Category: cloud-storage

Cloud Storage

My Experience with cloud Storage over the years
Introduction
Most of us use some form of cloud storage or another, be it Dropbox, Google Docs, OneDrive, or a similar service. So do I. But over the years, the choice and use of online storage services became a problem. Let me explain.
What is cloud storage, storage versus backup.
This is a post about Cloud Storage. Now, let us begin with the early 2000s, When there was something called as Yahoo briefcase, Then came along female with a massive one gigabyte of storage. And everyone thought that, Hey, Who would need more space? Very quickly, other providers also started catching up.
[–more–]
Background
I don’t 2009 or 10 came Google Drive. And I think at that time, they offered 15 gb, which this to do as a part of it. When I started the webinars, and I remember, but that’s when the idea of Google Drive with unlimited access came into existence. And I think, you know, there was really great. started working for Schneider Electric, they had their own shared network drive, which of course, was accessible through VPN only. But a lot of people started using something called as Dropbox. My boss in particular, are hardcore Apple attic. He’s he very strongly recommended Dropbox, they had a two gigabyte storage and through referrals, etc, you could get up to eight gigabytes or so I think I ended up getting it about four, four and a half, then I close the account opened up another one, Probably through referrals and things like that went up to around four or five gigabytes again, close to.
And finally, at this point in time, we have just one two gigabyte account that we use largely for Gaatha story. In fact, just yesterday, I discovered that my wife’s laptop, Windows 10 machine comes with a one year plan for a Dropbox which is 20 gigabytes, but we’re not using it because by now I think we have outgrown the gigabytes and we are looking at terabytes. Not to boast but i’ll tell you why. Because the need now more is about video and business requirement rather than personal storage. But till 2016, it was largely a story of personal storage. So we tried sync.com for security, tried p cloud really happy with it, I hope that one of these days, we will end up getting their two terabyte plan or lifetime plan as the case may be for business purposes. Right now quite happy with thunder drive that aren’t giving it a try, in spite of a variety of negative reviews. I’m still waiting and watching our four terabyte plan for $99. You know cannot go really go wrong. Hopefully we are not wrong. Then comes We also try it out with box.com. We I ended up using mega two plans, actually one five megabytes and five zero megabyte plans, Then of course cool for extremely happy with it, I think we will make it a part of our network strategy, right Amazon or drive for some time, they don’t really work out very well for us. And we don’t use it a lot actually, Google Drive with I think three or four different Google accounts, each one with 15 gigabytes.
And then of course I am a plan release thing started going out of hand, Then came the issue of how do we consolidate all of these and you know, use them together, Cooper can do that for AWS for Amazon drive for Dropbox for OneDrive, and OneDrive is something that I would like to talk about as well that for work we use one terabyte of you know shared per account. For my wife, they use something called as drew up for work for my personal use. Now We also use p cloud bill and Cooper between Brunel and I also ended up getting plans for one, I think it was I Drive, that was only a mobile plan for storing largely images. And we still use it as a photo backup. And also the rules plan, which was for cold storage, something that I was really looking for was a drag and drop solution. And I’m still looking for it. But what we realized was that once the large files were really moved on to these larger storage plans, which is at any rate is a cold storage plan. We don’t access them unethical.
Lee Lu is the 20 gigabyte p cloud plan, which you know, we got 20s through some reference, of course, it’s more than enough to serve our needs for today for personal use, and we will continue using it. Like I said before, still a fan of the cloud for now you My wife has gotten used to it, some failures along the way. We tried the next cloud tried data drive, which is again, I think on incarnation of next cloud. Right now we’re experimenting on the content delivery network part with our media host on a CDN, which will have which is based on next cloud, Incidentally, a separate post on that maybe on a later day. Maybe not talk about it at all, because it should not being selected.
So These are some of the cloud storage, You know, tools or systems that we have used in the past, how do we connect all of them, we have tried all drive, We’ve tried. P cloud can also do that to an extent and make copies of your Dropbox thingy. And then we also tried to for of course, and multi cloud, multi cloud works very well, There was something called as a zero PC, which could also do something similar, I don’t think they are in existence anymore. So These are some of the I guess I would call them the Hall of Fame of sorts, where in the innovate, tried to integrate the different cloud ones, just saw something else on one of the deal sites. They’re a VC funded company, and they also can provide a similar service. But we have not really tried that one.

Timeline

2012- Dropbox, Box (Corporate), GDrive, Outlook storage.
2015 onwards:
Dropbox (personal) Mega, Drive, Phone provided .

