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Amazon Kills Off Unlimited Cloud Storage Option For Amazon Drive (usatoday.com)
Coldeagle writes: It looks like Amazaon is killing off it's unlimited storage plan and replacing it with a 1 TB plan for the same monthly cost. USA Today reports: "Amazon had the best deal in online storage -- unlimited backup for $59.99 -- but now unlimited is out. It has been replaced with tiered pricing, the system used by Amazon's rivals. The new rate, announced to customers Wednesday night, is now $59.99 yearly for 1 terabyte of online backup, with each additional terabyte (TB) costing an additional $59.99 annually. Additionally, Amazon is introducing a lower-priced tier set at 100 GBs of storage for $11.99 yearly."
until your single drive fails...
Companies that do this know that there will be some customers that use a little data, some that use a lot of data, and some that abuse the shit out of the offer. So they cancel the deal rather than deal with the abusers.
If these companies know that they will only offer "unlimited" for a year a two, then why do it? Unless they think that a customer will be trapped after uploading their data and won't want to spend the time uploading it all again.
I won't be upgrading my plan and will probably be going with backblaze for my backups.
If your house burns down, what good is that backup drive next to your computer?
Or as Francis Ford Coppola learned, putting the backup drive next to the computer isn't the smartest thing when a thief simply steals both.
Offsite storage is critical for data recovery.
Which is more likely, hard drive failure or connection/cloud service failure, bankruptcy, etc? At least you can secure your hard drive, in theory.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Just buy a new one.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
You can buy 2 drives, give one to a relative or friend and use crashplan to cross backup with that person. Cheap and offsite.
If you want unlimited backup, you can still get it for $10 less per year than Amazon's price at Backblaze, same as before, even cheaper if you're willing to pay for two years up front. And CrashPlan is still offering unlimited storage at the same price as Amazon.
Of course, that's assuming you're talking about backups, which is what USA Today mentioned. But this Amazon service is more comparable to Dropbox or Google Drive or iCloud Drive, which are general purpose personal cloud storage services, rather than backup services. In that regard, it was the best deal.
until your single drive fails...
Which is why I have five hard drives in a RAID6 configuration on my file server. I pay $50 for each drive and replace them every five years.
That's easy. Treat it like a long-term problem. A hard drive lasts, on average, 3 years. That's $150 per TB, which is more than the cost of 8 TB of storage. Assuming you need 8 TB of backup capacity (and really, if you don't have at least a terabyte or two of data, why aren't you using an iPad?), that means $1200 over three years. For that, you can buy eight or ten 8 TB drives. But to make the math easier, buy six.
Back up everything onto one drive, then clone the backup drive to the other five. Next, take five of the drives and store them at work, friends' houses, etc. Every two months, take your current backup drive and swap it with one of those five, proceeding to swap out each drive in a consistent order.
Now, you have better off-site storage than Amazon provides, because your data probably only exists in at most one spot with RAID redundancy at Amazon versus seven independent copies with this approach. And in the worst case, you only lose two months' work. While you're at it, you can use a cheaper tier of cloud backup software to maintain backups of any files modified in the last five months or so, automatically purging changes after about five months or so.
Or not. Whatever. Either way, $50 per terabyte is about an order of magnitude over cost. That's a high price to pay just to have it online and spinning all the time.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
If your house burns down, what good is that backup drive next to your computer?
Swap drives with a friend in another state, agree on a sync schedule. Enjoy your offsite backup.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Amazon with almost certainty knew the unlimited model wasn't going to work. So they ran this "unlimited promotion" long enough for users to upload tons of data and now that their data is up there, make them pay more to keep it up there. There are cheaper options out there. I feel like I got bait & switched by Amazon.
Let's focus on your condescending remark about how someone with less than a terabyte of data to backup should just use an iPad.
A terabyte is roughly 30,000 pictures saved in full RAW resolution from a full-frame camera. Most people will not have that many photos to backup. Other documents such as tax records need to be backed up but are not that voluminous.
So take your poor assumptions and put them back up your ass.
For $60/year/1TB you can go out and buy an external hard drive every year for less that that. Other than the convenience of being able to access your docs anywhere, this service can't be worth it at that price.
Buy the disk then colo your disk like here https://www.delimiter.com/slot... 8TB online storage for disk + $120/year - a LOT cheaper!
Users are uploading their entire media library for Plex or Kodi, up to 50TB etc, then they wonder why this happens.
Should Amazon list it with false advertising? If course not, but a little common sense people, please.
