Evaluating Best Backup Strategy

Support
#1

I’m evaluating numerous cloud backup solutions. Duplicacy is winning so far. My requirements include: minimal complexity, good support, storage agnostic, local encryption.

I need to backup 1TB of data to cloud storage. I already have reliable lan backup but want a solution for complete disaster/recovery. Of this 1TB of data, approx 85% could be very cold (it never changes, I never access it). The other 15% is a mix of rarely changes, maybe 5% changes daily or weekly. Nonetheless I will probably never need to access unless my house burns down (and since I’m in Northern California this is becoming a possibility almost every year).

So my first question is somewhere on this forum I found this chart: https://i.imgur.com/g3zXJii.png Where did this come from? I’ve worked some s3 and Azure calculators and found that maybe Azure is in fact less expensive for what I’m trying to do. Can anyone comment on cost? I’m aiming to keep my cost down to <$45/year for 1TB storage (no access).

I recently got fiber and at this time I have 60Mb up. I’m about to do some speed test but still wondering if I schedule this first backup to run only nightly, or throttled through the day, can Duplicacy deal with failures or unfinished backups?

And lastly, somewhere on this forum I read that writing to a local repository before sending to cloud is a better practice. I will try to find this explanation again but can someone enlighten me here?

Thank you for any details you can provide.

#2

That cloud storage comparison is a screenshot of a source data for my very old blog post (2018) Cloud Storage Pricing | Trinkets, Odds, and Ends that was since updated here Cloud Storage Pricing, Revisited | Trinkets, Odds, and Ends and by now became obsolete again, but that screenshot seems to have taken on life of its own.

It is not cost effective to store small amount of data and 1TB is right on the threshold when most solutions are least optimal.

If you already have Existing storage available such as part of g-suite or office365 then use that. It will be effectively free.

Archival storage is generally not suitable for backups and while it can work saving $15/year is definitely not worth the troubles.

The most popular one is Backblaze at $5/TB/month and you can get free egress through cloudflare; but once you have more then 2TB then g-suite is the way to go.

Personally I happen to mostly backup to from local machines to a nas appliance which replicates the datastore (via Duplicacy copy) to Backblaze, but some machines (portables) backup you B2 directly — since I’m not around the storage appliance. Both approaches work fine.

My main advice would be to stay away from archival grade storage; it can be made to work but the result not worth the effort.

7 Likes
#3

@saspus response was complete.

I agree that it is not worth using cold storages, a lot of work for almost no savings.

I use B2 (1.8TB) and I’m satisfied with the price and service. The second option would be Wasabi (it is not worth it for a volume below 1TB, because this is the minimum amount charged). Amazon and Google Cloud have many “surprise costs” with API transactions.

No problem. When you restart, it will check that the first chunks are already in storage and will skip them.

2 Likes
#4

I’m curious about this reasoning. Which calculation did you do?

#5

G-suite gives you unlimited storage at $12/month (and the min 5 accounts requirement is not enforced In case you only have 1 account).

Backblaze is $5/TB/month. So, 2TB is the same ballpark as g-suite in terms of cost.

1 Like
#6

Indeed. I looked again and business accounts have the option of unlimited storage. Mine is a basic G Suite account and has a limit of 30 TB (30 GB included + extra storage purchased separately). But AFAIK if you have less than 5 users you will only have 1 TB, isn’t it?

2020-05-14 10.24.32 gsuite.google.com.br bb29fc336330

#7

The 5 user minimum for unlimited with GSuite business is currently not enforced.

2 Likes
#8

Ah, thanks, didn’t know that currently is not being enforced/required.

Is this temporary? Could you please point me where i can read about? I searched and didn’t find …

#9

I don’t know if anyone besides Google knows if/when Google intends to enforce it. But it seems like it’s been this way for at least a couple of years. Some people seem to (ab)use it to extreme limits (hundreds of TBs+) so I’d imagine it’s when Google decides it’s cost effective to do something about it.

Some people have been saying they’ll start enforcing it any day now for at least 2 years; but here we are. For many of the people using the loophole, I’m guessing they’ll just pay for 4 more users if/when Google starts enforcing it and still have it be orders of magnitude cheaper than storing the data with pay-as-you-go cloud object storage vendors.

