What's the cheapest online storage that you know of?

Since you didn't mention your requirements, I'll assume data integrity isn't super important. In that case, allow me to introduce you to /dev/null as a service. It's free and has unlimited capacity.

Now we just need to invent a way to read the Void of Nothingness to retrieve the data and bam! Infinite storage.
- That's easy, just read from /dev/urandom. The access speed is super slow, but eventually you'll find your data
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This gave me a hearty chuckle. Thank you for showing me that wonderful piece of software.
This is hilarious. I love it haha
Thanks for the website, it was a funny read.
I'd never expect to find an answer like this lol. Thankyou
- Happy to help! Let me know if have any other technical questions :)

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Encrypt everything first and you'll soon have entire communities trying to decipher it for fun.
- Is this an ARG?
And then send us the links. Sharing is caring :)
That's pretty high risk, though, since the admins could notice at any time.

Depends for how long. Buying a used NAS with a single 1TB drive is probably cheaper over a 10 year period than subscribing to some cloud service for the same duration.

Hey, interesting to see you back
- Where did I go?
You mean three drives? You need data integrity, what if a drive fails? What if you have a raid 1 but when readding a new drive you have read errors? Parity is good.
- Good point. Perhaps at least a 2 drive NAS then. 👍

Depends what you want to do but Backblaze B2 is reasonably cheap. $6 per TB

It's reasonably cheap and you pay only for what you use.
- Yeah that's the best for me. I use about 600GB.
  
  500GB plans aren't enough and 1TB plans are too much. Paying what you use is so good.
Heck yeah, it's great. Wasabi is nice too, but keep in mind they bill differently for storage vs retrieval.

Hetzner storage box is 3.81€/month for 1TB.

Over the course of a year you basically bought an HDD (but excluding backups/power)
- Off site storage is off site for a reason, though.
- You could say this about any service.
- You purchased a shit hard drive at that price and bad point anyway.
I had a hetzner box a while back but I didn't know about these storage boxes. This is pretty great. I've used rsync.net for many years but it's basically 3x the price and it's painfully slow.

If you want really good answers, you will need to be more specific about your requirements.

The absolute cheapest as the question is stated is to go dumpster diving for a free hard drive and host it at a friend's house, but this is likely not what you had in mind.

Do you need backups?
Does it need to be encrypted at rest?
What bandwidth do you need up and down?
Is it okay with a monthly bandwidth cap?
what latency is okay? Is cold storage where it takes a day or more to fetch the data okay?

Exactly. How often will you use it? Every day? Just get a hard drive. Once a year? AWS Glacier is like $1 per TB per month and it can't burn down.
Well, I intend to use the offsite storage as an everyday-use-external-harddisk, I want to encrypt it, put a filesystem on top and the mount it. The thought behind it is, the provider will take care of data integrity and backups as well. Worry free usage for me then
- That's unlikely to perform well enough to be usable at all. You'd at the very least need some sync method which just updates the blocks you wrote to, and that rules out a lot of cheap storage.
  
  You'd be better off with either cloud storage a la Google Drive or Dropbox, either mounted from the remote location or used as storage for a sync-based backup solution. You could have it upload things instantly if it listens for save events in inotify.

On AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive 1TB will cost you $1/month. I use it as one of my off-site backup solutions.

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How much will it cost to retrieve that backup though?
- Around $120/TB from memory when I looked into it.
  
  That's too much for regular stuff, but if you're using it to store your family photos and videos off-site in case of a fire etc, you'd pay it. Hmmm... I wonder whether you could get insurance to cover it?
- Especially if you forget to tar it.

I’ve been using Backblaze. Have no complaints

Backblaze.

9/month for unlimited storage.

I'm at 4tb stored.

It’s hard (and against ToS) to access B2C Backblaze with any S3/Swift API, though. So it depends a bit on your use-case.

(preparing for inevitable downvotes) depending on how much storage you need and the flexibility you have in how you use it, Office365 includes 1TB of OneDrive storage for 6 users for somewhere around $100/yr. I use it for storing encrypted video files from my NVR and it works for my use case, but ymmv.

Another Backblaze user checking in 😁 I use their B2 service for $6/TB/mo, however they have an unlimited storage option for Windows/Mac if you're interested in that

Maybe Google isn't welcome around here, but I spend ~100/yr. for 2TB. $4.20/mo./TB.

I map my Windows libraries to my Google Drive and I'm done. Save it and it syncs. Plus, I use Android and Gmail, so everything fits nicely in the same ecosystem.
Awesome company that makes it eau to interface worth their storage outside of their proprietary tools, resulting in wide support built in to a bunch of backup software. Have no issue with you storing encrypted blobs. But - and this is most important - they don't harvest your data and resell or reuse it (although, always encrypt, to be sure).

Fantastic company.

Yet another B2 user here, I only backup things I can't afford to lose so my monthly spend isn't particularly high. I think the most I've ever paid for was around 1.5TB. One big draw for B2 is their upcoming egress policy change tomorrow: up to 3x the data stored with them is free to transfer out every day. Egress absolutely wrecks people's storage budgets a lot of the time, restoration costs can be absurd when you need to recover data.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2023-product-announcement/

I’ll just say this: you get what you pay for. I used pCloud a few years ago and wasn’t able to retrieve all my data, some files got corrupted (luckily I had backups). Now I use a DIY NAS and backup to B2.

