> It is 100% worth the extra $ if you plan on subscribing for a loong time anyway
I think many people forget about this. They pay for a monthly or yearly cloud storage subscription, but forget they have to pay this amount every year for the rest of their lifes if they want to keep their data. That's why I also use a Synology disk. I also have an additional lifetime subscription at a cloud storage provider (which pays back within 3.5 years). Sure they can disappear after say 10 years, but at least I have the Synology and I got a much better deal during those 10 years and can look for something else.
Another thing, don't upload all pics you take immediately, only sync after you have cleaned out all the bad photos and near duplicates.
To be fair, the underlying storage of the synology won't last forever. A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one, about ten years, as far as I know. You also need to pay for the electricity necessary to keep your server running 24/7, if you want a service level equivalent to a cloud storage service. All this adds up. The scales will probably stay in favor of the self-hosting options, but you have to take all this into account for a fair comparison.
> A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one, about ten years, as far as I know.
It's unlikely that people are using SSDs for the main storage on a NAS though, commonly just used for smaller parts (think metadata in ZFS-land for example), not for the main storage. Precisely for that reason.
My point is regarding writes specifically. A HDD can typically survive longer than a SSD if they were both to receive the same amount of writes over time.
SSDs use flash memory cells, which have a limited amount of writes you can do to them before they start to fail. Compared to magnetic disks in HDDs that don't have a finite lifetime of writes.
If you are mostly reading data, then no worries, probably won't affect you. But NASs typically gets a lot of writes, so you want something more durable than SSDs (in terms of writes).
The ones in my QNAP lasted at least 12 years. I replaced it just recently. The only durable storages are acid free paper and microfiche afaik. And you need a controlled climate.
RAID is only useful as long as you don't suffer more simultaneous disk failures than you've provisioned for (where "simultaneous" is dependent on your time-to-repair, since if it takes you a week to replace a dead drive, then two failures in the same week are indistinguishable from two failures in the same minute, in that you've lost the entire array).
That's why I suggested replacing at most 2 disks at the same time. But you could just one extra year and replace all of them one by one.
Or you can just use some dumb & cheap storage backend (in the cloud) as an extra backup layer, which you can easily replace at any moment if costs go wild or it goes bankrupt, without having to change the user experience.
Right. It's possible to stagger your replacements so as to avoid bad batches, or even to buy from different vendors for additional diversity (although for SSDs you have much more divergent performance characteristics), but when you're talking about rotating disks one at a time that's a lot of non-negligible overhead.
Depending on how much data you have to archive and frequency of access, it may very well be worth the cost to entirely offload opex and capex to cloud storage.
AWS Glacier Deep Archive in us-east-1 is $1/TB/month (GCP and Azure offer comparable pricing for archival storage). If you have 5x 4TB SSDs that, say, run you $200 each, and you run RS(5,3) then you're storing 12TB of data for $1000 of capex for 5-10 years. Meanwhile AWS would set you back $144/year, so the breakeven on capex alone would be if you would normally rotate your disks every 7 years.
Yes, but Glacier won't let you and your family browse easily and nicely photos and video safely stored, as Immich (or similars) does. It's a mix of Capex+opex+user experience+freedom of choice.
And yes, my wife regularly looks at photos from 3,4,5 years ago, or older.
Which is why I mentioned frequency of access. For backup purposes, archival storage might be good enough, but if you're looking for an alternative for frequently accessed content (along the vein of whatever Google Photos replacement) then most clouds will charge you at least an order of magnitude more (even Backblaze would use most of the entire proposed capex budget within a year).
But you might still have some value in using Glacier for archival purposes and having somewhat less resilient local copies (e.g. only being able to tolerate a single disk failure, or even just JBOD).
Either way, your current approach clearly works for your circumstances, even though it'd be too fiddly for me personally.
To be fair: my current approach is Immich saving photos on a single external USB SSD disk (1TB) plus daily backup on Backblaze (approx 5$/month). To maintain the same setup on Gphotos I would be paying radically more (obviously now I'm "paying" with the risk of a lower MTBF)
But I want to upgrade to a homemade multi-disks NAS just for the fun.
5 disks every 7 year on average have a cost (today) of 80/90$ per disk of 1TB. A 2TB Google One plan is 10$/month. In 7 years will be 720$ vs 450$. Yes you need to factor in the rest of hardware as well (but you can also use it for other things). So self-hosting is probably a bit more expensive but not that much, and you keep your data with you.
In any case a NAS with 5 disks is probably overkill for family photos and videos, a single disk or at most a RAID0 with 2 disks over a RPi5 will be enough for many people and way way cheaper than a 2TB plan, but obviously you need to know how to and like to self-host
This doesn't sound like a fair comparison for this product. It's true about most subscription services, but if you are ok with 50 GB, then 50 years of storage will cost you $1500, which is pretty much a cost of single Synology station with some drives, WITHOUT amortization cost, if you consider that your drives are not forever and probably need backups anyway. Of course, you'll store much more on a NAS, but if your onlt problem is subscription cost, you don't gain anything by switching to Synology.
I personally am considering Ente right now, since having E2EE Google Photos sounds actually pretty cool, despite the fact I have a NAS (a Synology NAS, for that matter). However, my reasons to not using the NAS as you could are different: this is really the place where I store everything, so I prefer having it accessible from local network only. Not sure how you guys feel safe putting something like Synology on the open internet. (Also, I currently don't run it 24/7 anyway, but that's for different reasons, which I hope will become obsolete when I find a better place for the NAS at home.)
I think many people forget about this. They pay for a monthly or yearly cloud storage subscription, but forget they have to pay this amount every year for the rest of their lifes if they want to keep their data. That's why I also use a Synology disk. I also have an additional lifetime subscription at a cloud storage provider (which pays back within 3.5 years). Sure they can disappear after say 10 years, but at least I have the Synology and I got a much better deal during those 10 years and can look for something else.
Another thing, don't upload all pics you take immediately, only sync after you have cleaned out all the bad photos and near duplicates.