A few years back, me and my buddies in college got word that if we signed up for Google Workspace Business (was called something else back then) we got basically unlimited cloud storage. The price looked good for the amount of storage that i got so i signed up and started storing everything there.
Fast forward to 2024 and i just got an email that they are increasing the price to €13.80 EUR per user/month. I’ve been thinking about moving away and cancelling this service all together but i am not sure on what to replace it with.
Self hosting this is out of the question since i don’t have the infrastructure (Hardware/disk space/colocation etc) to do this properly. I am mainly looking for a solution to store massive amount of photos.
Do any of you have a suggestion on where to migrate or have you done something similar and want to share your experience?
Reliability / Durability is hardest thing to replace … just in terms of cost.
On a small scale, and in practical terms, you’d want two “nice” sites and at least raidz3 or equivalent 3 disk redundancy with snapshots and automatic scrubbing .
The “nice” sites would have redundant power and internet, and you’d have enough cash and spare hardware sitting in your closet to “spring into action” and build a third site.
Most people would consider this overkill for their photos, but mathematically it’s worse. Practically the likelihood of data loss is usually near zero enough.
The software stack will depend on features needed, could be as simple as sticking a bunch of drives into a multi-drive enclosure, attaching to the cheapest raspberry pi, and running btrfs-snapraid, mergerfs, and samba… and then tailscale+rsync for replication.
For small amount of bytes this would have a large overhead, but at least it’s expandable as you go.
I was going to suggest linode since L1 has a referral
But looking at the referral page, it looks like the reduced it from $200->$100
A new user receives a $100 60-day credit when they sign up through a referral link. Before the credit is applied, they must add a valid payment method to their account.
The referrer receives a $25 non-expiring credit once the new user has been active for 90-days and spends $25 or more on services (after their promotional credit has been used or has expired).
If you want to DIY it you could find a VPC and run sandstorm on it for your own cloud
Alternatively you can use nextcloud, jellyfin, or plex
Some people also run plex (their move to be a steaming service is a little concerning), though plex/jellyfin aren’t designed for it
Thank you all for your replies. Crazy part of my personal life right now so I’m not able to answer everyone in this thread, but i will take a look soon.
