Paying for Cloud Storage is Stupid

The title is click bait. Cloud storage is off-site storage, replicated across regions for redundancy as well. 

Your single biggest point of failure is the house burning down and with it that clever on-site NAS. Factor in the up-front cost for two of these in different locations and cloud storage where someone else has to babysit hardware and software patches becomes not-so-stupid after all. Of course, you have to trust the cloud storage. It's always clever to have an on-site backup for when Cloud Storage Co. locks your account for <insert infringement>.

You won't save money in the long run whichever way you go: owning your hardware or using cloud storage. Hardware fails and needs replacing. Subscriptions add up. 
If your data is precious to you it will cost you. Build a NAS for the fun 🙂

What about transcoding, Jellyfin recently announced support for HW transcoding H.265, H.264 on this chip?

What about enclosure?

"Expensive cloud provider".. Proceeds to put 800 bucks worth of ssd storage into his NAS

I used a OMV5 on a RockPI board with a SATA hat for about 3 years. After about 2 years, when the power sometimes went out, the server would not come up and needed fdisk to fix the partition on the boot drive. When I went to troubleshoot the system became unresponsive. It turned out to be the micro SD card I was using for the boot drive was failing. I accidentally damaged to SATA hat and RockPI by pressing a little button on the SATA hat (used to reset it but not if externally powered on 12v). Faced with replacing all the hardware, I realized my hard drives were 7 years old and they were full.

Because I have 25 years of data, family photos, videos, records, software, and other irreplaceable items, I realized that using a single board computer is inappropriate. I did my research and decided that an X86 solution was best for me. I used a Supermicro motherboard, Xeon server CPU, ECC memory, M.2 boot drive, Western Digital Red Pro storage drives, Xigmanas OS and a UPS. I chose these things because it is unwise to boot from a storage drive (ask me how I know), unwise to not use ECC memory, and X86 makes virtualization possible. The new server is significantly faster than the single board computer, especially for video editing. One other useful improvement I made is adding a VPN server (a Brume 2). The only thing I have not worked out is a decent backup solution.

I compared online storage solutions against hardware costs including replacing my drives every five years. The online storage is about the same price as my setup, but has the huge performance hit associated with uploading and downloading files. Particularly, for a year, I really tried but hated Google Drive and OneDrive for random syncing problems that took time to sort out each failure. I even once reached out to Microsoft because I pay for Office, but they were only able to tell me to 'just go through the comparison of conflicting files' which is a huge tune suck. This occurred often on Word documents and was a disaster when editing Visual Studio projects (no I don't use GitHub).

The new server has been up for about a year no problems. We'll see how it does in the next nine.

Mmm… I can only seem to find "youyeetoo CM3588 Mini NAS Platform" in the EU

Would love to see a detailed how to guide on how to set this up from A-Z.

yes. why you want pay cloud so your files someone else machine(admin see all). and its just server. why we talk clouds LOL

While it may seem like a good idea remember you are also paying for ha. What if the mb goes bad?

Say I have set this thing up as a server. I understand how my PC connects to that, but what does it take to use it as, say, dropbox or google drive from my phone? What did I miss and when? Need some clarification

Awesome Linus. Thanks!!

So im looking at the math here and that SBC youre holding with the 4 M.2 slots could be populated under the cost of a single 8tb ssd with msi spatium 4 TB modules totaling 16 TB than expand the platform one more axis by building these SBC's into a blade arcitecture and scale up as needed to adapt to storage needs and when the 8TB drives become a quarter the price of the next 16TB drives you could repopulate the array with twice the storage for the cost of the top end available… future proof till the M.2 changes as the SBC could be released with series upgrades in future to replace the back bone of your storage.

I am for hire if you need a computer mastermind…..