Connection failure isn't data loss. Cloud outages aren't data loss. Has any big cloud provider ever lost data? Gmail lost some email once, years ago, when the redundant systems failed too, but then that's a free service (they had tape backups or something for the paying customers).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Or your house gets broken into, burns down, floods etc.
Encrypt your data and backup to the cloud.
It's a great idea in theory, in practice it will probably not be kept up to date. Most people can't be bothered to keep any backups.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
You lost me at easy....
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
God damn the cloud pushers, man. AWS and MS give you a taste of the cloud, for free. Then nearly free. You think, you say, you know you can quit any time you want, but soon so much hardware is gone, and there's two people left in the IT department. Then you're hooked. The cloud prices are jacked up, terms are changed and before you know it, you're waiting on the cloud pusher man.
Why would your friend/relative want to store a bunch of HDDs and do this "swap dance" for eternity?
These ideas of setting up a server at grandma's house two states away are absurd. You think she wants a server or even a RaspberryPi with a HDD attached running 24/7?
Either backup to an online service like Backblaze, run a server in a hosting provider, or ship your HDDs off to Recall or other archival storage company. Never understood why IT people around here want to involve their friends/family in overly complex backup/DR schemes. Think about them before suggesting your rich aunt buy a 1000 cartridge tape library.
Amazon does make multiple copies (tho I can't find their SLA for cloud drive), but you're mostly paying for convenience.
Heck, S3 will run you $283 per TB per year. And download isn't cheap either. But with S3 you get many copies of the data, and while you pay by the GB to get the data out, you can scale to absurd bandwidth. It's that last bit that justifies the price. Heck, it's half off if you promise not to access it very often.
And glacier is $50 per TB per year, cheaper than Cloud Drive and more reliable, but it's not at all convenient to get your data back (just the $100/TB for the bandwidth is enough to be painful by comparison).
Your way is definitely cheaper, no question at all, as long as your time is free.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hey kid. C'mere. Try this out. First hit's free.
Offering short term unlimited and removing it later is somewhat common. Lure folks in, get them hooked and then adjust the offering once they are sticky attached to the service.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
Er...
Crashplan works automatically in this configuration. Once set up, you just let it do its thing without interaction.
Kid-proof tablet..
But also, account for the cost of traveling to do the swap *including the cost of your time*.
And the data is still stale.
But also, account for the cost of traveling to do the swap *including the cost of your time*.
I'll use UPS, thanks.
And the data is still stale.
I'll use the internet, thanks.
What are you, new?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was notified of this change the day my previous subscription ran out.
They claim it is "fast" but in reality, it isnt. I needed to transfer 1TiB of content off of S3 a year ago. Files on average were roughly 1MiB in size. Transfers would only go to about 3MiB/sec total, and this is on my gigabit internet connection, so local speed was never an issue. It was painfully brutal to attempt to make a local copy of all of those files.
"Other than built-in fault-tolerance managed by a professional staff, hardware management by a professional staff, and the ability to access your docs anywhere, this service is absolutely no different than just buying an external hard drive and lugging it around everywhere you go, with all the requisite cables for connecting it to any device you might want to connect it to, and keeping it secure at all times, and ensuring it's not lost, damaged, or stolen."
Does that sound stupid to you, too? Why not?
This is not the equivalent of "buying an external hard drive," you get a lot more for $60 per year than a single spindle that you have to manage yourself.
All data on a single hard drive + hard drive failure = all data lost. Connection / Cloud Service failure = inconvenience, perhaps small amount of lost data. Services like Dropbox cache a copy of your data locally on your hard drive and keep it up to date, so even if Dropbox ceases to exist one instant from now, you still have a local copy of all of the data stored in their "cloud" as of the last sync you ran - which, in practical terms, means, "seconds ago."
Bankruptcies don't generally result in all your data disappearing with scarcely 5 seconds of notice, as well.
The likelihood of a failure or bankruptcy are certainly non-negligible, but the IMPACT of those failures is a lot lower than the also-non-negligible chances of your single copy of all your data on your portable hard drive being lost, damaged, or stolen.
What a waste of money. Keep 2 hot spares on hand, and hot-swap the drives out when they fail.
Also, RAID6 is overkill for home fileservers, for two reasons:
1) You still need a backup solution for disaster recovery circumstances. RAID is not a backup solution, it's a fault tolerance / high availability solution.
