A 12TB HDD costs $150. You pay for the drive in less than 3 months.
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Apple Adds 6TB and 12TB iCloud+ Storage Tiers
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HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
That's not the only option you have:
- Buy a Mac.
- Attach a big fat hard drive to it (20TB is dropping below $200 right now),
- sync your 250K photos to that Mac (store them on that big HDD if you don't have enough internal storage),
- in Photos app, make some albums of favorite photos that you would want with you at all times (certainly that can't possibly be all 250K),
- sync those "favorite photos" albums back to iPhone and thus carry only a select subset of photos with you at all times.
Use Time Machine to backup your media to one or two other drives and store at least one of those offsite, regularly rotating it with the one onsite, so that you don't lose all in a fire/flood/theft scenario.
This will yield no subscription fees. You control your own data & photos vs. trusting strangers in some distant server farm. Read/Writes will be much faster than Cloud transfers. Etc.
You can do the same kind of thing with videos, music, etc. too. Store all back on your Mac, sync select subsets of the ones you must have with you to your phone when you are going to be away from that Mac.
Apple makes it very easy to set up photo albums, music playlists, video playlists, etc and then select those to sync to iDevices. Consider using this terrific and easy feature of macOS instead of pay-pay-paying to store it all in iCloud.
OR, set up your own cloud in a NAS and upload any new photos, videos, music, etc to that NAS until you can get back to a Mac to properly import them into the respective apps.
OR, put all of it on that NAS "cloud" so you have access to all of it whenever you are connected to the internet... but don't have to pay ongoing subscription fees for that access.
iCloud is great and all but it is farrrrrrr from the only option. If you reallocate a few months of bigger-tier fees, you can basically buy many years of your own storage or cloud and put the remaining months of (what would have been more ongoing) fees (forever) towards the budget for your next few Apple device(s).
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That drive isn't protected from hardware failure, so RAID protected storage is inherently more expensive, along with 24/7 electricity costs.
Kind of cold that the upper tiers give exactly $0 volume discount.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
So spend $300 and make one a Time Machine drive. Both will likely be fine for 5-7 years with no subscription fees and their owner having 100% control of their own data.
iCloud 12TB at $60/month over those same 5-7 years equals $3,600-$5,040. One can buy their next couple of iPhones, iPads or Macs out of the savings without forgoing storing and backup security of their data.
What about fire/theft/flood that takes out both hard drive and TM drive? Add one more 12TB drive and rotate the 2 TM drives with one always stored offsite (I use a bank safe deposit box to do exactly this). Rotate them regularly to keep the one offsite relatively up to date. $450 vs. $3,600-$5,040 seems like an easy choice.
Edit: I'm seeing 12TB HDDs on Amazon right now for about $100. So for one 12TB main drive and TWO Time Machine backups so one can be extra-securely stored offsite, it...
...makes it a $300 vs. $3,600-$5,040 comparison. 💸💸💸
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The other option is to simply edit down photos and videos instead of just keeping everything. Editing out the chaff is very satisfying, and your photo album looks way better when you're done. The process can help you become a better photographer, as you start to get it in your bones what ends up looking good and what you're likely to delete later.
Apple makes it very easy to overshoot and just not worry about all the extra images. Photos likes to default to condensed views (Months, Years, Days, For You) that conceal the fact that you might have taken like 25 photos of your kid on a carousel and only three of them are actually the keepers.
I predict that in a year or two they'll roll out AI to surface your best photos for you, selling it as a "just keep shooting, we'll sort it for you!" process that still leaves you accumulating images at increasing rates, paying for them for cloud and SSD storage -- especially as megapixel counts leap up and the files balloon in size.
As a gen X'er, when I look back at how many photos there are of me as a kid, it's like... maybe 50 total, and I bet that's typical of anyone who grew up in the 90s or before. Digital photography (and smartphone photography even more) has normalized taking and keeping vast, vast numbers of images that would have looked pretty obsessive and weird a decade or two ago.
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You’re saying the old server farms will be the midden piles for future archeologists?
This makes a lot of assumptions regarding drive durability, doesn't factor in any electricity costs, end user value of their time, or ease of use - regularly rotate backup drives to a bank safe deposit box? Okay. At least include something like Backblaze for $9 a month in your comparison, for unlimited cloud backup.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Haha.
