Online Data Storage: Asking for recommendations

[KleinesSinchen]

Up to moving to another house I never considered storing my data on computers, which are not fully under my direct and physical control. But thanks to my private situation there currently is no option for free and reliable physical off-site storage. This undermines the backup concept and I’m not feeling comfortable right now.
Since it was never necessary I’ve never looked into the available options. A naive search with a general search engine doesn’t look too promising: Just overwhelming and confusing.

An alternative for practically unlimited data storage outside the own house is a deposit box in a bank. ← This is not a cheap thing. So I’m wondering what online services have to offer. Amount of data is currently roughly 6 or 7TB. But to be honest not everything of this has to be backed up against any scenario. I would be grateful for cost-effective suggestions. Same for telling me your experiences: Reliability. Trustworthiness.

 

[Magsor]

There is no perfect solution or everyone would be using it.

I personally will store my data on m2 SSD from now on but depending on what is available to you HDD a verygood option but slower. Buy an enclosure/adapter and backup away.
You can probably buy a 2tb for around 100$ if its a bit slow but remember that slow ssd heat up less so... it can maintain usually a transfer speed of around 400mb/s in my experience but you can get faster speeds.
Then leave that in place where its gonna stay dry maybe a fireproof safe and put some a box of salt in the safe too I just leave my important stuff with my mom so if there is a fire where i live its safe.

If you want to go online mega.nz is the place I use altough the free 50gb tier is enough for me. You can get 8Tb for 200 euro per year which is pretty cost effective. It pretty neat, in the way that you can files share easily with coping files between accounts instantly. So if you want to share something with the world with staying anonymous make a dummy account, copy the files/folder instantly and share.

 

[eyeliner]

~7 tb is a lot of data. There's a few vendors out there that offer vast amounts of storage, even those that have the "cold storage" approach, where the data stored that way is basically pennies.

What are we talking about, here? Roms?
Furry porn? Pictures?

You can take advantage of some services to store images, like Amazon, if you are Prime member, off loading some service to other vendors, but I have only used Onedrive for more general uses and it works ok. 5 Tb is more than enough for me, but I keep my romsets in hard drives.

 

[ZeroT21]

You could easily get a big enough HDD to store a mere 7 TB

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Then leave that in place where its gonna stay dry maybe a fireproof safe and put some a box of salt in the safe too I just leave my important stuff with my mom so if there is a fire where i live its safe.

If you want to go online mega.nz is the place I use altough the free 50gb tier is enough for me. You can get 8Tb for 200 euro per year which is pretty cost effective. It pretty neat, in the way that you can files share easily with coping files between accounts instantly. So if you want to share something with the world with staying anonymous make a dummy account, copy the files/folder instantly and share.

Leaving HDDs at a different location was my previous method. But now there is no second location available anymore.
I've signed up on Mega (got only 20GB free, not 50) to instantly upload an encrypted copy (encrypted myself, not relying on their promises) of irreplaceable stuff. 200€ per year is a hefty fee. Sparkasse (bank) offers a little deposit vault for less → practically unlimited off-site cold storage. Of course this provides zero protection against the last point at the bottom of this post.

~7 tb is a lot of data. There's a few vendors out there that offer vast amounts of storage, even those that have the "cold storage" approach, where the data stored that way is basically pennies.

What are we talking about, here? Roms?
Furry porn? Pictures?

Spoiler: EOF Mode

Furry porn! Of course! Lots of it. What else are HDDs produced for?

Is the kind of data important?
Strictly speaking my completely 1000% irreplaceable data will fit on one BD-R. This stuff is already duplicated on multiple media (HDD, SSD, optical discs, free online storage) with checksum verification included.
Don't have pirate fever (hoarding 46271 games or some more to never play them). In addition to that complete No-Intro sets of consoles (plural!) I'm interested in would fit on a single BD-R.

The majority of data comes from backups created from original movie DVD/BD. Second falls audio drama (several thousand CD-DA dumped – it could be done again, but that is some serious work). Third place is taken by NAND images (those are irreplaceable as well but not as important).