2) If you're using RAID5, In the unlikely event that more than one failure occurs simultaneously, you can simply rebuild & recover from your backups. For home use, the extra fault tolerance of RAID6 isn't getting you much except lower performance and less usable space.
And if you don't have an off-site backup plan, then shame on you for pretending to care about your data by spouting off about RAID.
It's apparently "experiencing problems". Gee, I cannot imagine why! I had a decent chunk of storage backed up on their service and then they killed rclone. I was just about to begin using Duplicati and now this. So, after about 3 months of "service" I'm dropping them and have moved to Gdrive - currently uploading right now. Had I been able to use Duplicati I'd have kept both but now I'm a bit pissed - refund please!
Don't advertise something you cannot handle and don't raise the price to the Moon when you realize people will actually take you up on your offer either. A shame they dropped this but I've run without offsite backups for ten years so worse comes to worse I'm back to where I was.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
It's creimer. Spouting off about stuff he doesn't understand is his raison d'etre. Ask him about the best 2 for 1 pizza joints though...
It sounds pretty cheap.
Why wouldn't a friend or relative want to help you? Maybe you're coming from a culture where everything has to be paid cash but and handled by a company but other people help each other with what they can (and certainly storing some drives qualifies, there are people storing in the basement or garage other's stuff since 15 years).
As far as grandma goes she has not a raspi as they weren't even on the drawing board back then but a Dockstar (something similar with 128MiB RAM, yes Debian supported). Enough for rsync/encfs and samba.
If you're using RAID5, In the unlikely event that more than one failure occurs simultaneously, you can simply rebuild & recover from your backups.
The reason I replace my hard drives every five years is that when one drive starts to fail all the drives will soon fail. Sometimes in sequential order or several at a time.
That is why you would typically replace one drive every year or whatever. Not all at the same time anyway.
Me, I just let them fail and then I rewrite them so bad blocks are not used. I have drives that failed once (badblocks) that have never failed again for several years once the badblocks identified and not used anymore.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
https://store.crashplan.com/st... offers the ability to back up to a friend over the internet for free.
WTF? So it's not as secure (you could have a fire), costs more, and takes up your spare time? No reason to do that. Just host the files online and sit back/drink a beer.
Just host the files online [...]
I pulled my data out of the cloud over a year ago. My data doesn't need to live on the Internet 24/7. A local file server doesn't require an Internet connection.
... that all these dumbasses are uploading all their data to the enemy. I don't care if you manually encrypt/decrypt it on top of their own "encryption" -- you realize that they can (and will) hold on to that data perpetually, and have access to infinitely faster and more expensive computers (soon probably quantum ones) than us? They likely can, or will later, decrypt your data, snoop at it and hand it out to anyone they feel like.
All my data is in my fireproof safe on multiple disks. Locally. If the fireproof safe doesn't work properly, then fuck that data. I'm not uploading it to the enemy, and I'm sure as hell not paying for the "privilege".
That's great if you never leave the house.
Now One Drive 1TB option with Office is the best option.
Or, as I said, you simply keep a couple spares on hand, and as soon as one of them begins to fail, you swap it out. Swapping out a functional drive "because reasons" is dumb, and wasteful.
And I cannot stress this enough: RAID-ANYTHING is not a "backup" solution, or a "disaster recovery / data protection" solution. It is a *HIGH AVAILABILITY* solution, and that is all.
If you're relying on this wasteful, proactive swapping of drives out to somehow "protect" your data without backing it up offsite, then, again - shame on you for pretending to care about your data.
If you're relying on "RAID6 has SUPER low data loss chances" to keep your data safe, you fundamentally don't get RAID or data protection.
And if you ARE backing your data up offsite, then engaging in wasteful disk-swapping is pointless wankery that serves no purpose whatsoever, other than to satisfy some dumbass need to feel like a l33t hax0r when you tell people, "Yeah, I gotta swap out my RAID6 to protect muh dataz."
Yes, once per day. So your risk is that you lose the value of whatever you produce, on average, in a day, if you have to recover from backups.
I produce more than $60 worth of data in an average day - my code, and my time, is more valuable than that.
So, for me, spending $60 a year to have someplace to continuously back up my data is a better proposition than risking the loss of a day's worth of data trying to cheap out and save a buck. The fact that it's hosted on a server that somebody else manages as their full time gig is even better. I trust an Amazon tech much more than I do some random friend in another state to keep his computer online so I can back up to it.
These schemes, for anything that is remotely important, are penny wise, pound foolish.
