Cloud storage for 8TB of music files on an external HD

My attitude towards the cloud and personal data is fairly relaxed. First of all, one are so much more secure in an Apple environment than in a google environment (browsing / phone). It’s not funny. I am boring.  if you want to be somewhat secure, you need to be in an all Apple environment. Unless you are completely in a corporate secured Microsoft environment… and very few people are. Virtually anything you do in Google messaging emails all that stuff gets read and forward to databases some of it in summary form some of it specifically.

I was at Harvard for a seminar in 1989. They were demonstrating the advantage of UNIX. They asked one of the participants what their name was and their address from that within 15 seconds they told the group his phone numbers how much he owed on his house, where he worked, who his neighbors were,  how much they owed on their houses. Are you aWhat their cars were, their loan values. This was all available online in 1989 and the databases that are currently available on all your purchases and preferences are incredible so what are you hiding?  You certainly wanna make sure that any brokerage accounts and bank account accounts are very secure, use the double authentication always check your emails for unauthorized withdrawals. But other than that who cares if you got recipes from aunt Jane and why would they hack it?

Also, the thing you most have to worry about is what doje just did. By connecting the five governmental databases. They now know everything from what benefits you receive and have ever received, where you work,  how much money you make, what your party affiliations,  comments you made in Facebook or messages you sent to friends. There are no secrets. Within a few minutes, I could take that data and make a prioritize list by partee affiliation, what you’ve said on-line anywhere, where you live, how much you make, your health problems, etc. and do bad things with it.  I am a boring retired person so I suspect nobody cares.

Now, if one wants to be real OCD an offsite backup is needed. Having multiple copies in the same location means they all are gone if a fire, etc occurs. Find a trusted friend/neighbor with a safe. Make a set of backups and ask them to keep in their safe.

I backed up my website, code and database to a couple of thumb drives. Since by 2 friends are gun guys they have safes. They now each have a thumbdrive.

3 levels of storage. Son is working copy. Father is backup. Grandfather is offsite.

[[a reliable SSD for a somewhat similar price so why would I pay $48 a month forever]]

Just be sure to park your backup drive some other location than where the "live" data lives.  Otherwise a fire, flood, even electrical anomaly (if the backup drive is connected) could easily wipe out both the live data and the "backup".

I agree with most of what ghdprentice says.  Some of the other responses I have some concerns with.  I'm a former software engineer who enjoys commercial-grade computer systems in his house, and I have a hobby in collecting electronic data (including digital audio).

I use Backblaze's various service for my home computers.  I use their unlimited data services (which is about $90/yr for a 2-year plan, or under $8/month).  This is what you likely want for your situation.  It works fine, and with a check of a box in the settings app you can choose any external hard drives to back up.  I back up a similar amount of data on my Mac with digital photography files on an external 8TB SSD.  I'm not sure where you're getting $48/month, and where you see that it doesn't back up external drives.  I've been a loyal customer of Backblaze for several years now and haven't encountered a single hiccup with them.

I also make use of Backblaze's B2 service, which allows you to use the cloud storage space as your see fit, with my Linux server.  I use Duplicacy as my backup software to Backblaze B2, but there are a number of choices (Restic, etc).  With this you can choose your own encryption key, so even the most paranoid about computer security can relax here, as the data is stored in a fully encrypted state.  The pricing for this is more complex, and is related to the number of transactions and the amount of storage used.

A few comments relating to some of the answers above:

* Local and off-site backups are a must.  (Cloud storage counts as off-site.) I keep backup hard drives at my office at work, so a house fire/flood/theft/etc can be restored quickly with the drives in the office.  I rotate 3 different backup drives so that two are at my house and one is at the office.  I also have Backblaze for my cloud backups, and my partial restore tests have been completely successful.

* If you're going to store data at a friend's house, safe deposit box, etc use a hard drive (not SSD).  SSD's/thumb drives don't hold data without being powered on periodically as well as HDD's, as ghdprentice mentions.  After 6 months or so the probability of a solid state device having perfect data retention starts to drop.  Besides, HDD's are cheaper on a per-TB basis.

* Someone mentioned RAID as a backup.  RAID is not a backup.  It is a mechanism for allowing large amounts of storage and the ability to tolerate the loss of of one drive (RAID5) or two drives (RAID6).  It does not protect against accidental deletion, malware, etc.

* Honestly, if I were starting this hobby right now I would probably subscribe to a couple streaming services and call it a day.  That said, I enjoy the concept of owning the data, and I do well at managing it, so having Roon play things that I want to focus on is really neat.  Of course, if we've made investments in CD's, SACD's, and digital downloads for decades and have spent a lot of time and effort organizing them into our digital collection, then there's a valid argument to just continue it.

Hang in there, and spend the effort to safeguard your data.  Data storage has never been faster or cheaper, so take advantage of the exponential improvements over the past few decades.  

Michael

Sufentenil (you must be an anesthesiologist),

"I use Backblaze's various service for my home computers.  I use their unlimited data services (which is about $90/yr for a 2-year plan, or under $8/month).  This is what you likely want for your situation.  It works fine, and with a check of a box in the settings app you can choose any external hard drives to back up."

I have this very BB service and I check the box to include my HDD in the backup, but it doesn't back it up and their website states this:  

"Network Drives and NAS

Network-mounted drives, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, remotely mounted computers or volumes, and shared volumes are currently excluded from Backblaze Computer Backup. However, you can back up network drives using Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage."

Is an HDD included in the above exclusions?  This I need to figure out because in spite of checking all the boxes, it doesn't back up my HDD. (Their customer service is among the worst I have encountered!) What it does backup it does at snail's pace... it took weeks to back up a mere 500 GB on my Mac mini and at that pace it would take an eternity to back up my 8 TB of music on my HDD!  

Other issues thoughtfully addressed.  I agree that most music that one has in their collection of CD's is available on the myriad streaming services and I am happy with Tidal Hifi.  But, carefully curated CD's that one owns might be want to be backed up for play via Roon, etc.  Some years ago, I ripped all my CD's to my HDD and play everything back via my computer via Roon and a DAC for playback.  My 2100 SACD recordings are not available at that level of density on any streaming services.

Another other issue is local storage and I note conflicting points of view if an external HDD or SDD is preferred.  I was surprised to find that SSD's might not be as robust I assumed.  I have several Seagate et. al. HDD's that failed... I just expect them to fail.  I already have my music files backed on two HDD's, but seldom turn them on which seems necessary for their vitality.

I will see if I can figure out how to get BB to backup my HDD and will report back and will hold off on purchasing a SSD.  Thanks for all your input.