I'm thinking about switching from google drive to dropbox, due to safety reasons (I don't want any suspicious AI spy on my files). Today I noticed the Hetzner Storage box and mountain duck.
Hetzner storage box offers 1TB network drive for 3.2 EUR per month, and mountain duck offers a way to mount that network drive on Windows, with a 39 USD one-time fee. The software is made in swiss.
Due to the god damn GFW in China, the speed can't go over 100KB/s without proxy. Thankfully, with my proxy server set up on the Hetzner FSN datacenter, the upload speed is faster than 4MB/s, which I think is the limit of my network. The download speed is also not bad: 8MB/s at the beginning, drop to 2MB/s, sometimes stuck at 2Mbps. Not sure who should be blamed for this, since there are too many participants involved: mountain duck, my transparent proxy, my network ISP, the proxy server on Hetzner, Hetzner storage box, I don't know. But with WebDAV, it supports random access, which means I can stream a video and scroll back and forth without waiting for the stupid client software to download the entire file (It's you, Google Drive Client).
The price is also the cheapest. Hetzner's price is equivalent to 38.16 USD per TB per year (BX11, with BX41, you get 24.246 USD per TB per year), while Google Drive (2TB annually) is 49.995 USD per TB per year, and dropbox (2TB annually) is 59.94 USD per TB per year. The proxy server is kind of required no matter which service I use, so that's not a big game changer.
I will try this configuration for a while. If I think it's good enough, that would be a great deal.
@freemo Oh, glad to know that! I'll have a look soon :)
Then cross-platform would be a nightmare. Also, considering I rely on Google too much, I think I'd better spread my data over other service providers before they close my account since I'm using an American account while in China.
I think I'm safe because now I have Google, AWS, and Hetzner in my supply chain. I asked AWS and Hetzner, and they said they would never check my file, not with human nor with AI.
> using an American account while in China.
That's worse than Google spying on your files, because it means complete account lockout. I wouldn't risk losing access to your files like that.
Yeah, that's a huge risk, so I'm eager to move my data from google to somewhere else, after 3 years of nothing happened. However, you can't select China because their country list doesn't have that option. I can select Taiwan or HongKong, but I don't have any local payment to use. Now I'm using a virtual credit card to handle my payments, which, charges 5% fee for each tx.
Thankfully, I've been using my account for years, and they might think I'm an American living in China. If that's a new account, I'm sure using a virtual card and an IP from the datacenter will trigger their anti-fraud system in less than 5 minutes, LOL.
I'd prefer something like RAID or ZFS. If the thumb drive failed, all of those 1TB data will be gone. Before I start using unraid, that's how I store and lost my data
Yes, redundant storage is more reliable. You could use a regular hard drive for daily or weekly backup for triple redundancy.
It sounds like will need to backup to multiple different cloud services anyway. Also, ISPs can be unreliable, too.
@skyblond
You don't need a program to mount the drive. It uses samba. You can connect with rsync, SFTP and anything using ssh protocol.
Normally I don't. But I'm in China, and the network is worse. Without a proxy, the transfer speed is less than 100KB/s, and as far as I know, there is no way to force windows to use a socks5 proxy (VPN has been dead in China for years) when mounting samba.
@skyblond i suggest iDrive, 256 aes private key, all sorts of enterprise type features at economical pricing
@skyblond We also have cloud.qoto.org which is free.