What's the cheapest online storage that you know of?
I'm looking for a diskspace of possibly 1TB online
Edit: my idea is to use it like as an external harddisk for everyday stuff. Encrypt the disk, put my filesystem on it, mount it as external drive kinda. Never worry about backups or lost data etc, as the provider would take care of it
Since you didn't mention your requirements, I'll assume data integrity isn't super important. In that case, allow me to introduce you to /dev/null as a service. It's free and has unlimited capacity.
Depends for how long. Buying a used NAS with a single 1TB drive is probably cheaper over a 10 year period than subscribing to some cloud service for the same duration.
You mean three drives? You need data integrity, what if a drive fails? What if you have a raid 1 but when readding a new drive you have read errors? Parity is good.
I had a hetzner box a while back but I didn't know about these storage boxes. This is pretty great. I've used rsync.net for many years but it's basically 3x the price and it's painfully slow.
If you want really good answers, you will need to be more specific about your requirements.
The absolute cheapest as the question is stated is to go dumpster diving for a free hard drive and host it at a friend's house, but this is likely not what you had in mind.
Do you need backups?
Does it need to be encrypted at rest?
What bandwidth do you need up and down?
Is it okay with a monthly bandwidth cap?
what latency is okay? Is cold storage where it takes a day or more to fetch the data okay?
Well, I intend to use the offsite storage as an everyday-use-external-harddisk, I want to encrypt it, put a filesystem on top and the mount it. The thought behind it is, the provider will take care of data integrity and backups as well. Worry free usage for me then
That's unlikely to perform well enough to be usable at all. You'd at the very least need some sync method which just updates the blocks you wrote to, and that rules out a lot of cheap storage.
You'd be better off with either cloud storage a la Google Drive or Dropbox, either mounted from the remote location or used as storage for a sync-based backup solution. You could have it upload things instantly if it listens for save events in inotify.
That's too much for regular stuff, but if you're using it to store your family photos and videos off-site in case of a fire etc, you'd pay it. Hmmm... I wonder whether you could get insurance to cover it?
(preparing for inevitable downvotes) depending on how much storage you need and the flexibility you have in how you use it, Office365 includes 1TB of OneDrive storage for 6 users for somewhere around $100/yr. I use it for storing encrypted video files from my NVR and it works for my use case, but ymmv.
Yet another B2 user here, I only backup things I can't afford to lose so my monthly spend isn't particularly high. I think the most I've ever paid for was around 1.5TB. One big draw for B2 is their upcoming egress policy change tomorrow: up to 3x the data stored with them is free to transfer out every day. Egress absolutely wrecks people's storage budgets a lot of the time, restoration costs can be absurd when you need to recover data.
Another Backblaze user checking in 😁 I use their B2 service for $6/TB/mo, however they have an unlimited storage option for Windows/Mac if you're interested in that
Maybe Google isn't welcome around here, but I spend ~100/yr. for 2TB. $4.20/mo./TB.
I map my Windows libraries to my Google Drive and I'm done. Save it and it syncs. Plus, I use Android and Gmail, so everything fits nicely in the same ecosystem.
Awesome company that makes it eau to interface worth their storage outside of their proprietary tools, resulting in wide support built in to a bunch of backup software. Have no issue with you storing encrypted blobs. But - and this is most important - they don't harvest your data and resell or reuse it (although, always encrypt, to be sure).
I’ll just say this: you get what you pay for. I used pCloud a few years ago and wasn’t able to retrieve all my data, some files got corrupted (luckily I had backups). Now I use a DIY NAS and backup to B2.
This is only slightly related - I lost a small number of files with DreamHost object storage, and they were charging more than S3 per GB.
So, I agree you usually get what you pay for, but also make sure the provider is all-in on the product. I think DreamHost really isn't interested in their virtualized/cloud offerings.
Agreed. Especially when reliable storage only costs $4-$6/tb these days. (Where I live that won’t buy you a freaking cup of coffee lol). I only back up to the cloud and pay for my important data anyway, I have terabytes of data that I don’t mind losing and therefore don’t bother backing up to the cloud.
It’s really not complicated. Look up Truenas or Rockstor. Both are solid NAS OSs. I’ve been running Rockstor for about a year now (partly because I’m a huge fan of btrfs) and I’m pretty happy with it. Make sure to keep an offline backup on an external drive just in case you mess something up. I manually plug in a drive about once a month for that.
I think DIY is more fun anyway ;) and I’m sure the community will help with questions you can’t find answers to online. Good luck!
OneDrive with Microsoft 365 Family subscription. There are several deals for 50€ per 15 Month for 1TB per Account. Since it is the family subscription you'll get up to 6 Accounts. So it is 3.33€ for 6TB or 0.55€ per TB.
I tried but for me the upload was very slow and not very practical.
They only have a windows app for now, so to back up my NAS the only solution I found was to create a windows VM, a virtual disk pointed at my data on the NAS and running the VM regularly to back up the data.
It's a good question. If I had something like gigabit internet with high upload speeds I probably would (and eventually will). Right now though, I use Jellyfin from wherever I am, and I share it with a few friends and family too.
iDrive E2 is $40 a year for 1TB S3 compatible storage and they have promotions quite often. As always with cheap storage don't rely on it and have a local NAS but it's handy for offsite. I've just transferred out of Wasabi, who were cheap but are less so now.
Never worry about backups or lost data etc, as the provider would take care of it
This is not how it works. You still have to backup your data!
Your account can be closed due to various reasons, you accidentally delete files, some malware deletes files without you noticing it before it is too late.
A friend of mine lost some important data because of the ovh server container fire incident. Ovh had no backups.
I wanted to do my own self-hosted storage but for the cost and features I went with Dropbox. It's $10 a month if you prepay for the year otherwise it's $12 and you get two terabytes of storage. For that you get all the same things most self-hosted solutions will offer including 30 days of versioning/backups. Additionally it's pretty popular so most software has built in integration which is convenient but not something you need. Bottom line is doing your own storage can be cheap but adding off-site backups gets expensive and just going straight to off-site backups (cloud storage) is going to be close to the $10-$12 dollars you'll pay anyway but you have to do all the work.