Why use cloud? when 10TB plus are easy to optain & cheap

[Labrat101]

Hi ,
I might be getting old and out of touch .
I just can't get my head round what's so great about Cloud . 
First I look at when using a cloud server . The server could be anywhere on the planet . If that company goes down.
due to power natural disaster etc where is my Data ??.
My son just set up a 100TB storage in his lab . Its really small and just sits on a shelf . it has direct connection to the internet
so he can access it from anywhere . It has its own UPS .  But if the internet goes down or some other freak of nature we know were our Data is ..physically located .
Were as Cloud you have to install drivers setup and if its paid for system and one forgets to pay or password problem .
 They can just say sorry we deleted it .  or our tech screwed up . Ok there is a contract .
Some how I don't feel safe not knowing where it is . physically 
I guess most people may never fill a 10 or 20TB even with all the videos ,family photo's etc.

[SilverSolder]

I guess having an off-site backup is one benefit of using cloud tech.   Just don't overpay for it...

[Labrat101]

We defiantly didn't over pay .

The other thing that also worries me is that there are a lot of Cloud services offering FREE
 5TB storage quite large for the average user . But how can these server farms that must have quite a high maintenance running cost . have millions of Free loaders  . They are for sure making money . Which starts to make me think are they using this Data . Big Brother thing.
They say they are secure . From whom . The CIA and other Org's etc have access to what ever they want .
 Photo's etc can be used for face recondition if there are names on your photo's this can then be added to the super large recondition data base that's already being used .
 
There has to be a catch to FREE.    Paranoid  Yes

[mariush]

Hi ,
I might be getting old and out of touch .
I just can't get my head round what's so great about Cloud . 
First I look at when using a cloud server . The server could be anywhere on the planet . If that company goes down.
due to power natural disaster etc where is my Data ??.
My son just set up a 100TB storage in his lab . Its really small and just sits on a shelf . it has direct connection to the internet
so he can access it from anywhere . It has its own UPS .  But if the internet goes down or some other freak of nature we know were our Data is ..physically located .
Were as Cloud you have to install drivers setup and if its paid for system and one forgets to pay or password problem .
 They can just say sorry we deleted it .  or our tech screwed up . Ok there is a contract .
Some how I don't feel safe not knowing where it is . physically 
I guess most people may never fill a 10 or 20TB even with all the videos ,family photo's etc.

The benefits about cloud are basically ... your data sits in a datacenter, somewhere. Some cloud providers would also provide CDN like services, basically your data is replicated in multiple datacenters around the world, and when someone requests one of your files it's served from a server in a datacenter that's physically closest to you.

For example, I'm in Romania with a 500 mbps download / 25 mbps upload internet connection. 
I could download with 500 mbps from a server in a datacenter in UK or Netherlands or France, but maybe only 200-350 mbps from a server in US, and probably only 50-100 mbps from a server in Australia, because the Australian ISPs often have congested ocean fiber cables with Europe and other places, so they slow down individual transfers.
If you're managing a team of a few people, let's say one graphical designer, one website/game programmer, one sound artist, or video editor ... and they have to constantly sync up files and therefore download stuff, then a cloud service with CDN features may make sense.

The other thing that also worries me is that there are a lot of Cloud services offering FREE
 5TB storage quite large for the average user . But how can these server farms that must have quite a high maintenance running cost . have millions of Free loaders  .

Majority of users won't upload more than 1 TB or so. The few subscribers who pay a monthly fee make up for a big part of the costs, once they start paying they tend to keep paying, there's automatic renewals, difficulty of downloading everything or moving somewhere else, so they'd rather continue paying... 

Storage is relatively cheap, we're at around $0.02 per GB   ... services like Backblaze for example can afford to give unlimited backup for around 5$


Also, some cloud providers (Google for example) have to use servers for other things, and it's not a big deal for them to simply insert a bunch of hard drives in those servers and make better use of rack space so the datacenter space and bandwidth is more or less free because it's paid by other services

For example, the company offers a premium CDN (content delivery network) for which they have to rent capacity on fiber cables and pay a fixed monthly fee for that bandwidth, for example 2$ per megabit for a 10gbps connection.... regardless how much data is transferred through that fiber...  but if the capacity is not used, they can shove the traffic of the cloud servers as "low priority" traffic, to better use what they pay for. 

[james_s]

I personally prefer not to use cloud for anything whenever I can avoid it, but there's a lot more to cloud that raw storage. I do see the appeal of letting someone else deal with all the day to day maintenance and security stuff, at least in theory someone is dealing with that stuff. Hosting at home is not free, it consumes electricity, physical space and bandwidth, and it is not completely maintenance free either. Also hard drives have been significantly more expensive lately between Covid related shortages and all the cryptocurrency morons.