Current

| Sr. No |Storage Provider | Size (GB) | Since (Year) | Remark |
|:–|:–|:–|:–|:–|
| 1 | GDrive | 2013 | 15 GB | Storage for noncritical files, images used by fast.io CDN |
| 2| Nextcloud (Astian Cloud)| 2020 | 50 GB | Backup of noncritical files |
| 3|Koofr | 2017 | 250 GB | Bought the lifetime plan in Nov 2019 |
| 4 | Publitio | 2019 | 100 GB | Purchased this plan through Appsumo |
| 5 | GApps | 2011 | Unlimited* | B School Account, largely unused |
| 6 | Zoolz | 2017 | 1 TB 1 TB | The company has terminated the service altogether as on October 2020[^] |
| 7 | Rethink | 2019 | 1.2 TB | Lifetime Deal on Pitchground. Slow development |
| 8 | pCloud | 2017 | 20 GB| No plans to get more storage |
| 9 | Thunderdrive | 2019 | 4 TH | LT Deal on Stacksocial. Many people have concerns about viability of this SAAS. |
| 10 | OneDrive | 2017 | 5 GB | Unused|
| 11 | Droplr |2019 | 500 GB *3 | LT Deal on Appsumo |
| 12 | VPS (FlowVPS) |2019 | 125 GB | LET BF Offer |
| 13 | Dropbox | 2011, 2016 | 2.5 GB | Audio recordings. Had discontinued plan signed up again |
| 14 | iDrive | 2018 | 1 TB | LT Deal on Stacksocial |
| 15 | jioCloud |2018 | 5 GB| Unused |
| 16 | Asus Cloud |2014 | 5 GB| Unused |
| 17 | iCloud | 2018 |5 GB |WA Backup |
| 18 | Sync| 2018 | 9 GB | Figuring it out |
| 19 | Zoho Drive | 2016 |5 GB |Not used |
| 20 | Blackblaze b2 | 2020 |10 GB |CDN Testing with cloud flare |
|21|e.email|2019|5 GB|Not Sure|
——
^ I had purchased a ‘lifetime deal” with them in 2017.

Update Sept 2020

upon closure of Zoolz, I thought of putting together the list of services I have used over the years.

Features

Price, storage, location, speeds, encryption, Mac/ Linux App, Rclone, iOS/Android app.

---

Other Cloud storage Providers used in the past

Owncube (Nextcloud)

Mega

Box.com

Hubic

Cloud

Yandex disk

Zoho disk

Airtel Cloud (2 GB)

Amazon drive

Datto Drive (and faux pas)

Disroot

ADrive

Cloudme

Sugarsync

Jottadrive

Also see; List of discontinued file hosting services on Wikipedia.

Accounts closed

Features

Price, storage, location, speeds, encryption, Mac/ Linux App, Rclone, iOS/Android app.

Newer players

Icedrive, Eurake Host.

Photo storage

This is a category in itself

Flickr

Google Photos

Shutterfly

Photobucket

Smugmug

500px

Amazon Photos

Anyone with an Amazon account gets 5GB of storage for free, for videos and photos on Amazon Prime Photos. With an Amazon Prime membership at $12.99 per month, you get unlimited online photo storage.

Your video storage is still limited to 5GB, so you’ll need to pay for additional storage if this restriction is a problem. Extra storage costs between $19.99 per year for 100GB and $59.99 per year for 1TB. Extra storage costs an additional $59.99 per year for each additional 1TB of storage.
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/b?ie=UTF8

Providers I have not used

Wasabi

OVH

Woekli

Mediafire (also read: fast.io)

Tresorit

Cloud to Cloud Transfer

(https://www.cloudwards.net/best-cloud-to-cloud-management-services/)

Multcloud

Cloud HQ

CloudFuze

Cloudsfer

rClone

Koofr

Sftp

Rethink (one way only)

https://www.i-smartcloud.com

https://www.systoolsgroup.com/migrator/

Cloud backup

Carbonite

Cloudberry

Spider Oak

Acronis

Wrapping it up

a. Problem of plenty
b. Consolidation
VPS for storage versus “commercial” storage providers. Best practise: Encrypt data before uploading. Companion post to file sharing services.
Cloud storage versus backup

Resources:

1. Wikipedia
2. Discussions on Reddit
3. LET/ LES
4. Cloudwards.net

Cloud Storage Strategy: 2018

1. Sync.com – Keep for personal critical documents
2. Zoho – No major storage, email social documents only instead of Google Docs
3. OneDrive- will have to keep: Skype account
4. iCloud- Do not use?
5. Dattodrive- keep, but do not store major data after March 2018 possibly close in July 2018.
6. All GDrive- empty out/ not use anymore
7. Owncube- close account ?
8. Mega- Clean out account, Delete 1 account
9. Dropbox- Keep till March, then delete once Zencastr opens up to to others

