Dropbox alternative?

[chickenstick]

Hey folks, I have a lot of digital files related to my business, music, wife's business. I've been using an inconsistent combination of iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox for awhile now and am looking to bring those costs down to zero or as close to it as possible.

What have y'all found useful for this sort of thing? Probably looking at 2-3 TB worth of files, all told.

[loutfard]

Depending on your needs, hosted nextcloud might be interesting. Hetzner storage share would be my first choice. It's a reliable low-budget provider. Looks like their offering costs EU business customers about 12€/month for 5 Tb, unlimited users, custom subdomains, backups and more.

Nexctloud goes far beyond just file storage and sharing by the way.

[ducknald_don]

I use Syncthing, an open source tool. There are clients for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS and Linux. It seems reliable, I've had no issues.

[delay]

I've looked for cheaper alternatives to Dropbox. It has clients for Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android and iOS. It has differential sync, so if you update 1MB of a 60GB virtual hard disk, it syncs just 1MB. You can choose what to synch to which client. There is 30 day history, so if you delete too much in an Excel sheet and close it, you can roll back. Dropbox stores data in multiple data centers, so your data will survive your house burning down.

That's a lot of convenience for $12 a month.

[thef0x]

From a UX perspective, I'd also suggest nextcloud as it's similar to dropbox (compared to rsync or syncthing which feels more "linux-y").

My 14TB home server runs Proxmox and I have a container for nextcloud. Monthly cost for me is ~$3 which beats any paid-for service. Linux sysadmin skills pretty much required, otherwise I'd look for a third party managed solution. People also like "unraid" but I don't find it to be any easier than just learning docker compose syntax (or use chatGPT to write your docker-compose.yaml files for you).

Solid choices for hardware are: any old laptop you have + an extra HDD, a librecomputer w attached storage, a desktop tower with the power system changed to a picoPSU [all low powered options].

[Tyler9000]

My recommendation may depend on your use case.

If your goal to to have things easily accessible, then for things like your music you can set up an inexpensive Plex server on a home computer where you store all of your media and can stream it anywhere with an internet connection. The base Plex software is free, and if you want to upgrade to advanced features like a home DVR then a lifetime pass often goes on sale for less than $100.

If your goal is cloud storage for data backups and the like, then personally I like Microsoft OneDrive. You can get a small amount of space for free. A normal personal MS365 account costs about $70 a year and comes with 1TB of space, which works well for me and is a good deal considering I'd pay just for things like Excel anyway. And you can upgrade the space for extra cost or perhaps sign up for a family plan that has 1TB each for up to 6 users.

FWIW, I use Plex and OneDrive in tandem where my plex server stores my music and video for easy streaming while OneDrive automatically syncs everything up to the cloud for safe keeping and easy access. It's all really seamless once it's set up properly.

[delay]

My 14TB home server runs Proxmox and I have a container for nextcloud. Monthly cost for me is ~$3 which beats any paid-for service.

Interesting setup! What does the monthly cost of $3 consist of?

I also wonder what happens when the 14TB become unrecoverable. For example when the raid controller goes bonkers.

[maskedslug]

I run a (much smaller) 4TB Synology NAS for similar purposes. I run a nightly backup to backblaze for all the non-easily-replaceable stuff. I don't have that much data worth backing up, so I'm currently spending less than $1/month for this little insurance policy. It costs about another $1/month in electricity.

[chickenstick]

This is all super helpful! I'm really interested in the home server idea, but would also be completely open to using a normal service like Backblaze.

I'm currently spending less than $1/month for this little insurance policy.

How are you getting less than $1/month? I don't see any kind of way to get less than $6/mo on their website.

[maskedslug]

It’s $6 per TB. If you’re backing up less than a full TB, your bill will be less. My last bill was $0.55