You could easily get a big enough HDD to store a mere 7 TB

That is the first line of defense against data loss! External HDDs, multiple versions, preparing BD-R full backup… But it doesn't protect against:

• Burglars stealing all media
• Disasters destroying the house (fire, flood, landslide…)

and… delicate topic touching politics – please no political discussion here –

• Authorities illegally/illegitimately confiscating stuff in house search abusing preliminary investigation by public prosecution as form of punishment without a trial
  • ↑ Increasingly frequent problem… sadly ↑

 

[Hayato213]

Cost about 50 Euro for 10TB of cloud storage if you use like google drive, drop box cost 72 dollars a month if you want more than 3TB of storage.

 

[eyeliner]

Is the kind of data important?
Strictly speaking my completely 1000% irreplaceable data will fit on one BD-R. This stuff is already duplicated on multiple media (HDD, SSD, optical discs, free online storage) with checksum verification included.
Don't have pirate fever (hoarding 46271 games or some more to never play them). In addition to that complete No-Intro sets of consoles (plural!) I'm interested in would fit on a single BD-R.

The majority of data comes from backups created from original movie DVD/BD. Second falls audio drama (several thousand CD-DA dumped – it could be done again, but that is some serious work). Third place is taken by NAND images (those are irreplaceable as well but not as important).

Kind of, yes, if you can re-download later from Archive.org or torrent seeds. My point is, if it's romsets, no need to be overly religious in archiving it.
Pictures, on the other hand... Important, if you deem them so.

Rips are important, most surely. I'd say, a Onedrive subscription is more than worth it for that a huge amount of data.

Offload some stuff to a nearby physical drive and backup what's REALLY integral to you degenerate self.

Heck, it's the way I do with a few games and programs from ye Olde times. They've been traveling from cloud provider until today, until they found a home in Onedrive.

 

[linuxares]

https://www.hetzner.com/

Maybe? So good that Plex banned them. A lot of people host their videos on there.

 

[Chary]

What I do works more as an in-case-of-emergency rather than straight up cloud storage--Backblaze is like, $15 a month or so, I think, and it just takes whatever drives are connected to a single computer, and backs them up. If a drive ever dies, you can have a little backup of everything saved onto it, and you can grab a single file or the entire drive.

 

[KleinesSinchen]

https://www.hetzner.com/

Maybe? So good that Plex banned them. A lot of people host their videos on there.

Nice. 5TB for ≈13€/month for a storage box as they call it sounds cheaper than the file hosters I looked at.

[…]and it just takes whatever drives are connected[…]

That strength is – from a different point of view – a very big weakness.
It just takes. This requires ultimate trust in the provider.

Even those providers promising "zero knowledge encryption" aren't remotely trustworthy (let alone Microsoft or Google which don't have this as far as I know).

Cloud is and will stay a marketing buzzword for "someone else's computer"
Once data leaves the own dominion, I treat it as open to spying by everybody on the whole wide world. Any kind of vendor "app" must not be active on the computer containing data to backup. Only reliable open source encryption software may prepare data to manually upload.

Backblaze is an interesting concept. Ultimately too dangerous.

 

[linuxares]

Nice. 5TB for ≈13€/month for a storage box as they call it sounds cheaper than the file hosters I looked at.

Thats why people use them. They're cheap and fast. So people hosted their video libraries there and then Plex got scared about movie piracy and blocked them

 

[eternal]

Yeah I was going to mention, like linuxares said, find an online VPS shop that either allows you to install windows or linux and they have a generous storage space for whatever your budget is a month. But obviously youd have to learn how to access it (especially if its linux, since those tend to be cheaper), and youd have to worry about if it's TOS doesnt like that stuff, or whatever other random rules online storage comes with. Also 7TB is a lot, probably not cheap

Honestly, if its personal stuff or stuff youve bought but backed up, just either save the money and/or pay for it outta pocket and store it locally with like regular hard drives you can keep locked up somewhere or a raid you can access normally. I still dont trust most cloud storage places myself

googling " best vps storage ", shows a whole bunch of random hits, some on reddit too.