This is what I do. Truenas scale and backup to ext hard drive and B2
This is only slightly related - I lost a small number of files with DreamHost object storage, and they were charging more than S3 per GB.

So, I agree you usually get what you pay for, but also make sure the provider is all-in on the product. I think DreamHost really isn't interested in their virtualized/cloud offerings.
I wish I knew how NAS and what to do in case of a failing hard drive.

Is it necessary to have it always powered on?
- It’s really not complicated. Look up Truenas or Rockstor. Both are solid NAS OSs. I’ve been running Rockstor for about a year now (partly because I’m a huge fan of btrfs) and I’m pretty happy with it. Make sure to keep an offline backup on an external drive just in case you mess something up. I manually plug in a drive about once a month for that. I think DIY is more fun anyway ;) and I’m sure the community will help with questions you can’t find answers to online. Good luck!
Yeah of all the things to cheap out on, it doesn't seem wise to do it with data storage unless you don't mind losing it...
- Agreed. Especially when reliable storage only costs $4-$6/tb these days. (Where I live that won’t buy you a freaking cup of coffee lol). I only back up to the cloud and pay for my important data anyway, I have terabytes of data that I don’t mind losing and therefore don’t bother backing up to the cloud.

OVH is quite cheap (£0.0024/GB-month)

Does anyone use Proton for storage?

I've been contemplating hopping onto their offerings once Proton pass has added some more features.

I tried but for me the upload was very slow and not very practical.

They only have a windows app for now, so to back up my NAS the only solution I found was to create a windows VM, a virtual disk pointed at my data on the NAS and running the VM regularly to back up the data.

I gave up after few weeks and went to backblaze.
I have Proton for VPN and it came with 500gb of cloud storage with my plan. Pretty decent.
I think it could be a good option in the future, but it's pretty under baked right now.

OneDrive with Microsoft 365 Family subscription. There are several deals for 50€ per 15 Month for 1TB per Account. Since it is the family subscription you'll get up to 6 Accounts. So it is 3.33€ for 6TB or 0.55€ per TB.

Where is MS Office 50€/15mo and can I use it in America? Been thinking about getting a new domain since I failed to get off google workspaces in time.
- Sorry, can't tell how the prices are in America. But for Germany this kind of deals are around pretty often.
I second this. So much bang for your buck and it's cheaper than Amazon prime

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How do you access your storage? Is there like a web front end? I thought Storj was more for backend storage?
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I've used Sync.com for awhile now with few issues. 1TB is about $6 a month, 2TB around $8 a month.

Hetzner's Storage Box is quite cheap

iDrive E2 is $40 a year for 1TB S3 compatible storage and they have promotions quite often. As always with cheap storage don't rely on it and have a local NAS but it's handy for offsite. I've just transferred out of Wasabi, who were cheap but are less so now.

Never worry about backups or lost data etc, as the provider would take care of it

This is not how it works. You still have to backup your data!

Your account can be closed due to various reasons, you accidentally delete files, some malware deletes files without you noticing it before it is too late.

A friend of mine lost some important data because of the ovh server container fire incident. Ovh had no backups.

Ooofsh, thanks. You're right

Check out Hetzner Storage Box. I've got 20TB for my Jellyfin library and it's $50/mo.

Edit: use rclone to mount it as a network drive on your desktop.

Edit 2: Just checked and it's $40/month

I'm kind of curious why you don't just buy a HDD or two. At $600 a year you'd break even really quickly.
- It's a good question. If I had something like gigabit internet with high upload speeds I probably would (and eventually will). Right now though, I use Jellyfin from wherever I am, and I share it with a few friends and family too.

I'm using iDrive. Quite cheap and if you want an S3 interface you can check their enterprise e2 tier.

They also have a super low-end tier of 500GB for 9.95 a year, less than a dollar a month, which is nice for a not so heavy user.
Is that Apple storage? Isn't that called iCloud?
- Different product. I use IDrive as well since it has a native Synology app.

If you're into SCP/FTP/Rsync/SMB check out Hetzner Storage Servers. About 3 € for 1 TB, including 10 snapshots

Buyvm has 1TB for $5, but you need a GPS to connect to it, that is another $2. So $7 total for a small linux box with 1TB.

A GPS? Why?
- You use a global private server when you fat finger the G instead of a V
- They hide it in a field

Not sure about cheapest, but Wasabi is affordable considering no data transfer fees

Youtube

I wanted to do my own self-hosted storage but for the cost and features I went with Dropbox. It's $10 a month if you prepay for the year otherwise it's $12 and you get two terabytes of storage. For that you get all the same things most self-hosted solutions will offer including 30 days of versioning/backups. Additionally it's pretty popular so most software has built in integration which is convenient but not something you need. Bottom line is doing your own storage can be cheap but adding off-site backups gets expensive and just going straight to off-site backups (cloud storage) is going to be close to the $10-$12 dollars you'll pay anyway but you have to do all the work.

I use either Discord or the unlisted feature of a random video/audio website depending on the circumstances.

How do you do that?
- Most video websites have the option to make a video viewable only when someone has the link. The option is presented to you when you're uploading it.

Yandex disk. They accept credit cards.