[Labrat101]

Thanks James -s
For home use I have a 4 draw hot swap Box that's I backup anything requires safe keeping . I have a stack
of HDD dating back maybe 20 years . Maybe crude they take up space under the desk but I know they
are safe . I never keep it powered up longer than needed .
I use google drive . I guess that can be called cloud the only thing I have on that is 15GB of manuals for old
laptops etc . which I have collected over the years . I did put the link in the repair docs section.
My Sons lab 100TB is self supporting he sells space for his customers Phones .
But still think that these server farms are little bit of a gimmick . The Microsoft farm is sitting in a lake for
cooling . I hate to think how many Meg watts of Power its drawing .
What happens to the thousands of old hard drive when they fail .
 I was just trying to figure out if they give 5TB to million people The power & space .

Quoted by " mariush""  Thanks .

So you said storage is cheap for paying customers . The electric and the cooling costs must be fantasticly  high and the work force etc. The redundancy I would hate to start to calculate.
As you mentioned that Server farms in a different country is also a cloned Data. To increase accessibility
   Also must increase the risk of Data loss from Hackers & itch figures just opening more backdoors .
Still  not convinced that there isn't something else that they are not telling .
Old School thinking .

[jh15]

I've a couple paid services but want to get rid of them when the next term ends. Keep one or two for really important things, with encryption.
     Something I'm working on is making a LTO tape and storing off premises at a friend, relative or workplace. Not at the same flood, fire, tornado risk .
     Anything I really need or want I don't trust the cloud anymore.

     On 9/11 20th some video footage  I wanted to rewatch or share were gone. A favorite of mine from the past I can't find, glad I have a copy.
     Look at Yahoo groups demise. Try to find anything on the Heathkit Hero 1 robot group. Glad I have all the paper courses and 2 bots to share someday somehow.

Like self insuring, be your own backup and use other physical locations. Someone you know has a hall closet to put your files in.
     I don't encrypt my tapes, think grandma has a machine? And any IT person worth its salt could get your will or whatever if you get demised.

[james_s]

So you said storage is cheap for paying customers . The electric and the cooling costs must be fantasticly  high and the work force etc. The redundancy I would hate to start to calculate.

It is, BUT the consolidation can make sense. The generator in a power plant consumes a huge amount of fuel, but it's less fuel than if you had tens of thousands of individual generators at all the homes or neighborhoods. At least in theory, there are many thousands of people making use of the same datacenter and each person is allocated only the amount of storage they actually use, rather than each person having as much storage in their house as they think they might possibly need. Also datacenters tend to be built near power plants where electricity is cheap. It would make sense to put them in cold climates too, it's unfortunate there aren't more cases of all that excess heat being put to good use. A datacenter in a condominium or apartment building seems like a good idea, pipe the heat into the units rather than throwing it away outside.

[ejeffrey]

Hi ,
I might be getting old and out of touch .
I just can't get my head round what's so great about Cloud . 
First I look at when using a cloud server . The server could be anywhere on the planet . If that company goes down.
due to power natural disaster etc where is my Data ??.

There are plenty of reasons to not want to use cloud services, but this is the wrong one.  Major cloud providers can and do offer data replication with multi-continental redundancy with high bandwidth links available for replication.  This is something that is basically impossible for a home user or small business to have and is orders of magnitude less likely to be subject to power failures, fire, and natural disasters than your home server.  Furthermore, they can have not just reliability but high availability: by having multiple online replicas, if one datacenter does have a fire resulting in loss of power, the other zones can keep serving and meeting whatever freshness and synchronization guarantees the particular service has -- for instance, they may guarantee that once the damaged data center comes up it won't server stale data until it synchronizes.

Of course there are still business risks and software failure to worry about, but in terms of physical reliability and security the major cloud vendors are really not playing in the same game as your son's 100 TB server in a closet.

Also when most people talk about cloud services they don't just mean storage, they mean something like AWS, GCS, or Azure.  These have storage + compute + specialized resources (GPU, FPGA) + higher level services built on top of them + management tools for administration and scaling.

[fourfathom]

I work from several different locations and I don't want to carry around computers or storage devices, so I put the files I want to access (and keep synched on my different computers) in the cloud.  I also have local automatic daily backups for the computers at my different locations, using those 2 TByte drives so if I lose my internet connection or cloud service I can recover my data.  This might not be the best solution, but it's easy and so far it works for me.

