Figuring out personal cloud storage

Millennials are probably the first generation to have the majority of their life online. I'm a 1990 baby and got my first laptop around age 14. I went to a high school called High Tech High so of course I had to play the part.

I remember getting my first Gmail address, back when Gmail was an invite-only system. Crazy! Anyway, I've naturally accumulated several gigs of photos and documents over the past 20 years.

I recently left my job and with my time off I've decided to optimize how I'm storing photos and documents.

Initially I thought I was being robbed blind by Dropbox. $10/month for 2TB! Forever! What a racket. But as I went down the path of self-storage¹ I realized that $10 is a pittance to pay for basically a 99.999% uptime and I'm not even scratching the surface of 2TB of data. So I quickly resubscribed to Dropbox.

Last year I signed up for Google Photos because the search and organization functionality is so good. Creating albums, tagging people, etc. Plus they are coming out with a lot of AI editing features which is nice. That currently costs $19.99/year for 100GB but I'll need to upgrade soon since I'm at 75% of my limits.

tl;dr: My all in cloud storage costs right now are about ~$140/year.

How do I determine what gets stored where →

There might be an argument for killing Dropbox entirely and going with Google, but I do like how they handle document storage. I did a quick search on Reddit and it seems like people generally prefer Dropbox over Google Drive for document storage so I think I'll keep both for the foreseeable future.

¹ The self-storage thing is truly hilarious. I bought a 5TB HD on Amazon for ~$160 and was planning on downloading everything to that and canceling the Dropbox plan. But all my research kept reminding me that I'd need to budget in time to check on the files, transfer to a new HD over the years, etc. My friend is a professional photographer and she said, "It's not if an external drive fails, it's when."

I then thought, "Oh maybe I should use something like S3 because that's really cheap and I really don't need my files that often." But this is insanity because I don't have an AWS account, a database, etc.

Basically, I was doing a bunch of mental gymnastics to save…how much? Literally $11.66 a month?

Given that I just spent the past 3 years of my career at Vercel where we had a version of this conversation with customers everyday (managed vs. self-managed infra) I was cackling to myself that I went on this mental journey.