Idk, my home server has a 1tb SSD. Does that count?
this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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60TB of my own hosted cloud.
2TB Google
2TB Microsoft
2TB Apple
Unlimited IDrive for mobile photos/videos backup.
Zero
200TB on my own hardware at home & family members house
3.5TB on a ServaRica Storage VPS
480GB on a OVH dedicated server
Yum
Around 30TB shares between various providers. Hetzner for servers, Ionos for S3 compatible block storage, Tuxis for PBS, atm still some old backups at Synology and Backblaze,but getting rid of that.
Total cost should be around 120€/month.
Zero.
There is no cloud, just someone else's computer.
Oh my god you're awesome. Simply put straight to the point, cuts like a razor.
Just use the cloudssssSSSss
48TB on my own hardware
108TB on my own hardware.
How much did you pay for that? He gets 0.5 TB for 48 $ per year, presumably including 24/7 availability, redundancy, etc. And not just included but without having to manage anything.
Not that guy, but I bought a bulk order of used hard drives on eBay for about $1/TB
Granted, a lot of those drives died on the way so it was more like $1.50/TB after I sifted through it. I've only had one more die in 3 years
Things I think about, which would be interesting to know, perhaps I missed something. Please share your experiences:
How many hours did it take you to set everything up? How much did you eventually spend for everything combined? What are the running costs? How much space does it gobble up? How loud is it? Backup/redundancy plan? Internet connection good enough (upload speed)?
How much did you eventually spend for everything combined?
Hard question to answer because it's the server of Theseus at this point. My first NaS/Homelab was probably about $300 in cheap parts. It had 3 TB of SSD storage in a 6 bay 2.5 in SSD caddy that fit in a 5.25 bay of a Optiplex. It booted from a single NVMe drive and had 2x 4tb spinning disk drives.
My current server is a little over $1500 I think. It has 2 gpus (5060ti 16GB and 3060 12 GB for AI and hashcat stuff), 8x 4tbHDDs, 8x 500gb SSDs, an EPYC 7302p CPU, all noctua fans (3 case 2 CPU).
What are the running costs?
Electricity is cheap in Kentucky. I think this might cost $10-$20/month to run. Jellyfin is my most used service so I moved it and the production nas that fuels it onto a much more power efficient setup (Optiplex 3000 with a single 12tb HDD) and that probably costs a couple bucks at most a month. I have all the data backups on my big server so if the second hand HDD dies I can just point there server at my big server while I reload a new 12tb HDD.
How much space does it gobble up?
Not much more than a normal gaming PC. It fits in a Gamemax Titan or any other E-ATX case really.
How loud is it?
Not very. The stock fans of the Gamemax were fine but the Noctua flex is always funny. I keep my server right next to my gaming PC which is right next to where I game (duh) and work from home. It's only noticeable when one of the HDDs is dying and trying its best. This is why I went with consumer components in a consumer case as opposed to a rack mount solution. I worked in a data center and so I have some rack mount servers but they're loud as shit.
Backup/redundancy plan?
I pay for 500gb of Proton drive. All my important documents are backed up there. Most of my TBs of data are movies and shows. It would suck to lose the collection but it's not worth setting up an off site backup for terabytes of meaningless things like that. Honestly, I only really need sub 100 GB of cloud storage for photos and tax documents. It was just a good deal to get the 500 from Proton.
Internet connection good enough (upload speed)?
My internet connection is dog shit. That's why I started my NaS. I got sick of the show I was streaming being interrupted by Spectrum shitting the bed again. Websites I run are hosted on GitHub or a VPS until I can get something less bad.
How many hours did it take you to set everything up?
Well, I'm very cheap. I mean VERY cheap. My HDDs in my big server were pulled from some NetApp appliance that used a weird blocking format for HDD data which don't feel bad if you didn't know that cause I didn't either. Took a few days to figure that out and then a few weeks to run a auto reformat on Truenas to put them in the right blocking format for anything other than a NetApp appliance to use.
