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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

$60/mo to put my whole "200gb" iTunes library "in the cloud", or the same amount of money to buy a much larger storage appliance for my home.

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Even though cloud storage is getting cheaper, it's still not as cheap as off of the shelf hard drives (yet). But then again, you can't access your hard drive from anywhere, and it's not stored at geographically different locations.

Then when it comes to your mobile devices, sometimes it's not possible to add additional capacity. You are paying for something different than a hard drive. Cloud storage will get cheaper, just as the harddrives have

How can it be cheaper as off the shelf drives if data centers also only use commodity off the shelf drives?

(probably from wholesale, though)

Well, a data center using lots of drives can probably use more of the space on them. It wouldn't be unusual for an individual person only to fill up 1/10 of his hard drive. It would be less common for a data center to have 10x overcapacity.

Another possible cool thing just came into my mind:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instance_storage

If they wanted to be really clever, they could also analyze the data when it's uploaded and encode it in a less redundant way... for instance, it's quite likely that large numbers of people will have very similar mp3 files... if you could figure out that 99% of a certain file is exactly identical to 99% of another file, why store that data twice?

But, that gets very complicated... you're just shifting the hard drive costs into developer and cpu costs... so it may not be economical.

Clouds must markup. They can't charge the same prices or they are merely covering hardware expenses, which doesn't cover personnel expenses, let alone profit.

Fortunately you can get some premium value out of that markup that is way more expensive to set up yourself. (In particular multiple backup sites.) But the cheapest storage solution absent all other concerns will always be simple local storage.

Agreed. As someone who sells online backups by the byte, I should be trying to get people to back up all the data they have -- but as I routinely point out to people, some stuff really doesn't need offsite backup. If your house burns down, there are lots of things you're going to be upset about losing; a collection of downloaded MP3s probably isn't one of them.

I disagree. Losing my MP3 collection would mean losing part of my identity I had over the years.

It's really interesting/funny to look at the different stuff and say to yourself "Did I really like this? Did I really go to concerts from these bands?"

But of course, the cat/dog and the girlfriend would need to get out of the burning appartment first :)

But 60 USD? Probably not. :)

Agreed. In fact, one of my friends lost over 1TB of painstakingly collected mp3s (mostly scene stuff, prog house, techno, sets, etc), and was devastated by the loss. It took him over 10 years to assemble that collection.

I did say probably. Most people don't take music quite as seriously as your TB-collecting friend.

On the contrary, one of the top 5 things I do want backed up is my MP3s; I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on them. But I probably don't want to back them up over the Internet.

Any backup service that won't accept encrypted blobs is worthless. Any cloud backup software that doesn't make that easy in both directions is also worthless.

What does this have to do with my comment, though?

I'm sorry, I hit the wrong "reply" link.

hrm, so use tarsnap then :p

Even paying for the software and additional technology this looks expensive to me. Amazon S3 price for this would be $20/month for the storage (plus transfer costs of $0.15/gb) so I think it could be cheaper

Exactly. Buy storage, hook up mobile device to it over a VPN, then map a network drive - done, exactly same end result, but no cloud dependency and no recurrent monthly fees.

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