I don’t think you’ll find anything official since it’s a loophole. It seems to be popular with the DataHoarder community on reddit (example) and rclone community.

There’s also a thread at least partially about it on this forum here: So what about unlimited storage?

edit: I take that back, it looks like @TheBestPessimist is legit in the linked forum thread, and has 5 users in order to get unlimited :slight_smile:.

3 Likes
#10

Yep, I have 6 users now (some new ones, some old ones).

My current usage is ~5TB

image
image1204×92 10.7 KB

And it looks like i’m the highest storage user. The closest one after me comes at ~2.5TB.

I’m also using Google Drive File Stream instead of the normal Google Drive client or the Gdrive API, so i don’t have any issues with google’s rate limiting (which is extremely relaxed for their own apps/usage)

2 Likes
#11

Thank you for your great comparison @saspus! You mentioned that “by now became obsolete again” – do you plan to post a new version for 2020? :slight_smile: That would be amazing :slight_smile:

#12

Probably not, because the outcome would be “use backblaze B2” anyway. Now that the g-suite loophole evaporated B2 is the only choice, both in terms of cost and performance.

Now waiting for them to raise prices…

1 Like
#13

Thank you, I expected that the answer is B2, from everything I’ve read.
I am surprised to see that the price of B2 has been the same since 2014. Shouldn’t storage pricing drop faster than inflation?

What was the gsuite loophole? Unlimited storage for a constant price? It looks to me that still exists, the only problem is that you need to pay for business licenses.

I wish I had one of those HubiC accounts!

#14

Why would it? and then the demands grow, so even if the cost/TB was to fall that would not help much.

it used to be that if you subscribed for G-Suite business with 5+ accounts you could have unlimited storage. Defacto 5-account requirement wasn’t enforced, which means you could get unlimited storage for $13/month.

Now g-suite is gone entirely and is replaced by google workspace. Neither of plans have unlimited storage (except enterprise, which is not applicable anyway).

I wish I had one of those HubiC accounts!

Nope, you would not want one. It’s WebDav, ridiculously slow, high latency, and they messed up data more than once. It was cheap because it was crap.

#15

Does this mean that all GSuite loophole users need to pay a lot now, or are there some lucky ones who can continue using the 13USD/month indefinitely?

Thanks a lot for the insight into HubiC! Reading all of this I am glad that I decided for B2 a while ago :slight_smile: Hopefully, they don’t increase the prices…

#16

Likely that would be the case. Google is very reasonable in that respect – FWIW I’m still using free g-suite I had since forever. They keep removing references to it from documentation but the service is still working, and they don’t nag me much about upgrading. Not only that, I can try paid version, and then return to free version if I don’t like that. Who allows that?! That’s crazy :). I should say I’m a happy google user. Except search. google search does not work for me.

image
image1458×548 43.5 KB

(Unlike Microsoft who broke Microsoft Domains (or whatever was it called) in a such a ridiculous way that it sort of worked, but you could not change anything anymore, and years later it would break, and they won’t be able to fix. Basically they forced the users out).

I think Backblaze is also a reasonable company (looking at you, Wasabi) and they will keep current customers on current plan. But reading their blog I don’t think they will increase pricing any time soon. Then had $5/month for a very long time, so the 20% increase was quite recent. Still, it would be worth it; it’s still cheap compared to on-premise solution + support + maintenance + headache…

Edit: here they say it:

G Suite Business is not available for new sign ups. If you have G Suite Business, your subscription and all related services will continue to function as they do today, until it’s time to transition to a new offering. We’ll be in touch over the coming months to identify your transition path.

#17

Can you elaborate here? Do you mean you backup to local drive endpoint with Duplicacy that happens to be mounted cloud storage through the file stream?

(I’m trying to get rid of NAS and evaluating available options. Box.com looks appealing too in this respect)

#18

Set a reminder to answer this. Cannot do now. Will ping when done.

#19

@saspus isn’t the answer to your question described here: Using Google Drive File Stream with :d: ?

#20

Yep. And because of this I decided to go with this. Thanks!

1 Like