Hey all,
So a telegraph poll was replaced without warning outside my house this morning, bye bye internet for half the day!
It did make me think though, at least with my multiple TrueNAS servers and SyncThing instances were making copies of my live files without a fuss.
It does make me think though, I should probably consider a fall-back WAN sometime…mind you, it very rarely goes down, perhaps once or twice a year.
Just thoughts!
These types of events are great reminders and encouragement of why we put the time and energy into self hosting. I remember a year or two ago when the internet lost its mind over one of the big message platforms being down and our home didn’t blink because we use a self hosted xmpp server. Internet goes down, all files are available locally.
I have considered automatic fallback solutions for internet outages which happen 2-3 times a year here for hours at a time (regional WISP). We are able to tether phones for work and the cost/complexity of a dedicated fallback just isn’t worth it to me. Be curious what others think/do.
I have AT&T Fiber 1Gb as my main connection, with Verizon 5G Home Internet as secondary, very nice to know I have a second connection
Something else I’ve done is made a NAS in my detached garage, to give my replicated snaps some isolation. This is a nice middle ground between cloud and on-site backups
Does a cellular connection shared through a USB tether count as backup?
I got about 20GB worth of mobile data monthly allowance. Daily, I dont use much mobile data because most of the content I consume is via podcasts and youtube at home, downloaded through my NewPipe app and my podcast app. There is also internet at work when I need to look up something.
Also fun fact, the spouse has an “unlimited” mobile data she got about a decade ago before the entire country became addicted to social media and youtube/tiktok (and I will always be envious of that). I haven’t really tested how true the “unlimited data” truly is though.
On one hand cloud services offer convenience, on the other hand companies cash in on customers of those managed services. Not to mention that all cloud providers I know of follow a for profit business model. In terms of NAS and self-hosting it means running those services yourself will almost always be more cost efficient than to buy into a managed cloud service. Those companies have comparable expenses for hardware and electric energy, but also factor in an overhead for human workforce and a profit margin.
A simple example is cloud storage, a Toshiba 16TB HDD can be had currently for around 170USD, eight of those driver for a RAID-Z2 or RAID6 with approximately 96TB of storage space* would amount to about 1400USD, with an entire offsite backup of the same specification it would be about 2800USD total. Storing that same amount of data in AWS’s S3 Glacier Deep Archive, their cheapest storage tier, would amount to 100USD a month, not to mention that an restore of the entire dataset would cost well north of 4000USD.
Even smaller providers, who historically offered bare metal servers or VPS servers, are usually well above 300USD a month for that amount of storage. From my calculations, depending on the service you compare to, a enthusiast breaks even after a year or two compared with commercial storage services. To put it in a nutshell, if your data does not pay for itself, self hosting is the cheaper way to go.
* Formatted storage space will be lower!
What a positive comment, thank you 
That’s exactly the same situation as me - of course when it is down, my mind does start to wonder about alternative solutions. Hard to be motivated, when like you say, it happens only a few times a year.
Wow, I know - so you are NetworkProfile eh, thanks for writing your blog, Google recommended it to me a few weeks ago and I’ve been scanning for helpful things that relate to me. Nice one 
I sure would like a setup like yours when it comes to redundant WAN, I have to admit though, my income isn’t related to tech (well, I use a computer but that’s about it!).
I’ve read that already, very interesting!
I reckon it does, I’ve got the same thing.
I’ve got roughly the same mobile data as you, and likewise I rarely use it. So it is handy for these kind of days.
Your spouse is lucky eh!
Absolutely, I think when it comes to large data, nothing beats local storage. My motivation for having my own servers (not proper ones, mind, just repurposed workstations initially) was due to me not trusting Windows to store my bits and bytes safely. But then the issue of backing up that data came about - RAID not a back up and all that. BackBlaze would cost a silly amount like $650 per year, and that cost would only go up year on year. So I decided to make use of the replication function, build myself a low power machine to receive snapshots. Works a treat!
I have to confess, the maths isn’t on the side of self-hosting in some situations and places.
Taking Google’s offering of 2TB that costs around £/$120 per year, a 2TB SSD is around £/$130-150 and should last at least 3 years. So total cost over 3 years would be perhaps £/$500. Just to power my 1 low energy server 24/7 costs around £90 per year, we won’t think about the HDD’s, motherboard, CPU, etc.
I don’t do it to save money, I think for smaller datasets, cloud wins. I like the integrity and control of my data though - it only goes where I want it and with the power of ZFS, it’s safe and duplicated automatically! 
For small datasets it is certainly an option, I agree. However I would resort to one of those providers who offer you a private Nextcloud instance. Also, given your example, the SSD will most likely live many years, provided you store basic files, like documents and photos and do nothing to fancy with it, and (140£+5*90£)/5 is 118£, so even in this case you most likely will break even before the SSD dies. But if you are just going to backup some documents and family photos you might as well pay 10£/month instead of having to go trough the hassle of administrating a server.
Actually, cloud storage for backups can, theoretically, technically, and realistically from a business perspective be cheaper than self-hosting… especially for backups… it’s just clouds are greedy, and barrier to entry is high, both in terms of finance and in terms of know-how.
Basically I’m saying that at a certain scale around $10M+ worth of drives maybe less, the delta between 20% overhead and whatever smaller overhead chunks stored in cloud would have after being encoded to be decently durable and available, is enough to fund network, power, host systems and salaries.
It sounds weird but I’m worried about the future of spinning rust - it might turn into a datacenter only thing sold only to business customers.
Hopefully clouds will get cheaper soon.
I hope not, having only just gotten into self-hosted data storage 