Amazon Kills Off Unlimited Cloud Storage Option For Amazon Drive (usatoday.com) 76
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."
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Which is more likely, hard drive failure or connection/cloud service failure, bankruptcy, etc? At least you can secure your hard drive, in theory.
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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).
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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
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Just buy a new one.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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..
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What data do you have?
I have ~800GB of personal data (iTunes, VMs and backups) and business data (programming, videos and websites).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Do you understand now?
A moron on a soapbox is still moron. A soapbox, however, is still useful.
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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.
Re:Cheaper to buy your own (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You can buy 2 drives, give one to a relative or friend and use crashplan to cross backup with that person. Cheap and offsite.
Re: Cheaper to buy your own (Score:2)
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Er...
Crashplan works automatically in this configuration. Once set up, you just let it do its thing without interaction.
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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
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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.
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Let's not waste time focusing on an obvious joke.
Re: Cheaper to buy your own (Score:3)
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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 c
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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 qualifi
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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 reli
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But also, account for the cost of traveling to do the swap *including the cost of your time*.
And the data is still stale.
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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?
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https://store.crashplan.com/st... [crashplan.com] offers the ability to back up to a friend over the internet for free.
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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... [delimiter.com] 8TB online storage for disk + $120/year - a LOT cheaper!
This shit always annoys me. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Bingo. Like the crack dealer, first hit is free.
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It's called a lost leader, and it gets feet into the door. No one wants to walk into an empty store.
The change isn't about people abusing it. That's just the excuse. It's about dollars, and only ever will be.
Re: This shit always annoys me. (Score:2)
First hit's free. (Score:2)
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.
Best backup deal? Since when? (Score:2)
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
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I just looked at Backblaze based on your suggestion. It's not $10 per year. It's $50 per year which is a $10 per year savings off the monthly price.
Amazon Cloud was removed as a Plex cloud source because it's too darn slow. And probably Amazon saw people throwing terabytes of movies out there expecting to access them in a timely manner.
Bait & Switch (Score:1)
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If you read their fine print, it wasn't unlimited anyway. They'd only let you upload certain file types, and they stated they could terminate you account if you used too much space. It was never unlimited, but likely more than 1 TB. I skipped their offerings for these reasons.
Abuse as usual (Score:2)
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.
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To add insult to injury... (Score:2)
I was notified of this change the day my previous subscription ran out.
Attempting to drop the service now.... (Score:2)
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 re
$1/mo for 100GB (Score:2)