Dropbox for Offsite Backup? (2021 onwards)

[chris franklin]

For a third copy (offsite back up to my onsite back up) of my video and still files (40T+), Would anyone here consider Dropbox? $US260 per year for unlimited storage. So to be clear… this back up would be for the scenario of house burning down or burglary of copies A and B, or copies A&B failing. Any reservations with this concept? (eg: privacy, hacking, dropbox company collapsing etc)

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Your post here as well as in another thread has a strange, spammy, and irrelevant link at the bottom. Are you seeing it?

[Brie Clayton]

Thank you, Neil, for pointing this out! This user is getting deleted, along with all of their back-link building replies. Some spammers are stealthier than others, but I will eventually find them!

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Chris,

The Dropbox Advanced plan you refer to, is $20 per user per month for unlimited space. That much I got from their plans page.

But there’s no indication on how much they would charge to download all that data. So, its a good safety storage for the house burning down or burglary eventuality, but when that eventuality happens, what are the options for downloading 40TB? Their page says 100GB transfer free each month, meaning would they charge if you downloaded more than 100 GB in a month? How much?

Google, Amazon, Azure, all have these ‘egress’ fees which are exorbitant when one wants those Terabytes back. I have not come across any cloud facility that charges for upload, and storage, but is free for download.

With 3.5″ hard drives available in 16TB, 18TB, even 20TB sizes, and 50TB and even 100TB drives on the horizon, it might make sense to offload those terabytes on to bare enterprise drives, maybe even make 2 sets, and store them in different places. 5 years down the road, these drives would need to be ‘migrated’ to the highest capacity available then.

$1000 gets you 5 years of Dropbox unlimited, and the same $1000 also gets you 48TB of bare hard drives (3x16TB, or 3x18TB) which are accessible any time with just a USB/TB to SATA adapter or enclosure. These drives can read and write at nearly 200 MB/sec, which is faster than the Internet that’s available anywhere.

LTO is also touted as a long term backup, but with backward compatibility with older generations getting narrower, it makes less and less sense since one would also need to keep a working LTO drive for all those years.

Neil