What data do you have? Are you running a cyclotron in your studio apartment? How much data can people have or need?
I'm genuinely curious and seriously baffled.
Good news is Photos still appear to be unlimited for Prime Members and do not count towards any of the Drive storage usage.
That is why you would typically replace one drive every year or whatever.
That's what I'm planning to do until I get to the point that I have one new drive and the oldest drive is four-years-old in any given year. If I maintain the current five-drive configuration. I could add another nine drives to the case.
Me, I just let them fail and then I rewrite them so bad blocks are not used.
I get drives that are either clicking or overheating to death. Those were Seagate drives. I'm using Western Digital Red NAS drives these days.
That's great if you never leave the house.
If I ever get commercial space for my home office, I'll have to build a new file server for the business data..
What data do you have?
I have ~800GB of personal data (iTunes, VMs and backups) and business data (programming, videos and websites).
Code42 has unlimited backups for a fixed monthly rate. Why not Amazon?
Swapping out a functional drive "because reasons" is dumb, and wasteful.
The hard drives are either clicking or overheating to death after five years of 24/7 use. (Those were Seagate drives, not sure what to expect with WD Red NAS drives.) If the SMART status changes from OK to something else, I get an email notification and start planning for replacement(s). Useable drives can go into my other PCs.
Most of your precious data sounds like digital hoarding. You don't need that data at the drop of a hat. Just turn off the fucking hard disk. There's your backup.
Jayzus.
Have they failed? If they haven't failed, or generated SMART errors, then fucking leave them until they do fail. That's what RAID systems are for. Keep a couple spares in hand, and as soon as you use a spare, order a replacement.
And the more important point, which you keep ignoring, is that if you're relying on RAID as your "I'll never lose this data, it's super safe" mechanism, you are doing it WRONG.
RAID is for fault tolerance. It is not bulletproof. It is not an off-site backup. I don't care how many nested levels of how many kinds of RAID you're configuring, if the only copy of your data in existence is there on your RAID6+10+600 file server, you might as well douse your server in lighter fluid and strike a match, because you are not taking preservation of your data seriously.
And the more important point, which you keep ignoring, is that if you're relying on RAID as your "I'll never lose this data, it's super safe" mechanism, you are doing it WRONG.
A point that you keep harping on that's not even relevant to this discussion.
RAID is for fault tolerance.
If you re-read the thread, RAID was my answer to a single-drive failure.
Most of your precious data sounds like digital hoarding.
Without the mapped shared drives to the file server, most of my applications wouldn't work correctly. If a system fails for whatever reason, I just need to reinstall the OS and applications, copy over the logon file to map the network drives, and access my data again.
You don't need that data at the drop of a hat.
That's why I took my data out of the cloud and put it on the file server.
I read it. RAID was your answer to "all your data is gone when the single drive fails."
Let me spell it out for you, since you seem incapable of comprehension.
Your suggestion that using a RAID array eliminates your chance of losing data is wrong-headed, incorrect, and completely treacherous advice for anybody to listen to. It does not matter whether you're using a single spinning drive or a RAID array, your data is NOT PROTECTED unless you have a regular, automated off-site backup scheme. RAID is for mitigating the operational impact of hardware failures. It is not for protecting your data from data loss.
Do you understand now? Or do you need it broken down into single-syllable words, you idiot?
Do you understand now?
A moron on a soapbox is still moron. A soapbox, however, is still useful.
That's something of a non-sequitur. Even if you don't need the data on the internet 24/7, hosting files online instead of having a home RAID6 that you replace entirely every time a single drive fails is more secure, cheaper, and easier. It will allow to you sit back/drink a beer.
How many parallel reader threads did you use? How many clients? I haven't seen a problem like that, but then I consume the data within the cloud in the same region.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Let's not waste time focusing on an obvious joke.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Thanks for conceding the point. I hope you'll remember being schooled on the proper application and use of RAID in future discussions, because your example is a fucking TERRIBLE one to emulate or draw instruction from.
Funny how you resort to ad hominem in an attempt to get the last word in though. Maybe you can turn that into a revenue stream!
Thanks for conceding the point.
What point was that?
Funny how you resort to ad hominem in an attempt to get the last word in though.
Funny that you called me an idiot (ad hominem) in your previous comment to get the last word in though. If the kitchen is too hot for you, don't let the back door hit you in the ass on the way out.
Moving to Hubic (https://hubic.com/en/offers?referral=LCUAXF) - 10TB of Cloud Storage for just $55/year!