Wrapping it up

a. Problem of plenty
b. Consolidation
VPS for storage versus “commercial” storage providers. Best practise: Encrypt data before uploading. Companion post to file sharing services.
Cloud storage versus backup

Resources:

1. Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_storage
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_online_backup_services
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_hosting_service
2. Discussions on Reddit
3. Quora
4. LET/ LES
5. Cloudwards.net

image host
So far. And I don’t think we will, because at this point in time, given our total storage requirements, if I and also, if I were to add the storage requirements from all the different, you know, hard this external hard disk terabyte and a half, I think I’ll talk about that a 300 GB Hard does that we use for personal use, and then a terabyte and a half that use for another cloud storage service. So I think ended up doing replicating, you know, duplicating, multiplying many things doing the same thing over and over again, I have been guilty of that in the past, but sometimes that is by design, redundancy helps assurance helps in case one goes, Excuse me, One goes down there is the other one, Like was a bad example or a bad case with that notarized and then also mega when they reduce the plan size from five zero to one, five gigabytes. So we really had to move a lot of data out Few that we wanted to try but shut down quickly. copy.com Then there was bid Casa and you know, there were a few others, add links to the third party, you know, review sites etc.
So you’ve got cloud words, I would like to use Carbonite, I would like to try and use the the other one also, which a lot of people have recommended for recent times. And that would be So you know, we tried media fire also. So live fire link, for example, we can add in the discussion about jumper drive. Maybe we also tried the other one, right, the Sweden one which only gave two gigabytes or three gigabytes of storage, etc. So Yeah, we can talk about life fire, we can talk about cloud words, we can add link to some core, our Reddit discussions. We can also talk about black Blaze. Yeah, black blazes, the one I was looking about for dentists or it Then there is photo lemur is for photos storage, There is just cloud, then there is. So add the link basically from this, you know, Cloud Storage blog post.
The question is, why not use some of our existing cloud providers since they provide unlimited storage Anyways, maybe we will maybe we should not. That is not the intended use. We’re not using it for Cloud Storage, we’re using it for web hosting. So my theory has been if you use it for purposes that you’re not supposed to, you will end up with unintended consequences, Then there is another one, right go to cloud storage.net that we could use this link in the blog post. So these are all links, which rank quite high on Google. So we link to them, hopefully look for a backlink, or maybe go ahead and comment on their site, saying that, hey, great, you know, helpful, blah, blah, blah, and, you know, I’m adding going ahead and adding the link to my, my post to your thing, Hope your reviews will find it useful.
Now The thing is all of this content, we also need to go ahead and record that in Hindi as a Hindi post. Now, what we could do is if we add images and regular slideshow can also go ahead and do that in slideshare. Yeah. Also go ahead and talk about go cloud and Airtel flower and you know, all the geo cloud deals and the games people play on YouTube, etc. You know, YouTube, Link
cloud free be, I wouldn’t recommend any of that it actually makes sense to go out and play. It’s like this, right? You go ahead and buy a computer worth thousands of dollars, and then you install pirated software on it, or you buy an iPhone, and then you go ahead and do all these little silly things that don’t really make a lot of sense to you, right? So Yeah, then there is this new player is Dr. There is Cooper that really low, not tried vocally, then there is next cloud and then there is own cloud. Yeah, Not really tried something called as both storage or sync thing, or there is another one called I think it starts with the PS Well, that we are not tried. So the ones we use regularly and will call very, you know, highly recommend, and this is personal recommendation, Be Cloud es for personal, maybe eventually for business, but it does get expensive.
pOH look for the dealer on Black Friday or thereabouts. If you can find one, Very recently started using Thunder drives slow for downloads, Then there is rules that we have been using. And then we also have Cooper that we use very regularly. So very happy so far with Cooper also. Yeah, So These are some of the tools that we’ve been using over the past several days, We got Other than that, what I could say is cloud storage, you can use email as a cloud storage as well, we used this guy, right inbox.eu also that offers 10 gigabytes or 20 gigabytes of cloud storage, You can give that a try, We have probably outgrown the free cloud storage thing by now. We just go ahead and pay for things that make sense from a business point of view when it gives assurance and continue to but more importantly, free works. You know, we react to a certain point in time in your business, you need to get out of this scrappy, I know do it for free kind of mode. And you really need to start concentrating on using the best tool for to do the job to get the job done.
You know that we’re not spending too much of time for r&d and wasting things on non critical business activities. Right. So Yeah, that is where we are when it comes to the whole cloud storage thing. What is in store what is the future I think everything is Anyway moving to cloud, what I would recommend is the most critical stuff has to stay password protected. The most critical thing, Oh, by the way, talk about our clone as well terminal based, right, and our sink basically and our clone and how use that on a Linux machine. So coming to the bottom line number one, if its mission critical, you know, make sure that it is arc it is protected, most of the sites do offer full encryption, two factor authentication, etc. But if it’s absolutely critical, It has to be locally encrypted and then uploaded to the server, maybe another blog post on that number one, you know, through tools, third party tools, etc, locally and corrupt and then upload or download and decrypt etc. Second is maybe use tools like terminal based tools for encryption.
Third is maybe use secure FTP instead of just regular web browser based hosting may not work for all of us for a business critical thing to go in for a paid plan effort. Now of course, Joe Cloud Now to the startup India thing we get five terabytes of storage which we are not really using then the question is if they were offering five terabytes Why did I go ahead and get Thunder drive or whatever you know, maybe I’ll go ahead and get a refund I don’t know yet. So Yeah, these are some of the the tools of the trade that we have used for cloud storage so far. made some mistakes along the ways you know being happy with some purchases for for example, be crowd Not yet purchase but still happy. Wish some things had worked for us. Mecca, for example, purely from a security point of view, some sad some that did not work for us at all. Dr. Dr. also tried this thing, or is that Germany all our website that we tried? So that one that did not work for us? One feature tried not really like people use the base tab guys, right? We transfer. We’ve tried that, you know, like the service. I don’t know why we’re not used it a whole lot

