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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

But at least around here, wouldn't people rather own their storage

I know I'd rather not own any storage at home. I have a 9TB storage array (well, I'm only using about half) that I use for pictures, music and movies, and if I had a faster and more reliable internet connection, I'd happily move that all to the cloud.

I'd want my own encryption key though, so the provider can't see any of the data.

All of that data already lives at a cloud provider as backup -- took a couple months to upload it all.

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I've thought about doing this a lot. I have a solid and stable 20 Mb connection at home, only have had ~2 hours of downtime this year.

The thing is... I don't want to basically trap myself into AWS or Dropbox. I run a 6Tb array like you, and kinda set up my own cloud, drag and drop, etc.

I don't think I'd ever give it up because:

1) It's cheaper to run myself (long term) - I'd have to consistently pay someone else ever increasing amounts to store data (which seems dumb since storage gets cheaper every year, their service doesn't).

2) Security - I don't want anyone to have access to those files but me. I'm 100% sure Amazon or Google would be able to access those files if ordered too by a government. Hell, they might do it without being ordered, who knows what's happened since Snowden.

3) Ease of use - my setup is based on a local network (as well as an ssh component). Basically, my setup works like Dropbox. The only drawback is no mobile component. If I want to change that I have access to all the parts and can do what I want. With AWS (which I use all day for work) I cant swap out a drive or stream a movie to my TV, phone, or desktop with a click.

I've got just about 60TB in my apartment with gigabit and I wouldn't consider moving them to the cloud. Way too risky for me.

Now I will say, if I could trust a cloud service that wouldn't charge a ton of money for 60+tb then I would jump on it.

Hosting yourself is still way cheaper. But services like S3 do get cheaper. When S3 was released in 2006, it cost $0.150/gb*month. That price underwent a half-dozen or so cuts every couple years to reach its current price of $0.03.

Its actually been that price for about 2.5 years now. With competition from Google, Microsoft, and Backblaze, its possible we could see a push toward even cheaper prices before too long.

As for security, S3 does support SSE at rest with a user-provided encryption key. So you're good to go there.

On security, I'd like to point out that GCS now supports Customer Supplied Encryption Keys [0]. If you lose your key, we can't help you. Nobody can just unwrap your encrypted data.

On cost, I'm using Nearline myself ($.01/GB/month so about $10/TB/month) as an offsite backup of my home NAS setup. Paying for actual bytes stored instead of bytes of capacity gets you at least 20% (raid overhead) but honestly closer to 50% or more depending on how full you are. The poster above had about 3 TiB apparently which works out to $30/month. That's pretty good for an unthrottled replicated storage system offsite.

(And like you, I'm considering making my media directly read-only available via App Engine or something, because once you're talking about 1+ TiB of photos all photo hosting sites fall over).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/encryption

Agreed. I keep a server at home, not because I want to but because I have to. The cost of cloud storage and compute, relative to what you can field in your closet, is inordinate. You do pay the premium for not managing it yourself.

Its my hunch that the statement you quote is just simply wrong. If you're keeping a computer at home that is doing something valuable enough to keep it around, it should valuable enough to you that there has to be _some_ price cheap enough, and _some_ capabilities good enough, that the cloud makes sense. The exception to this is, of course, the hobbyists and the tinfoil hatters.

That's... gotta be extremely expensive.

I don't care about my internet connection but it was looking like hundreds of dollars a month or more to store that sort of data.

(I only post in the hope that I'm missing a magic, affordable bullet.)

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