I have a LOT of videos to store (due to this YouTube channel and also my 6x PoE CCTV camera system). I always used to think that my storage and backup storage system was fine – until I completely ran out of backup disk space. Whoops.
Unfortunately my previous backup space provider (Synology C2) was a bit too expensive, especially for more than 1TB of space, so I went looking for alternatives. I checked out quite a few:
Carbonite
Crashplan
Dropbox
Google Drive
Microsoft OneDrive
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 Glacier
Backblaze B2
Wasabi
Hetzner
So in this video I weight up each provider’s pros and cons, and discuss their pricing – and finally the provider that I ended up going with.
If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.
Video Transcript And Guide
Hey everyone, I had a pretty good (1)storage and BACKUP storage setup, considering that I have LOTS of videos to store. After all, I have six PoE cameras that record 24/7 AND I have loads of video content for this channel. Previously I was storing my active YouTube video projects on my workstation PC, before moving them to my 4 terabyte Synology NAS over there. Every night, my NAS would then be backed up to a 1 terabyte Synology C2 backup store – well, everything other than the CCTV recordings. Those remain local right now, albeit they’re stored on a RAID array, which is not a backup but it’s better than nothing.
But just the video content alone meant that I rapidly ran out of backup space, resulting in my backups being suspended. Since Synology is a bit too expensive for extra space, I did some BRIEF research, and I purchased 5 terabytes of cheap backup space from IDRIVE. I then realized my mistake (namely that they don’t have SFTP or SSH support), and I got a refund 15 minutes later. My bad.
Thankfully though, there are loads of great options for backup space, including Microsoft OneDrive. I never thought I’d say that, but it’s actually a viable option, weirdly. So here’s all the options I explored, and what I ended up choosing.
Carbonite and Crashplan
I firstly checked out both Carbonite and Crashplan who were previously darlings of the Homelab community, but I noticed something AWFUL on their websites. It shocked me to my core. They offer “unlimited” backup space. *shakes* Public Service Announcement: there is no such thing as unlimited storage. Storage costs money after all, and it’s just not possible to store MANY terabytes of footage for a few pounds (or dollars) a month. YES these plans might work for people with below a terabyte of files to backup and it IS good that they offer full encryption and some good recovery features, but there’s too many stories online of these two companies cancelling people’s plans because they used “too much” storage. So they’re clearly not great options for me.
The next options that I explored were “the big guys” – Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. Dropbox’s personal plan isn’t too badly priced, offering 2 terabytes of storage for £10 or $10 per month, and they have lots of other good features, although admittedly many of these aren’t available on their basic plan.
Dropbox
So Dropbox could be a good option for lower storage users, but unfortunately their prices ramp up a LOT after the basic plan – where you’ll essentially be paying around £15 or dollars per month for every 3 terabytes of extra storage. This isn’t SUPER expensive, but it’s not cheap either – 20 terabytes would cost over £100 per month, and this plan is ideally designed for teams, so you end up having to create multiple users and technically have different storage “buckets” to spread your files over.
Google Drive
This is where Google Drive (or One) is a lot more competitive, to be honest, with every single plan working out cheaper than Dropbox. I know that some bigger content creators including Ali Abdaal use this for some of their video storage needs, and I can see why: Google offers some pretty solid features. The main downside for me is that Google’s upload and download speeds are always a bit slow – they certainly don’t max out my 500 Meg ISP package.
Microsoft OneDrive
Next I checked out Microsoft OneDrive after seeing some people on Reddit mention this as an option. I hate being bugged by OneDrive as much as the next person, but their plans aren’t BAD for lower storage users – costing £6 per month for 1 terabyte of storage, OR for just £2 per month extra you can get 6 terabytes – sort of. Basically some people buy the Microsoft 365 Family plan, create six users, but then just see this as 6 “buckets” for their files and store 1 terabyte in each – getting 6 terabytes of fairly cheap cloud backup storage. It’s up to you whether you ‘should’ do this or not, considering it’s meant to be a plan for families, but I’ve heard that it can work well.
At this point I need to mention SFTP – none of these three companies support this by default, although you can enable this as an “add-on” for Google Drive. What some people do instead, though, is use a suitable backup service in the MIDDLE of (1)their NAS and their chosen backup storage company – services like Couchdrop and EasyFTP spring to mind for this, although both of these come at an extra cost (especially with Couchdrop) and so I didn’t want to go down this route otherwise it all would have been too expensive for me.
Synology C2
So I started to explore some other options. Since I already had a Synology NAS, I naturally looked at how much it would cost to get more than 1 terabytes of C2 backup space – but it’s certainly not cheap. YES it’s super convenient and has some great enterprise features including strong encryption, flexible retention policies and hourly backups, but we’re almost at Dropbox pricing here so I quickly ruled this out as an option.
