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Comment by sinatra | Hacker News Reader

Local storage is extremely cheap. Except for mobile devices where it's kept artificially expensive as a way to price discriminate.

However, I would not want to build a company around bypassing local storage because when (if?) local storage becomes cheaper on mobile devices, there will be absolutely no benefit of using their product.

Then, as the photos and videos keep getting bigger and bigger due to higher resolution and quality, the bigger problem will be uploading those files to the "cloud" in the first place, not not having enough local storage. Because, compared to local storage, network connectivity for mobile devices will take longer to become mature.

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Storage is still pretty limited on laptops. For example even on Macbook Pro you are still stuck with max 1TB. If you carry your computer around, external storage is pretty inconvenient.

One issue with cheap local storage is the reliability. It is easy to get an external hard disk or NAS box, but quite difficult to setup appropriate backup procedures and maintain those. For example keeping data and backups in one physical location is not a very good idea.

I'd argue that if you're running out of 1TB local storage for data you use frequently, then this completely cloud based service won't work for you anyway. Imagine how much data will go back and forth for that 1+TB. Something like Dropbox/Google Drive with selective sync will be a better option.

And this cloud service doesn't solve the backup problem either. With Upthere, the copy in their cloud is your only copy. If their data gets corrupted, you lose everything. So, you want a proper remote backup solution anyway whether you use Upthere or Dropbox or Syncthing. And if you think Upthere must have good backup setup of their own, then I'd argue that so would Dropbox and Google Drive.

So, I still am not sure if Upthere really provides that much value.

> Storage is still pretty limited on laptops. For example even on Macbook Pro you are still stuck with max 1TB. If you carry your computer around, external storage is pretty inconvenient.

Outside of Macbooks, though, there's a wide range of available storage options. Outside laptops, even wider. To OP's point, this seems like a limiting factor only until it isn't. If people are feeling the pain from Macbook storage limitations, it's a fair bet that the next iteration will let you go further. And the same applies across the board, including mobile.

> Except for mobile devices

That's a pretty big exception. But even on traditional computers, photo/video libraries going back years can take up terabytes. Now with stuff like this (e.g. iCloud Photo Library), you can access that entire history from any device of any size.

And don't forget, it handles offsite backup too.

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