Asklemmy

Don't use cloud storage at all, use syncthing. If you really need a lot of disk space, that's going to be the cheapest anyway.

One thing to keep in mind with something like Syncthing is where the physical location of the other machine(s) is. The nice thing about cloud storage is that your data is in an entirely different geographic region, so if there's a hurricane, flood, fire, etc. your data is still safe. That being said, I use Google drive at the moment so I'll also be keeping an eye on this post for alternatives.

Proton Drive maybe?

is this thread really 2 years old?

I'm using free account on Mega. Had it for years, have my photos automagically back up there, still haven't used all of the free storage. If that happens, I'll probably subscribe there since it's tested, familiar and safe. But there's also Proton Drive. Will compare both when I need it.

I've used pCloud for three years. Initially it is a lot, especially if you're not sure if you will commit to them, but if you do, you have one less hidden big expenditure masked as subscription, which nowadays is valuable. I wish they released their Linux version through Flatpak and not Appimage, though

Hetzner also has a hosted Nextcloud: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

Your own NAS. Not your hardware, not your files.

This is perhaps for a narrower audience, but if you run a consumer version of Windows (not Server), you can get Backblaze unlimited storage for $70/year per device.

They support encryption with a key you provide in the client, which is super convenient. Restoring individual files is pretty straightforward, but an entire drive was a bit of work last time I had to do it. For the price, it’s a nice ~~piece~~ peace of mind for 10TB+ of versioned storage.

Wasabi is great and cheap for S3-compatible object storage.

I am no techie, but, yeah, StandardNotes is great. I have a free 2GB nextcloud acct, but there are paid accounts that are very affordable. I did make sync mistakes by trying to sync Obsidian (notes) with Nextcloud and their sync softwares conflicting causing a mess. I contacted the free provider, though, and they fixed what I tried to fix for months, but failed to. I think that is a rare case, so think Nextcloud is wonderful. Hope to set up a Pi server with my own Nextcoud and use the free account as a backup for a while (not sure how power outages or storm power surges could hurt a Pi). I am also very curious about Mega and Linode 9I thought Linode was for business accounts, though).

'Cloud Storage' is a bit underspecified. What are your use-cases, specifically?

Linode actually has a 'cloud storage' offering based on the Free 'ceph' distributed storage system's implementation of S3.

I'm personally very fond of rsync.net, which you can access via scp/sftp.

My general recommendation is to use a Nextcloud provider. Depending on how much you are willing to spend a vps will allow you to use encryption at the cost of some restrictions, o go cheaper using the shared instance. Either way you don't have to manage backend & you can upgrade storage as needed. Since you'll choose the provider that means there's some trust, but for sensitive files or folders I'll recommend you use something like Cryptomator. That way you don't have to change or use another service for improve privacy and security. That means you could use Cryptomator on any of the services you already mentioned. I like pcloud as second option to Nextcloud. But Nextcloud is a more comprehensive alternative to GApps that Pcloud.

I host Nextcloud on Hetzner. It's about 5€ for 1TB. You have the privacy of Nextcloud, but they upgrade it for you and so on. Just a heads up: You don't have access to the shell on the machine.

There's a lot of help out there for setting up a nextcloud server, either at your home, or on a VPS. Once you have the server up, you can have as many clients as you want, and each client can have a copy of any/all files you have on the server (each client storage space permitting). Depending on how much data you have (and file sizes), you'll have multiple copies at any given time. That's what I do.

Another thing you can do, is use something called 'rclone' to mount something like: google drive, onedrive, dropbox etc., as a network drive on your computer. Rclone has the ability to encrypt these folders, meaning google/dropbox/etc can't see what your files are, but you can see them fine on your computer. You interact with your this mount as you would any other folder on your computer.

Another option would be to use something like Duplicati and have your backups be cloud agnostic. It fully encrypts the backups so it doesn't matter who the vendor is or if they are good guys.

This assumes you have the TB of space locally though.

I use resilio, which is a peer to peer storage based on BitTorrent. I don't remember syncthing’s base protocol, but it sounds like it meets the same goals.

Resilio offers apps for my phone, NAS, Mac, pc, etc. For my phone I use selective sync for a few key folders instead of the whole thing.

These don't get me location redundancy unless I tuck another device offsite. Most people don't have 2 secure enough locations for this.

I mean, you kind of just ran the gambit on the current state of consumer facing cloud storage. I'm not sure there are any options that aren't from "bad guys".

This video has some good options https://youtu.be/72lxrH7GmDg

I'm using contabo for over a year now. Using they're cheapest version, hosting a nextcloud instance with 300 GB of storage, €5 / month. It's slow, but perfectly serviceable if you're not relying on the web interface. Independent German company, in the business for a long time. Stable, reliable, not a single complaint.

I've been happy with Sync for close to a decade now.