You know how to link multiple cloud storage devices. We can also talk about, you know how to do it on mobile phone, how to backup your images,save your archival email, how to protect your online cloud storage data. These are some of the keywords that we could go ahead and use and add the links that I have added in the cloud storage text, text, write the blog post, that I have added and then of course, use screenshots and make a video of written in the that is about it for now, possibly Marathi as well.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=online cloud storage&t=ffab&atb=v175-7&ia=web
https://www.goodcloudstorage.net/cloud-research/free-cloud-storage/
https://cloud.google.com/storage/
https://www.technradar.com/news/the-best-cloud-storage
https://www.dropbox.com/features/cloud-storage
Youtube link- Jio Cloud Free Deal
https://www.cloudwards.net/comparison/

When “free” online storage comes at a cost.

###The problem of plenty
Over the years, I have accumulated Two gmail accounts, one Windows Live! account, Dropbox, Cloudme, and after I got the Mac, an iCloud account. The good part is, I had a total of 50 GB of ‘free’ online storage. Add to that an additional 20 GB through My wife, 100 GB from my web host, and my alma mater’s google Apps (now Google Suite) account theoretically offers ‘unlimited’ storage). For sake of simplicity, let us say we have a total of 170 to 180 GB of ‘free’ online storage, which is awesome.
Add the storage table here
I began storing the backups of documents into different accounts, and over a period of time, it became a nightmare. I began storing my writing samples, personal documents, academic transcripts, and other important documents on one of the two Google Drive accounts, with a copy on One Drive. Documents related to my business, Kamakshi Media were stored on the Google Drive.

All edited audio files for MyKitaab and Baalgatha Podcasts were originally stored on Dropbox. I would also use Dropbox for sending the raw audio files to my editor and get back the edited files into Dropbox, and with a 7 GB storage, I quickly began to run out of space. So I ended up transferring the completed audio files onto my second gmail account, and dropbox was used for storing screenshots, images to be used in Social media, and sharing files with the editor. iCloud began to be used for storing all expense reports, receipts, and invoices.

Last week, I had to search for a couple of documents related to my wife’s work, and it took me over an hour to locate them. They were not on any of the online drives, but I could find them on the external 300 GB Seagate drive that I use for backing up data locally. That got me thinking, “Finding a document take me so long to find, what will happen if I had to search for images?” With thousands of photographs, it is not practical to name each image. That means opening up (or previewing) each image to find the photograph was had taken during our last vacation, for example.

##There HAS to be a better way
The above line is a hat tip to Kevin O’Leary from Sharktank, and I took this line seriously. I wanted only two storage accounts, one for day to day use, and the other for a periodic backup. I signed up for Mega, the site which offers 50 GB storage in their free account. Using Multcloud, I moved all the scattered files to Mega, and cleared out the One Drive and one of the Google Drive accounts. Storage in Dropbox was brought down to 1 GB of files that I had shared with editors, customers and some other folks. One of my Google accounts became a shared account across all the Google accounts between my wife and I. This includes the mp3 files (final version of the files for MyKitaab Podcast), total storage space = 11 GB and counting. Once the 15 GB space is consumed, I will start storing the files on my Wife’s google Drive storage space, and share the files back with me. All my writing will be in Dropbox, with a backup on Mega.

