Simple topic: If you’re using cloud storage, what is it for? Which one did you go with? How much are you paying a month? How much are you paying a year? Any other info relevant info
Back story is nothing complicated. I’m looking to simplify my service bills, and as you’ll see below, spending a small fortune a year on storage, and not actually using it all.
I’m using google one, 100Gb package for R290/year which works out to R24.17/month. I buy those prepaid google play store vouchers once a year, and add to the google wallet. This is mostly for storing Assetto Corsa mods/cars/tracks.
For actual backups, I absolutely cannot lose, dropbox 1Tb for R216.63/month. This one needs to go, or I should go all in.
Based on these, i think the google one is best, of the two. It’s simple, payment doesn’t need a bank account, and you can get these vouchers at a supermarket. That said, I wouldn’t trust google with my omelette recipes, so encryption prior to backing up data, is probably a given. Except of course, if I’m uploading only to actually share it with people, eg. AC mods
I do have NAS servers at home. And some of those I periodically upload to cloud storage. But again, it’s like last resort. And that data, is actually so little, 1Tb cloud storage is overkill to the max.
Have you considered self-hosting? There’s software like Nextcloud out there that work quite well, or you could just use something like rdiff-backup which can do incremental updates over SSH.
It can be difficult finding a VPS with access to 1TB of storage, for example, and running Nextcloud will probably need more than the 1GB a cheap VPS will offer, so this might not be the best suggestion for your situation.
I’ve toyed with the idea of Nextcloud, but I’m not keen on managing a PHP-based instance of a service. 0-day apocalypse happens so often lately, I’d want to minimise the time I waste on panicking for updates/security.
I’m using Dropbox (even though I’m getting OneDrive for free through our company). Dropbox just works better and more reliable. OneDrive seems to get stuck often on one file and then nothing syncs further.
I’ve now even moved my Outlook data files to Dropbox and everything around those files (that remain open all week), seems to sync fine and when I close Outlook, those two archives also sync. With OneDrive, if there is one bloody file that isn’t syncing properly for who knows what reason, then all the other files in the queue is stuck.
I’m considering moving to the family plan. I’m storing everything on there from policies, bank statements, source code, videos, photos, email archives, the works. So being able to share things like the insurance policies with my wife so that it keeps syncing even if her Dropbox is full, would be useful.
I’ve never considered Google for storing anything other than maybe saved games. Heck, I don’t even use Gmail except for a spam collector. (i.e. when I need to provide an email address before being able to download a trial version of something)
So it has come to that time when my Google combined storage is nearing capacity. I keep getting the notification everywhere to upgrade. I was wondering if I should subscribe to this Google One plan and upgrade the entire family accounts while I’m at it. What have people’s experiences been with the service, I’m pretty sure there has been discussion in the past around it but I can’t seem to find it.