[Labrat101]

Like self insuring, be your own backup and use other physical locations. Someone you know has a hall closet to put your files in.
     I don't encrypt my tapes, think grandma has a machine? And any IT person worth its salt could get your will or whatever if you get demised.

You Seem to be a man of about the same era .
I remember using Tape backup . There was always a  problem that the tapes were susceptible to damage from Magnetic interference.
Had a few fail on me .
 think grandma has a machine .
https://spy-museum.s3.amazonaws.com/files/callouts/classic-lrg-spy-artifacts-es-april-16-2019-8332-enigma.jpg

[olkipukki]

My son just set up a 100TB storage in his lab . Its really small and just sits on a shelf . it has direct connection to the internet

How many disks there?
If consider a trivial level of redundancy and average cost effective per TB, so disk size in 10-12TB range, you will need at least around 20 HDDs... How come it be 'small'?  ... and 'cheap'? 

[jh15]

Was it LTO tape? I never trusted spinning head tape stuff like DAT. LTO is very robust. As long as grandma is not storing her neodymium  grade 5 magnets with it.

[Berni]

Yeah 100TB would need somewhere in the range of 7 to 20 HDDs and would cost somewhere in the range of 2 grand.

The advantage of running your own NAS server is that you indeed have full control over it, have ethernet speed access to it and can easily run other services on it. I do have my own Unraid based NAS server and i love it.

For people who just need to backup data then buying a big external HDD is probably the way to go. For people who just need a few GB of data to be accessible from multiple locations cloud storage is probably the way to go.

Running your own NAS server is not for everyone, its mostly good idea when you actually need a large amount of storage.

[olkipukki]

Yeah 100TB would need somewhere in the range of 7 to 20 HDDs and would cost somewhere in the range of 2 grand.

8TB starts +/- from 200 (€/$/£), not sure how you will fit in 2K budget

[Labrat101]

You appear to be thinking Hdds. . It was not done that way its banks of high speed solid state . . Powered and controlled by linux.
Its experimental.  It works .

[sleemanj]

But if the internet goes down or some other freak of nature we know were our Data is ..physically located .

You sure do, it's at the bottom of the pile of ashes/building rubble/floodwaters.

Any cloud storage provider worth it's salt is geographically redundant.

[VooDust]

Labrat101, you are comparing apples to oranges. Cloud is the on-demand delivery of IT services.

While your son's 100 TB certainly came cheap, think about the time it took to order, ship, unpack, install, and, eventually, dispose his system. With cloud, you can start using the 100 TB from second one. Speed of business is increased.

What if only 50 TB of it were ever used? He can't give back the remaining 50 TB. Money lost. Spinning this thought further, there is always the risk of either having bought too much or too little. With cloud you pay only for what you use.

With a monthly payment instead, you convert capital expense into operational expense. That can be very attractive to businesses. If you're not a business, you don't need that.

As was mentioned in the thread before, the markup on cloud storage comes from the high availability, high durability and security attached to it. You can run your IT workloads on a maturity level that would not be feasible for most businesses to do on their own.

Lastly, running a data center is hard. If you only need a couple TB, buy an HDD. There was never anything wrong with that. If you need a data center to sustain your operations around this HDD, go with cloud.

[VooDust]

In many ways, computing is repeating the history of electricity: In the early days, before the electric grid, many factories had to build their own electric power plants for their immediate needs.

Today, we simply consume electricity from our power outlets. At the end of each billing period, we simply receive a bill. (I know it's a bit more complicated with factories and their huge energy needs but the principle is the same: centralized power plants for everyone).

Building your own servers will be like... building your own lab power supply: A fun and rewarding learning experience, but neither cost-effective nor necessary.

[Labrat101]

But if the internet goes down or some other freak of nature we know were our Data is ..physically located .

You sure do, it's at the bottom of the pile of ashes/building rubble/floodwaters.

In that scenario . I wouldn't need any backup . I would have my own free cloud with a harp & wings

[Berni]

Yeah 100TB would need somewhere in the range of 7 to 20 HDDs and would cost somewhere in the range of 2 grand.

8TB starts +/- from 200 (€/$/£), not sure how you will fit in 2K budget

Yeah i was talking ballpark figures. If you take 200€ 8TB hard drives it costs you about 2600 € so that is pretty close to 2 grand.

Then again you also need the rest of the system. You can't even plug that many drives into a typical motherboard, so you need a bit of a special board or an extra SATA controller on PCIe. You also typically want to have a UPS running it Then ECC RAM is also a good idea, you also need some redundancy in those drives and want a spare on hand so start rebuilding the array asap...etc

Also not everyone has a fast enough internet connection to work live with the cloud. But on your own LAN you get gigabit speed at a minimum, or 10Gbit if you spend a little bit of extra money on networking gear. On the other hand a lot of people have a internet connection slower than 100Mbit, especially for upload.

