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

As much as cloud services provide convenience and expansion for file backup, I don't want to be tethered to any particular data company. And nearly every large tech company, including Apple, leverages Amazon Web Services. This includes cloud storage. At the end of the day, if you want convenience and like to pay a monthly fee then go with cloud storage and hope it remains "forever" during your lifetime. I prefer having my digital music files on a disc drive for the music I've bought over the years. I also have music that is not on streaming services. 

And when the internet goes down, so does your access to your files. It happens all the time. 

The upside of having your music stored on drives at home is that you'll never lose access to them, and the upfront cost of storage is minimal. Keeping it simple is key. Get a cloud back-up for convenience and a physical drive backup for peace of mind or just go with the largest drives you can afford and give yourself room to grow if you're still buying music like I do.  Not all artists release to streaming and I have a lot artists I listen to whose catalogs are incomplete on streaming so buying digital or physical formats is the only option if I want that release in my collection. 

Both professionally and personally, I've been moving away from cloud storage - I've been a paying Dropbox user for 15 years but now, they've (IMHO) lost the plot in terms of basic functionality and performance, so am in the process of ditching them. Google Drive is a complete resource hog, has poor OS-level integration and has been demonstrated to corrupt certain types of file (especially multi-part zip files). iCloud made a poor start years ago, but I now use that for core household and collaboration. We're also heavily focussed on reducing dependency on US-owned or controlled services.

I now run a RAID5 Thunderbolt array on the house LAN. Usually used indirectly through each machine synching to it, so we're not dependent on network/server performance. I run Roon server on a Mac Mini with an external NVME SSD for local content - that backs itself up to the RAID array and the server does daily incremental backups to Google Glacier storage, using the very excellent Arqbackup package. That costs pennies and provides coverage against disaster. For my photo editing, I use a Thunderbolt 4 NVME-based DAS connected to my MacBook Pro. 

I use Tailscale for external access and to create site-to-site VPNs for collaboration.

On the Mac/Win/Linux side, I've had a long career in technology and strategy consultancy, from working in the field in the mountains of Central Africa to advising major global corporates, as well as wrangling infrastructure and devops for my own startups. It may be indicative that the companies I've worked for or owned have always used Macs as their core systems, due to their greater productivity, reliability and lower management overhead - that's been true for 40 years now and, with the (albeit imperfect) Apple multi-device ecosystem, remains just as relevant today.

On the music playout side, I've compared MacOS, *nix and Windows-based playout and generally found the Macs to be most reliable and have the lowest induced noise (every Windows machine I've tried introduces some level of noise). That said, if I were still using HQPlayer extensively, I'd consider hosting that on an x64 architecture system - its architecture is better optimised for the Intel/AMD instruction sets than the ARM RISC architecture. As it is, my current DAC doesn't benefit from the manipulations of HQP, so I've set that aside for the moment.

HTH…

I would suggest you look at either CrashPlan or Sync.com. Both offer unlimited storage for a flat monthly fee. CrashPlan WILL backup the information on your NAS. I have approx 4TB of music and movies and I'm paying $10 per month for that. Hope this helps.

I appreciate all your responses, which of course do not coalesce into the "best" solution. My enmity towards the customer service with Backblaze has hit a new peak with their multi-page instructions to get my HDD backed up, all hieroglyphics to me.  I am dumping them and backing up the files with a Seagate 8TB HDD.  I will set a schedule to run up the "spinning"  part of the drive monthly and store it in my safe.   Problem solved for me, the third backup of my files.  Great thread, at any rate, so I thank all who provided such informative advice which might well be of interest to others, too.  I have several friends who have zero backup of their digital files. 

By the way, my last upload to BB was at an appalling .3 MBPS while my fiber internet service rages at 1000 mbps.  I imagine I will download my 8T of music onto the Seagate HDD in a few hours where it would take weeks and weeks to do so with BB.