Infographic: post from 2018
All the documents related to Kamakshi Media were moved to iCloud. Mega will be the ‘data dump’ for all documents, organized into relevant folders.

Way Forward
Once this was accomplished, I decided to close the One Drive and Cloudme accounts, which I thought did not serve much purpose.
New storage structure:
Mega 50 GB
Google Docs 15 GB
Dropbox 7 GB
iCloud (5 GB)

Koofr workflow : 2019

Below may be over-information for you but thought of mentioning it because I think this could be
We at gaatha story have 10 podcasts, in 4 languages. We have a remote team of 8 narrators in who live in 6 cities and 3 audio editors who live in 3 different cities. Almost all of them use Koofr to upload the files- each has been provided with a folder, workflow is as follows:

1. Narrators upload the audio.
2. Content editors listen to the audio, if accepted, drag and drop to audio editor’s folder.
3. The audio editor downloads the file, processes it, uploads the finished file.
4. Content editor reviews the finished file again, if accepted, sends to the publishing team who upload it to the media server.
5. A couple of narrators who have very good quality- send to the audio editor directly, saving us time.
   The 250 GB plan now allows us to plan on scaling using the same setup for another year to come. Low price considering the efficiency achieved.
   Frankly, we have tried ten or eleven cloud storage/ sharing services. Each had some limitation or another. Pcloud and Koofr were the closest that worked well, Koofr – more users found Koofr user friendly (many of them not technically inclined). So there you go.

2020: Signing up for a Storage VPS

In spite of my thoughts on having plenty of storage, the one that we use most for Gaatha story because of its convenience and ease of use is hufa. And we have a 250 gigabyte plan. We were running out of space at 230. gigabytes already, and with a lot more content to come, there was a need to either upgrade the existing plan to a terabyte or look for an alternative, but alternative, of course, was to transfer the files. Some of the files from Kufa and empty empty space. And that is the path we decided to follow. I had already backed up on Google drive through the integration that Kufa offers. But that was not adequate. There is something called as not too many backups, and something that I have come to believe in. Therefore, when this offer came up at seven, US dollars or 15 US dollars a year. It almost became a no brainer. On Sunday afternoon. I signed up for this service. set up Debian 10 with disk encryption. And after SSH. We were good to go. Our clone configuration in Debian 10, you have to do it as a web app, not as a regular one this is something that I came as a surprise to me because past incarnations did have go for in fact if you read koufos blog itself, it talks about our clone as one of the. I school for as one of the options, native to the menu in our clone. Anyway, long story short, there is also walk around the Kufa documentation in that sense is quite helpful, wherein I created a web dev account using a temporary password, an expert who fought with our clone. That is where the versatility and I guess the unit was spent universality of using some of the open standards and having multiple options for connections come into play. Next, the process started. Where in from one particular folder of 38 gigabytes. I started moving the files. But like any code process. I did not start right away with the real stuff. In the sense, I initially did a dry run in the verbose mode just to check if there were any errors or any other things that one could expect. Fortunately, there were no issues, and have taken a couple of screenshots of that. About halfway through, in about 15 minutes. Most of the data was transferred now this is slow because they’re using WebDAV hopefully in a future upgrade or maybe I will try and find out if there is a way of doing this faster through the native route. Once that is done, about 30 gigabytes of data would be freed up from this drive, I can probably transfer out to flow VPS because it does provide 5500 gigabytes of transfer out every month. So why not put it to use. Having done that. I will have backup of a backup of a backup. Then, the main files can be deleted, after which we should be good for about a couple of months, the question arises, why not go the whole hog right now, incremental makes sense. Probably I will repeat this process in a month’s time. In fact, if one sets up a cron job. This can be automated as well. Those are all advanced steps, which I am not quite adept with as yet to do for a future point in time. lessons learned. Number one, if you know your way around. If you’re comfortable with the command line. Our clone is an amazing tool.

Second,

it’s always preferred to encrypt your data.

So something for a future point in time maybe a smaller test file which I will encrypt at the source and then transfer it as a backup here. Fortunately, none of the information which is stored right now is critical. It was a temp folder. Number three is four, and it’s amazing. Number four, rinse and repeat. You can you can always experiment and try with other features as well.

Rclone

rclone copy -P pcloud:/ pcl/
Transferred: 7.791G / 7.791 GBytes, 100%, 33.559 MBytes/s, ETA 0s
Errors: 0
Checks: 0 / 0, –
Transferred: 419 / 419, 100%
Elapsed time: 3m57.7s