Amazon S3
I then checked out a few cloud storage options and started off with Amazon. It can be a bit difficult to calculate the exact price due to how they charge for everything, but it seemed to start at almost $25 for 1 terabytes which is VERY expensive. This is excluding local taxes, so in the UK we add on 20% value added tax and it’s almost £30 per month. For a single terabyte. Which is crazy high. FIVE terabytes would cost me £150 per month which is… yeah. Of course, Amazon do also sell “low priority” storage called Glacier, so is that any cheaper?
Amazon S3 Glacier
Well this is even more confusingly priced because it’s designed to be slow to retrieve your data – but I chose the “flexible retrieval” plan which “only” takes minutes to get access to your data. I then chose the average object size as 256 megs because I have a lot of large files, and the pricing fell to around $4 or £5 per month for one terabyte – and all the prices are quite reasonable actually. This means it’s a pretty good option, and S3 and Glacier naturally supports lots of different file upload methods too. The main downside for me is that I’m a simple man and I’ve used AWS a lot with work previously and it’s… not straightforward. There’s a fair amount of configuration and set-up hoops to jump through, plus with glacier you can’t easily just say “I want to quickly download these 8 folders and all their files”. So while the pricing was fairly good, I decided to avoid S3 Glacier too.
Backblaze B2
Next up I explored Backblaze B2, which is quite a popular option for backup space, especially because they’re a fraction of the cost of Amazon and other rivals. While they DO charge for downloading files, that’s only after you use more than three times your backup storage quote – basically if you have 2 terabytes of files, you get 6 terabytes of monthly download bandwidth which seems reasonable to me. So this starts at just $6 per month in America, however taxes are extra so in the UK this becomes over £7 per month and for 5 terabytes of storage, I would be paying £36 per month which isn’t super expensive, but it’s not ultra cheap either. The benefit of Backblaze is that you get many of the benefits of Amazon S3 type storage, but at a lower overall cost – plus setting up SFTP isn’t too difficult.
Wasabi
I evaluated two final backup options – Wasabi and Hetzner. Wasabi are another cloud-based storage platform like Backblaze, and they also claim to be much cheaper than Amazon and the other big tech companies. They start at $7 per month per terabyte, or just over £8 per month in the UK and so their pricing works out a bit more than Backblaze, but not majorly so. It is, however, worth knowing that Wasabi have a minimum storage policy: you must store each file for AT LEAST 90 days, otherwise they charge you extra. Which is a bit odd, and you could get caught out if you uploaded loads of video files, renamed them locally, and then synced them in a way that deletes the old files and reuploads the new ones. So that’s worth knowing.
Hetzner
The final option I explored was Hetzner who are a well known European hosting company that offer useful storage box plans. They don’t offer less than 1 terabytes of storage, and they also don’t have a 2 terabyte plan – it’s 1 terabyte OR 5 terabytes. But their prices are good: they are the cheapest option for all price points – other than using the Microsoft Family Plan hack for 5 terabytes. The neat thing with Hetzner is that it’s simple. You get a simple login and you can just start uploading files. You CAN also create sub-accounts and automated snapshots too though, if you’d prefer. They support a range of different sync technologies too. The main downside is that they only have server locations in Finland and Germany which is good if you’re a Eurovision fan, but bandwidth speeds for American customers (for example) might be a bit slow.
To be honest, I’m not really a fan of “the cloud”. Yes it has introduced some cool technologies, but it can also make things so much more complex. For my particular needs – which are just to have offsite backups for my media files – I don’t need complicated cloud systems with 10 minute retrieval policies, or 90 day minimum storage rules. So I ended up signing up for a 5 terabyte Hetzner plan, and so far it seems pretty good.
Upload speeds are fairly fast for me, and I like that by default (1)it’s all fairly simple, but that I can still set up sub-accounts to create more buckets if needed. The main downside is that snapshots do count towards your usage limit which isn’t completely surprising of course, but with Synology C2 (for example) they don’t count towards it – so you do have to weigh this up a bit when considering the prices. In my case I don’t really need snapshots though – I’m happy to just keep one copy of all my media files, since I also have a local copy of them.
So once I’m done setting up my new media workflow, what I’ll have is my six PoE cameras recording to my Synology NAS, which is also where our personal files are stored. These personal files (which are around 300 Gig) will continue to be backed up with Synology C2. I’ll then build a Homelab NAS server for all my media files, mounting this as a network drive on my workstation PC when I come to do video editing. Finally, the whole Homelab server will be backed up to my new Hetzner backup storage.
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