And that kinda stuff is what you deal with when you want a beefy server but you don't want to buy new. If I had bought this server new in 2018/17 when most of the parts were new, this would probably be a $10k-$15k server.
Can I recommend doing this? Only if you want to learn. I've dealt with so much weird shit. I have a memory leak that eats up 70% of my usable ram. I can't get the 5060 to run properly and the AI I have running on the 3060 is too stupid to help. Everything is virtualized which was a weird call, I virtualized Truenas and passed through a SAS controller to use my NetApp drives. Why? I got convinced by a Homelab YouTuber and it seemed fun.
But that's what what I wanted. Weird and jank to play with. I've probably put in a couple hundred hours of work into it. I put 5-6 more just today trying to learn Cloudflared tunnels to open my Jellyfin server to the web. But I might try my AI server next.
How many hours did it take you to set everything up?
I have a synology NAS, so the basic setup for just cloud storage comes almost out of the box. 2 hours maybe (because I like to tinker, could be faster)
How much did you eventually spend for everything combined?
Around $6000 for me, but it's quite the extravagant setup.
What are the running costs?
I didn't have to replace anything so far, so it's really just the electricity cost (But I don't even know what my total eletricity bill is, so no idea how much the NAS added).
How much space does it gobble up?
270 mm x 300 mm x 340 mm for mine, so really quite compact. Currently sits at the edge of my desk.
How loud is it?
The fan isn't louder than any other desktop PC but you get a lot of HDD noise. Doesn't bother me since I use headphones most of the time, but even without them I could just put it in another room. But you probably don't want to set it up in the bedroom.
Backup/redundancy plan?
I have 3-2-1 backup for my important data (only couple of TB), but no backup for the media library so far. But the raid6 setup with a hot spare should keep it reasonably safe from single disk faliures. I'm thinking about adding a UPS, but our energy grid is really stable and power outages are super rare, so it's not a high priority.
Internet connection good enough (upload speed)?
Yeah, currently only 100mbit up, that's quite limiting but enough for what I use it at the moment. I might be able to upgrade to 1gbps upload later this year, fingers crossed.
0b.
Dedicated, of course. Technically some of my private info is stored who knows where.
None
I have probably four terabytes of cloud storage and I use probably four megabytes of it
- I don't have anything important enough to pay for.
If all my HDDs and SSDs died tomorrow apart from the inconvenience of buying new ones it would probably be a blessing to get rid of junk files from 2006 that maybe I want to save for some reason.
I pay for 2tb on iCloud, but that is mostly for my family, I sync my files with syncthing but I only have like 400gb available like that
For important data, I have around 100 GB in an AWS bucket, all encrypted backups (moved away from Dropbox a few years back). It costs me about €5 or 6 per month. Thinking about moving them to a European provider, though not sure where to as yet. Less important data stay local on external disks.
I've got Idrive backups at 5TB for like $5 a month or something.
el cheapo interneto when you're not rich:
4G router at home, data capped (350 GB for 10€) so I had to be creative.
For non urgent downloads I use an Oracle free tier server: 200 GB. I retrieve the files when I have access to a fiber connection. Also acts as a small seedbox. Completely free but can be reclaimed by Oracle at any moment.
150 GB on Filen for sharing stuff (one time purchase)
A small 40 GB VPS for syncing smaller files like my notes, passwords, some files on Nextcloud ... also for Wallabag and a few other services.
I run my own nextcloud at home with several TB free on raidz. So no need to pay a foreign service for that.
Unlimited, but with reduced upload speed after 5TB. It's Jottacloud for €119 per year. I use it with rclone which lets me encrypt everything myself so I don't have to trust the provider.
About 19 GB on Google Drive, free account. 20 GB on Tuta, I believe, paid. Also a free account on Mega, 20 GB. More than enough for me.
(Actually I'm on a trial run of Google One 2 TB tier that came free with my Pixel 9 Pro, but I'm cancelling that when the time comes.)