If anything, I was conservative on drive durability. An individual users demand of HDDs is relatively minor vs. a 24/7 server farm, but I gave them only 5-7 years of life anyway. In reality, an HDD can easily go 10 years. I've got some that I consider retired but fired up recently and they still work. 2 of those are towards 20 years old. However, feel free to hypothetically kill one of them in less than 5 years. HDDs basically have steadily falling prices, so replacing one of those 12TB in a few years will probably cost less than the price of ONE month of iCloud 12TB. 12TB HDD is below $100 now. Replace all 3 in the example for 3 months of iCloud storage cost vs. paying for 12 months of iCloud that year... and then 12 more months the following year... and 12 months the year after that while those replacement drives keep right on doing the job for near $0.
Electricity use for 2 Hard Drives is practically nill. If I ceased using 2 hard drives in this way for a month, I doubt I could notice any tangible difference in an electric bill. They are not exactly power hogs. But pick an electricity cost for 2 hard drives if you like. It's a LONG way from $300 to $3,600-$5,040.
I run my own cloud and it takes nearly no time after initial setup. I greatly value my time but since it takes nearly none, I can't bill myself much for the time it doesn't demand of me. However, again, pick a number and it's still a LONG way from $300 to $3,600-$5,040.
Ease of use is eye of the beholder. I found it surprisingly easy to set up the Synology cloud I use: execute a step-by-step wizard, read options as presented, choose the ones I wanted, etc. Very easy (for me). Someone less capable could consult substantial free, step-by-step videos on YouTube and similar if they wanted some extra (also free) help getting their own cloud set up. But I'll grant you that average Joe may find iCloud easier to use... as it certainly should be if that Joe is going to be paying $60/month for it instead of very near $0/month as I do.
I regularly go to my bank, so swapping a drive in and out of a safe deposit box is trivial. But if that's too hard for people who want to save towards $3300-$4700 over 5-7 years, they could store the offsite copy anywhere. In the desk or locker at work? At a relative's house? Get a good friend to do the same and hold each others off-site backups? Etc.
Why pay even $9/month for something as trivial as removing a drive from a box and inserting a replacement one? Then doing it again next month or so when I am going to be there anyway? The entire computing world got by just fine for decades before there was any "cloud." That still works just as good as it did for the decades before entrepreneurs got the idea to try to monetize cheap storage into a forever subscription revenue stream.
But if there is absolutely no offsite storage option available to someone who wants that level of data security, then yes, $9/month is a LOT less than $60/month through that option. 10 years at $9/month vs. 10 years at $60/month is $1,080 vs. $7,200. That's about 2 iPhones and a pretty good new Mac in that difference.
Even piling in drive failure faster than only 5-7 years and putting some expensive electricity rate in the tabulation, it is an enormous gap from $300 plus such costs to $3,600-$5,040. The savings is enough to cover future Apple hardware purchases such as new iPhone + new Mac vs. spending on this to push corporate "services" revenue to "another quarter of record profit" AND also coming up with even more money to buy new iDevices and new Macs.
Am I saying iCloud is not for anyone? No. iCloud is great, impressively integrated, mostly "just works", etc. The fault I'm pointing out with it is only how high it is priced. I use the free 5GB myself, free 11GB at Dropbox (referrals accumulating added free space from them) and can use some free space on Microsoft and Google options too if I wanted. However, I bought the NAS for many other uses and it also happens to have a great, "free" option for my own, subscription-free, cloud service too. If I didn't have the NAS, I would feel just as good using the free cloud capacity from Apple and Dropbox plus HDDs with TM as described... so that I'm NOT paying $3,600 over 5 years.
If iCloud wasn't priced so very high, I could easily justify using more of it myself. But that's just too much for 12TB in the sky. There's plenty of cheaper options available to anyone who needs cloud or just 12TB via HDDs.