However if the goal is hosting some compact web service with low computing power demands it is by far best to run it on a rented VM somewhere in the cloud.

[Doctorandus_P]

The only way I would even consider using any "cloud" service for important or private data is to encrypt it before it gets send to them, and decrypt it myself. But even then there is a chance you upload data that is viewable by them if you make for example a software configuration error.

I do consider all photographs I make for example as private by default. Even if it's just from some breadboard project. Making any photograph public is a deliberate choice made for each individual photo.

On the other hand, if you're writing open source software or want to publicly share your projects you can put them on a number of those git_xxx sites.

[Rick Law]

In many ways, computing is repeating the history of electricity: In the early days, before the electric grid, many factories had to build their own electric power plants for their immediate needs.

Today, we simply consume electricity from our power outlets. At the end of each billing period, we simply receive a bill. (I know it's a bit more complicated with factories and their huge energy needs but the principle is the same: centralized power plants for everyone).

Building your own servers will be like... building your own lab power supply: A fun and rewarding learning experience, but neither cost-effective nor necessary.

Only if you leave content out of the equation would "building your own generator vs build your own server" be alike.

Intellectual Property ownership of the content stored in the cloud is a question.  When you upload stuff to your cloud, they can control what content you can store there already.  So, do you own the content or don't you?  How sure are you that the cloud operator will not inspect or use the content you stored there?

Apple already scanned photo you store in iCould.  What if you have baby/kid pictures of your kid that may expose more than you realize?   Apple reports this to the legal authorities, the authorities monitor your traffic to the ISP...  What if the cloud provider's scan of your stuff as illegal content was because of the AI scanner used is too much "A" but not enough "I"?

Besides control, there is the content ownership problem:  How would you like it if with authorization from the cloud company alone, your video of your kid accepting a swim competition award is used for advertisement by the manufacturer of your kid's swim suit?  Well, you did store that video on the cloud, and edited it while it was on the cloud, and clicked "yes" when you were shown the on-line "end user agreement" update...

Below quoted from an IT consulting/services firm article: "Who Actually Owns Your Data?" (Text bold added by me and not in original quoted text)

"Data created before uploading into the cloud has clear ownership and intellectual property claims by the creator or someone working on a paid basis for a business or organization. Data that has been created within the cloud could come with some strings attached. Making sure that you properly claim and protect your data and intellectual property is becoming more difficult as the legal processes have not really caught up with the pace of technology."

(RL notes: claiming the right is one thing, you still have to win the claim and to win that, you need lawyers and the money to pay for the lawyers.)

"What really happens to all those backups to the cloud?  If you are using a service to back up your data what kind of protections do you have? How is that data being protected? What about transferability [SIC] from one location to another or one vendor to another? Do my intellectual rights and data ownership claims follow the data?  These are all very good questions and they all reside in the grey area of the legal system."

"Congress has taken steps to protect the intellectual rights and data ownership of data stored in the cloud with the Stored Communications Act or SCA. With any legislation, there are several parts to this, in one section it specifically states that when data resides on a cloud provider’s infrastructure, the user owner rights cannot be guaranteed. " (this bold here was done by author)

Regardless of what is in the SCA, when you clicked that "yes" on that "user's agreement update", you might have agreed to give some or all your rights to data-miners already.

So, not like electricity grid vs private generators at all when you incorporate ownership rights in the picture.

Link to actual quoted article:
^{https://winningtech.com/who-actually-owns-your-data/}

[VooDust]

Intellectual Property ownership of the content stored in the cloud is a question.  When you upload stuff to your cloud, they can control what content you can store there already.  So, do you own the content or don't you?  How sure are you that the cloud operator will not inspect or use the content you stored there?

Fair point, I was more arguing from a business perspective, vs you have a consumer perspective in mind: if you upload stuff for free then yes, there have been numerous "end user agreements" trying to rip you off your ownership rights (e.g. Facebook, Whatsapp). I cannot comment however about the legality of such practices. Not that I would approve of course.

[Labrat101]

Link to actual quoted article:
^{https://winningtech.com/who-actually-owns-your-data/}

That was a very interesting article . 
This sort of confirms Why not . The Ownership could be lost . As::  it was yours    now its ours ..
So if one decides to cancel their Cloud account there will be a good chance there is a copy on there Backup archive system. 
Even if encrypted when uploading or down loading as much as 1 Bit gets corrupted and the check sum is altered
the whole file may not be recoverable .