Cheapest way to upgrade pool, Cloud or HDD?

[DevilNAS]

Hi everyone,

I would like to know your opinion about this matter.
A this moment I have a pool with 2x6TB HDD Mirror but I want to upgrade it to 6x6TB RaidZ2. As I need to create a new pool with the 6 drives, I would like to know what, in your opinion, is the best way and cheapest to backup my data for the new pool.

For now the plan would be to use Replication Task into a HDD or a Cloud Service.

The cloud that I found looks cheap but I would like to know your opinion and if you ever done anything similar.

Now I have this following ways to backup:

1. Replicate my pool to a Cloud Service, like Wasabi.com which looks cheap, destroy the old one and create a new pool with all the drives. Considering this would cost 40$ and internet speed is 100MB upload, this would be a good choice?
2. Buy a new HDD, remove one HDD from Mirror pool, add 6 drives to a new pool and Replication Task between old pool (with one HDD) to the new one. This looks simple but the cost will be a new HDD for 150$ and will be just use for spare or sell it.
3. Buy an external HDD, backup my pool and then create a new pool. This will maybe cost the same as the last point.

In your opinion, what would you think is better and why?

Thank you in advance!

 

[sretalla]

Between 2 and 3, consider 3 and shuck the drive after (or even before), that's typically much cheaper.

A cloud replication task is a perfectly fine way to keep your data temporarily (or permanently) backed up as long as you like the price.

Depending on the cloud, they tend to charge little (or even nothing) for ingress (bandwidth), but it really costs you to get the data back out again... Wasabi seems to be claiming it's free for egress.

If you're keeping data in the longer term, it makes more sense to self-host from a cost perspective... you're paying something like 30-50% more per year than you would pay up-front for the disks to own for maybe 4-6 years of storage (which is sort-of fair, since the cloud providers usually oblige themselves to keep at least 3 copies of your data in their cloud locations to cover hardware and even location failure, whereas you would only have a few disks of fault tolerance and have nothing if your hous burns down with the server in it).

An Ironwolf 20TB costs around $580 (I know, probably a lot less for those in the USA)... if I wanted 60TB of storage, that would mean buying 5 of them to run in RAIDZ2... you could say 6 to be fair and leave yourself the headroom to actually consume 60TB... that's $3'480.

To have 60TB available in Wasabi, they are quoting $4'312 per year.

Run that for 5 years (assuming no need to replace any drives) and it just saved you $18'080

And to be fair to Wasabi (it seems a very fair cloud provider in terms of price), the cheapest competitor of theirs (Microsoft Azure), would have cost you $15'336... per year!... that's if you didn't even download a single MB of it...

So self hosting saves you at least $73'200 (and a hell of a lot more if you wanted to download/use and of that data... just 2% of download per month would take that to $16'515 per year)

 

[DevilNAS]

Thank you for your reply!

In the future, maybe next year, I am planning to create a second machine for backup. For now I was thinking on using Wasabi for just one month to perform the pool upgrade. After that I would never use it again and cancel my subscription.

About privacy, this services are trust worthy? I am asking because I do not have my pools encrypted.

 

[sretalla]

About privacy, this services are trust worthy? I am asking because I do not have my pools encrypted.

I don't know a lot about Wasabi other than what I see on their website. They seem to be claiming compliance to Data privacy laws, so your local jurisdiction may cause that to be a little different depending on where that is... https://wasabi.com/compliance/

I know that Azure, AWS and Google all have Data Privacy agreements as part of their terms of service.

Encrypted pools don't help you in that case anyway as only ZFS replication would cause the cloud replica to have an encrypted copy present and I don't see that as an option in Wasabi unless their Cloud hosted NAS is ZFS capable and will work with a replication task.

In any case, if it's temporary and you use sufficiently complex passwords to protect your account and only use secure protocols to connect (cloud sync tasks support both secure and insecure protocols, so watch out for that), it should be fine.