If anything, I was conservative on drive durability. An individual users demand of HDDs is relatively minor vs. a 24/7 server farm, but I gave them only 5-7 years of life anyway. In reality, an HDD can easily go 10 years. I've got some that I consider retired but fired up recently and they still work. 2 of those are towards 20 years old. However, feel free to hypothetically kill one of them in less than 5 years. HDDs basically have steadily falling prices, so replacing one of those 12TB in a few years will probably cost less than the price of ONE month of iCloud 12TB. 12TB HDD is below $100 now. Replace all 3 in the example for 3 months of iCloud storage cost vs. paying for 12 months of iCloud that year... and then 12 more months the following year... and 12 months the year after that while those replacement drives keep right on doing the job for near $0.
Electricity use for 2 Hard Drives is practically nill. If I ceased using 2 hard drives in this way for a month, I doubt I could notice any tangible difference in an electric bill. They are not exactly power hogs. But pick an electricity cost for 2 hard drives if you like. It's a LONG way from $300 to $3,600-$5,040.
I run my own cloud and it takes nearly no time after initial setup. I greatly value my time but since it takes nearly none, I can't bill myself much for the time it doesn't demand of me. However, again, pick a number and it's still a LONG way from $300 to $3,600-$5,040.
Ease of use is eye of the beholder. I found it surprisingly easy to set up the Synology cloud I use: execute a step-by-step wizard, read options as presented, choose the ones I wanted, etc. Very easy (for me). Someone less capable could consult substantial free, step-by-step videos on YouTube and similar if they wanted some extra (also free) help getting their own cloud set up. But I'll grant you that average Joe may find iCloud easier to use... as it certainly should be if that Joe is going to be paying $60/month for it instead of very near $0/month as I do.
I regularly go to my bank, so swapping a drive in and out of a safe deposit box is trivial. But if that's too hard for people who want to save towards $3300-$4700 over 5-7 years, they could store the offsite copy anywhere. In the desk or locker at work? At a relative's house? Get a good friend to do the same and hold each others off-site backups? Etc.
Why pay even $9/month for something as trivial as removing a drive from a box and inserting a replacement one? Then doing it again next month or so when I am going to be there anyway? The entire computing world got by just fine for decades before there was any "cloud." That still works just as good as it did for the decades before entrepreneurs got the idea to try to monetize cheap storage into a forever subscription revenue stream.
But if there is absolutely no offsite storage option available to someone who wants that level of data security, then yes, $9/month is a LOT less than $60/month through that option. 10 years at $9/month vs. 10 years at $60/month is $1,080 vs. $7,200. That's about 2 iPhones and a pretty good new Mac in that difference.
Even piling in drive failure faster than only 5-7 years and putting some expensive electricity rate in the tabulation, it is an enormous gap from $300 plus such costs to $3,600-$5,040. The savings is enough to cover future Apple hardware purchases such as new iPhone + new Mac vs. spending on this to push corporate "services" revenue to "another quarter of record profit" AND also coming up with even more money to buy new iDevices and new Macs.
Am I saying iCloud is not for anyone? No. iCloud is great, impressively integrated, mostly "just works", etc. The fault I'm pointing out with it is only how high it is priced. I use the free 5GB myself, free 11GB at Dropbox (referrals accumulating added free space from them) and can use some free space on Microsoft and Google options too if I wanted. However, I bought the NAS for many other uses and it also happens to have a great, "free" option for my own, subscription-free, cloud service too. If I didn't have the NAS, I would feel just as good using the free cloud capacity from Apple and Dropbox plus HDDs with TM as described... so that I'm NOT paying $3,600 over 5 years.
If iCloud wasn't priced so very high, I could easily justify using more of it myself. But that's just too much for 12TB in the sky. There's plenty of cheaper options available to anyone who needs cloud or just 12TB via HDDs.
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I'm glad they did this. I still can't believe they're only offering 5GB for free though. That wasn't much when it debuted in 2011 and over 10 years later, it's useless. Now it only results in a constant annoying badge that bugs users to upgrade because they instantly ran out of storage
Not a great user experience
Not a great user experience
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Consider one of these or similar with no subscription fee... or 2 to have an on-site backup copy until you can get back to your Mac to import any new video footage. Or one for field video capture backup (second copy still in the phone) and a MB back in the room for import when you finish each day.
Bonuses:
Bonuses:
- if you find yourself in some places beyond the reach of cellular & wifi, you can backup anyway.