A couple of 5GB chunks from Proton and 5GB from my Apple account. I also have a couple more GBs from my free Outlook account but I don’t really use it to store sensitive info.
uhh none other than free (in price) google drive on a few gmails, but i dont use it.
i might eventually pay for cloud storage (when i can afford an option that won't use my data in ways i dont want it to be used) for backups. for now i do backups on my devices with syncthing. it would be wise to have some backup storage in a different location, though.
On Nextcloud, 6TB available but I'm only using about 100GB. Google, Dropbox, and iCloud are all free tier, don't use them much.
Personal: 2TB on iCloud shared with the family. I’m, by far, taking up the most space at 160GB.
Haven’t felt the need to use anything else. I’m still on Google too but don’t store anything new there since I have zero trust in my privacy on the service. Come to think of it, I need to remove whatever is still there and move it to iCloud.
Work: It’s all OneDrive/Sharepoint can’t remember the storage we’re given, which I don’t have control over, and don’t love. On Windows, it tends to fail to sync a folder here and there every once in a while for no apparent reason. And I absolutely hate the fact that you can’t attach a file to an Outlook email while it’s still open. Sometimes that is the best way to share it Microsoft! I wish I could use a Mac at work … sigh.
210GB on Filen (two stacked lifetime plans)
Is that possible on the same account?
Yes, plans are stackable. When I need more space I can buy another lifetime plan and it'll get added to my account.
For some reason (maybe it being called the "starter plan") I figured it was a one time thing. Good to know, thanks.
Not really. I have a Google drive, but I gradually reduce my use of it. I don't upload personal stuff there.
I have two hard drive at home that I use to sync all my information from my phone/computer to for backup (using syncthing). One day I'll pay for a fixed IP/VPN service for remote access to these drives. The two drives are in two different locations in the house.
I would like to have a drive in an additional location for backup. But I don't want it online.
I have 24TB on my own server, and another 1TB (split halfway between me and my boyfriend) that comes with a Proton account I pay for.
The 24TB was about € 200 per drive, built out over several years.
3 x 8 TB + 1 x 8 TB for parity makes about € 800 total. The other hardware was leftover computer hardware I had lying around, so in total I think the server cost me about € 1000,-
I pay € 180 / year for Proton for two people, which is € 7,50 per person per month. That includes a mail server, 1 TB cloud storage (500 GB per person), VPN, password manager, etc.
Mine is all backup space, but about 6TB between iDrive and B2. Works out to around $15/month total.
3 GDrive accts, 2 Dropbox accts, 2 Nextcloud instances, Zoho, and a free CDN.
1 TB active, 2 TB Backup on my own storage and 2 TB Backup remote on internxt (lifetime plan).
Before being overly excited about their lifetime offerings (and discounts on such) getting the backups running reliably was a pain up until their last webdav update, so I would consider them with caution. Also I'm not sure they do another round discounts on their plans... at least their marketing mails said it was the last chance - but hey, that also might be a strategy to make you buy in.
1 TB.
6.9Gb on my Dropbox
Like 20GB of Pictrs data on Exoscale, then about 30GB of pictures from my phone on the same provider.
I have two separate nextcloud servers and pay around 14€ a month for the remote one. The home one costs me like 20€ a month just in electricity, not to mention the 500€ hdds and the administration time invested.
Going cheapo on cloud storage shows me that people dont care about the world they live in. Every cloud account thats below 5-10 €$ for like max 50 GBs is cheaper than it costs to run them. Its just a way for large companies to destroy small companies who could actually provide a decent service.
I mean, feel free to prove me wrong but please spare me the capital apologist stance.
Of course, just another backup location should not be that expensive but a nextcloud is something very different.
2TB on Mega but thinking of switching to Nextcloud. 18TB (2 18TB drives striped mirrored) locally in my NAS, saving for 2 more
8TB on my own NAS.