, say, I want to move stuff around in folders… is that possible after the backup has reached them and is only visible to me through their web interface?
Depends a lot on what backup software you use. Blackbase B2 ist just an S3-like object storage service. It’s the underlying software stack of many different things, one of those can be backup software. They do have their own backup solution though. But in that case B2 is the wrong product for you to look at.