- Read/Write will likely be much faster than any cloud service via cellular connection.
- no burning unlimited* cellular capacity towards the potential throttling level or paying roaming penalties when outside your zone.
- Etc.
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I happily use 546MB out of my 5GB "free" iCloud space.
I prefer to have my own backups on my Mac vs (any) cloud service. But that's just me ...
I've survived without "cloud" my entire computer age and I don't see any reason yet to change that, and I've amassed 2.5TB+ of data thus far ...
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Obviously you, me and anyone else daring to not shoot (relatively) big money at Apple for this service are clearly in the wrong. Apple needs the revenue. We need to join others trying to sell everyone else on paying anything Apple asks for anything... even stuff some don't really need. Urgent! Save Apple! Save Apple! $3T valuations are not enough. Vaults #37-43 are not quite at 100% capacity on profit cash yet. Fill those vaults! Fill those vaults! 
Honestly first time I see someone offer a solutions and not just “iCloud sucks”. I’ll have to read more to see I can try some of your method.
Hadn't checked in a while bc last time I did we weren't anywhere near maxing out. But as of no we're using 1.1+ TB out of 2. Good to know there are higher capacity options but I sure hope the prices come down.
I am sitting at 197 GB used out of 200 GB on my icloud plan and am considering moving photos older than a year (140 GB) over to a synology and making a secondary backup on a thumb drive and updating that annually.
So my thought is immediate backup/sync with icloud > longer term backup Synology
So my thought is immediate backup/sync with icloud > longer term backup Synology
What seems craziest to me is that if you get the base 15 and 12TB cloud, you would nearly pay the price of the device again for one year.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Not bad. If you have a Mac, Time Machine is basically "for dummies" simple and will backup without you having to do anything... which will be much better than that "annually" part.
The Synology backup should be like 2 in one: you have a copy there and then its own RAID setup offers a second level of backup should any one (or in some setups 2) drives fail.
Synology has a Time Machine-supporting option (free service), so you can allocate some space on it for network Time Machine backups much like using Apple's old Time Capsule router. I use this too. In other words, set one TM backup to the Synology TM backup and the other to a local DAS drive. TM backs up every hour, so it will automatically back up to both in alternating runs every other hour.
A key concept is to get at least one recently-updated copy offsite, so you are protected against fire/theft/flood that takes out all backups at one location. I have TWO Time Machine DAS drives: one at home backing up right now and one in my bank's safe deposit box. Roughly monthly, I swap the two. Worst case scenario focused only on them, I lose up to about 30 days of the most recently-added stuff.
However, I also back up to a Synology and the most recent stuff is usually work files which are regularly synching to 2 Macs: desktop and MB. So I would need a big cataclysm to take out all of the local storage and a much bigger one to also take out the bank too (for which, I'm very likely lost as well, and thus can't worry about any data).
Think it through and be sure to get one recent copy offsite and you'll be just fine... far better than the vast majority of people who basically have no backups at all and then long for a solution when the one copy on the one internal drive is likely lost with a dead drive.
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HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
You can do it. The NAS-less option of just Time Machine and a couple of drives is very easy, cheap and "just works."
If you do want some cloud storage but you don't want to pay big subscription fees for it forever, a NAS offers a great way to run your own cloud. Or use the 5GB free for iCloud plus XGB free from Dropbox and XGB free from Microsoft or Google for a little cloud storage until you can get back to Mac, clear it out and organize it where it needs to be.
Sync select stuff (photos, video, music) you want with you at all times directly to the iDevice vs. leaning on iCloud. That will keep more free space free while using the storage you own in the iDevice.
If you think you need a LOT of content with you on some trip but not sure what to sync, get a small external drive and load up to just about everything on it, take it with you and tap it with the files app when you figure out what content you want to access. You can also store new stuff you shoot or pick up on that trip on it until you can get back to your Mac... a physical "cloud" storage device if you will (no subscriptions, much faster read/write, no cell signal required).
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Still only 5GB free. Good grief Apple.. step into the present, would you?
Biggest, wealthiest and stingiest tech company in the world.
Biggest, wealthiest and stingiest tech company in the world.