Looking for the cheapest Unlimited Cloud Storage Provider (excluding BackBlaze). Need help!

What I need: Unlimited (more than 10TB) cloud storage
For How Long: More than a year (forever?), or whenever I stop paying
Why: Because lots of backups
Price: As cheap as possible!
Type of File(s): Everything I can dream of!
Privacy?: ¯\(ツ)/¯ I plan to encrypt everything before uploading, to stop the company from gathering data about me.
Uptime: ¯\(ツ)/¯ Above 80% (99% of companies will do this) is good with me.

As you can see, BackBlaze is completely out of the question. They only store data for 30 days on their normal service, and B2 is just too expensive. Carbonite (AFAIK) only stores data for 90 days.

I know DropBox, OneDrive, and a few others do unlimited storage for their business customers, which is fine. I’d be totally down to sign up for their business plans. I just need help finding the cheapest company which meets my requirements.

Thanks :slight_smile:

S3 Glacier would be $235 a month for 10TB ($0.023/GB/month).

Google Cloud’s Cold Line storage is $0.01/GB/month. Never used it so i think there’s some caveats like minimum retention time, so you might be locked into 3 months after deletion.

Google Drive via G Suite Business ($10/mo/user) is the cheapest. You technically need 5 users to be unlimited, but someone was saying that’s not enforced (@Ruffalo was that you?).

rclone is the tool to use for file transferring. It supports encryption in case you have trust issues with Google.

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I’ve come across CrashPlan for Small Business and OpenDrive Personal.

When I called, I asked them these questions:

-Are files deleted if not seen for many months (upload once, never need to see on my hardware again)?
-File type restrictions?
-File size restrictions?
-Download/upload speed restrictions?
-Monthly Price?
-Minimum number of users?

CrashPlans response:
-Files never deleted, unless subscription ends
-File type restrictions? No
-File size restrictions? No
-Download/upload speed restrictions? No
-Monthly Price 10USD
-Minimum number of users? 1

OpenDrive response:
-Files never deleted, unless subscription ends
-File type restrictions? ??? Forgot to ask this
-File size restrictions? ??? Forgot to ask this
-Download/upload speed restrictions? Speed gradually slows down to upload as you get closer to 10TB, and passing it. Download from their servers is unchanged.
-Monthly Price? 10USD
-Minimum number of users? 1

Here’s the list of cloud storage providers that I partially went through, trying to find companies that allow 10TB+ storage allowances for a pretty cheap monthly price.

Probably tarsnap. Compared no everything else, you prepay what you’ll use, and once its uploaded its uploaded. Don’t pay for storage you pay for the bandwidth used. Encrypt to a tar, bump it, pull it when you need it. Pretty nice imo.

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“Proper” cloud services are never unlimited, you always need to look at cost of network to write, cost of storage to write, cost of storage to retain, cost of storage to read, cost of network to read. They always come with some weak external SLO, but internally the companies will have stricter targets. And the end of the day, you pay for what you use, but if you need an exabyte, they’ll be happy to provide - no biggie.

“End user” cloud services, like various “drives” and “suites” are usually where you have a simplified payment model where for some fixed fee you have fair use limits (check the fine print). As a small power user, this is probably a better choice for most people around here.

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Yes that’s right, it’s not enforced. Use rclone to transfer files and mount the encrypted filestore and duplicati for backups.

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@Ruffalo I tried to setup Duplicati a while back and it was running into a certificate error. Do you use the docker container or did you set it up yourself?

I’m not using docker for duplicati, no. Standard linux install. Only tricky parts were getting email notifications right and on Windows, excluding files/dirs in-use.

I have duplicati taking nightly backups from 2 windows, 2 linux, and 1 MacOS host all to the same unlimited GDrive.

On the mac now. As you can see, I don’t really constrain retention. Think I have it set to delete archived versions after 4 years.

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I might try to set up Duplicati again today.

If I hit a wall again, do you mind if I @ you in a helpdesk thread?

@TheAlmightyBaconLord, Duplicati can backup to a large variety of storage providers, so it might be useful information for you as well.

Sure. IMO, it is the best opensource target-agnostic backup tool available today.

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Got it working no problem.

Quick question: is there any way to have it just push files into Google Drive without zipping them (like how rclone does it)? I understand why someone would prefer it this way, but I’m just wondering if it’s possible to make the information browsable in drive.

Right now, with encryption turned off, it looks like this:

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No, because duplicati uses a block-based backup mechanism where it only uploads delta changes. This allows you to revert to a specific point-in-time and makes your daily backups smaller.

If you want it to be browsable you can use rclone in cron to essentially rsync your data to GDrive every day. It should still only transfer deltas but you lose point-in-time recovery.

That’s how I sync my NAS to google drive, actually, although I do use an encrypted store. I don’t have anything on there that isn’t encrypted.

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So are you using Google Drive G Suite Business with a single user, and getting to store more than 1TB? More than 5TB?

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I have more than 5 users, but can confirm that 5TB is not a problem for me.

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You could try DO ondemand storage vps with tarsnap

Originally read that at 6.7TB, but NOPE, that is a whole 67TB stored in the cloud. That is beautiful.

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Yes. There is no limit, and it works with one user.

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So I guess my 3 choices (so far) are Google Drive for Business, Crashplan, and OpenDrive.

Does anyone else know any others which offer 10TB/Unlimted storage?

Crashplan is slow as balls and only does backups, while you can use the unlimited GDrive for other stuff. OpenDrive I never heard of before, but I’m suspicious that anyone without Google, Microsoft, or Amazon’s scale can afford to advertise unlimited storage. And note both Amazon and Microsoft stopped doing it due to people like OOO and me. More OOO than me, 67TB is very impressive!

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