Hi all.
I have a bit over 2TB of data that I’d like to backup. Hopefully I’ll never need to restore that backup, so I’m looking for a cold backup. Do you guys know a cheapo cold backup service that won’t cost me a fortune in bandwidth?
Any preference in cost? As it’s incredibly cheap and fits most cases, I would recommend GSuite since it’s ~£6.60/$10 per month for unlimited storage but with a daily 750GB bandwidth cap. RClone supports encryption and regarding compression, you could probably tarball it with the compression flag? It’s pretty hard to beat that, even with dedicated cold storage solutions.
Welp, that’s what I’m using for live data, so I’d like to have backup off Google. If I compress the backup they won’t be able to correlate the data, but shoveling the data from one drive to another using the same computer might be a bit suspicious 
What about Online Scaleway C14?
The cheapest plan is 68€ per year for 2TB if you don’t retrieve the data.
But you can’t really add new data to an existing “bucket”, it’s purely cold storage and you have 1 week to upload the data using sftp/rsync.
Wasabi is $0.0049 per GB/month ($4.99 per TB/month) with no extra bandwidth or API call fees. It’s S3-compatible, so any apps that work with S3 will also work with it. The only reason I’m not using it myself is because it has a 1 TB minimum commitment (that is, you’ll get a minimum bill of $4.99 per month which covers 1 TB of data, and then you pay per extra GB). If you have over 1 TB of data, it’s a great deal, particularly given it’s hot storage (you can access your files at any time) rather than something like Amazon Glacier.
Wishosting also have VPSes with 1800 GB space for $8.99 per month if you pay quarterly:
1 vCPU core Xeon D-1520
Unlimited CPU core 2.4GHz
1GB RAM
1800GB HDD RAID-5
Linux/Windows OS
Bandwidth 500Mbps
Unmetered Traffic
1 IPv4
DDoS protection
Location - Canada
https://www.wishosting.com/order/main/packages/VPS/
if you have any ideas on encrypting and/or compressing the data that would be helpful.
Use zstandard (Zstandard - Real-time data compression algorithm) to compress it, it’ll give you the best compression ratio. For encryption, GPG is the standard thing to use.
If you use encryption and compression, make sure you compress before you encrypt, not the other way around. By definition, encrypted data is not very compressable. One of the main points with encryption is to avoid recognisable patterns, whereas compression relies on finding patterns in the data.
SYS Storage Maybe? it’s just $5.99/m for 2 TB (ARM)
I’m using OVH Object Storage
So I wanted to give you an update after I get everything configured and working smooth, but it’s going to take some time. So here is a quick update:
A friend of mine reminded me of Sia, a cryptocurrency that can be used to rent decentralized cloud storage. It currently occupies place 47 in terms of market cap. I’ve been following the project for two years now and the historical data shows the coin has been trading since 2015 with a very first volume explosion in Feb 2016. Developers are releasing new versions slowly, but steadily every few months, so the project is somewhat stable. Unfortunately Sia s still in “early” development and has some downsides that may be a insuperable barrier for some. For example:
renter , transactionpool and wallet is essential to restore the data. For this reason, it’s good a practice to frequently backup those flders (as well as the Sia installation, for convenience). btw. everytime you upload or download something the internal data changes, so you have to backup it again.Pros? It’s hilariously cheap. Currently it’s $0.27/m for 1TB storage; $0.03 to upload 1TB and $0.02 to download 1TB. There is also contract formation fee which currently is $0.48 + some network fees that I don’t fully understand yet, but looks to be ~10% now. Older articles mention ~3,9%, but the storage prices were a few times higher back then than they are now, so I guess the network adjusted itself so the developers roughly have the same amount of money. Even with the 10% it’s still super cheap.
Current storage pricing: SiaStats.info - Storage pricing
Article on how renting works: Renting on Sia - SiaSetup
Sia wiki: https://siawiki.tech/index
Sia roadmap: https://trello.com/b/Io1dDyuI/sia-feature-roadmap
I have the impression @Neoon didn’t have a very good experience with Sia. Maybe he can share his experience.
I have been using Arq to back up several machines to Google drive. 2TB for $99 a year and that storage can be used for other G services. It isn’t the cheapest, but it is very simple and reliable.
Would it not work out cheaper to just buy an external drive for the data to go on? Or do you need it to be somewhere off site?
Looks nice, but definitely too expensive for mass storage.
@Wolveix already mentioned GDrive. Unfortunately that’s a no go for me.
Unfortunately the data is constantly growing, so a storage medium with fixed amount of space is a no go.
Tomorrow I should have Sia blockchain fully synchronized, so I’ll give you an update on how it’s performing on Saturday. Meanwhile you can read my previous comment if you’ve missed it. 
BackBlaze B2 ? Seems to be around ~$10/month for 2TB of data and ~$20 to download it?