I would like to know how would the full benefit of unlimited storage look like. When my write rate is somewhat less than Google is adding new storage then I am definitely not taking the full benefit. So how large can be the cap between these?
Frankly I'd love to have some type of Google/Dropbox VFS where I could store unlimited TB's of my movies connected to my kodi player and it would just transparently pull the file down like you can do with Dropbox Enterprise, vs. keeping my NAS backup in Glacier Deep Archive.
The issue is it would cost 100+$/month to keep it in regular S3, and I'm sure Google is losing money on other folks importing TBs of data to their unlimited service unfortunately.
It mounts your Google Drive as a read only FUSE-style filesystem, so that programs can read from your unlimited storage. It was designed to be used with plex, but Kodi works just as well.
I need to backup ~25 TB, and still even with B2 that is $0.005 * 25,000 = $125.00. All near-realtime backup solutions IMO are too expensive at scale for a home user.
The only thing I've found that is a good price is Glacier Deep Archive which is just $1.00/TB, but the only downside is you have to wait ~12-24 hours for a restore.
The main downside to deep archive is the insane amount of money you will have to pay to get data out of it. They are not very transparent about how much it costs, the retrieval fees aren't bad but the egress fees are killer.
Oh for sure, all egress at $0.09 is still frankly a rip-off and the one thing I do see AWS doing to keep people locked in.
If this cheap storage class allowed for real-time reads I'd just store all my data on s3 and mount it via some kind of fuse filesystem and never restore it all for $5000, just stream on demand the movies / mp3s I randomly want to watch and would likely be cheaper in the long run than owning a big nas with hard drives.
Why not just add a second NAS with 25TB and call it a day?
2 x 16TB disks = $600
4 bay NAS = $300
That would give you cost you 15$/month (over the 5 year hdd life) for 32TB of data, or $0.50/TB/month with super fast loading in event of failure, no egress costs and headway to grow to 64TB if you need it.
Honestly I'd like to not have a NAS at all anymore. I moved from a 4k sqft house to an 800 sqft apartment with a ton of hard drives (I've had this reliable 14 disc tower for years so it has a mix of HD's that could be consolidated if I wanted), so having a NAS sitting in my small closet already is a bit annoying. I'd rather not have anything like that around anymore and just be able to stream from s3 would be great, especially if I want to move across the country / world again and don't have to worry about hardware.
The FULL benefit of unlimited storage is probably the whole world having free access to any form of media in one enormous shared archive, like an unlimited library of all things. Or maybe I'm not thinking big enough.
Just a tip, that limit is applied at the API level in a way that allows you to create limitless GCP Service Accounts and bypass that limit by manually granting them access to your Google Drive shares. I was able to upload ~6TB of data in about 2.5 days on a gigabit connection after discovering this.
I would like to know how would the full benefit of unlimited storage look like. When my write rate is somewhat less than Google is adding new storage then I am definitely not taking the full benefit. So how large can be the cap between these?