And what is the best option when both cost-effectiveness and time are factored in: Encrypted files into a mainstream/cheap cloud, or is it saner at that point to do a private-by-design cloud and call it a day?
Monthly, Yearly, or Lifetime subscriptions?
Subscriptions are spooky when you aren’t financially independent, yet.
Currently must deal with hundreds of GBs, growing by a few dozen GB per year.
Whatever you do, you’ll be fine by following the 3-2-1 backup policy. Trusting just 1 provider is terrible practice since its just 1 source of failure and the cloud is just someone else computer with tos you need to agree and abide with. The tos can change arbitrarily.
Those “lifetime” deals are also very vague. They never specifically state whos lifetime it is; lifetime of you, lifetime of the company, lifetime of their ceo, lifetime of a fruitfly etc. If they pull the rug a week after you register its still technically a lifetime of a fruitfly and they’ll get away with it.
Koofr has some great prices for all the storage space they offer. If affordability is important, then I have only found Koofr to be the best option. Plus, their vault is open source based on RClone. But you can always use Cryptomator with the service. They are pro Cryptomator themselves. You can also buy their subscriptions privately/anonymously.
It’s quite a lot. I don’t know your specific needs but or if this is for an entire family but before considering any cloud option I would advise to try to reduce storage needs which I find it’s sometimes not well managed.
For instance shooting and uploading 50mpx snapshots from phones. Just reducing to 12mpx size in the photo settings got me enormous space savings and it’s still more than enough quality even for printing needs. Videos in 4k could follow the same logic.
Usually media files are those that take the most storage space.
Also regularly deleting double or bad shots helps quite a lot.
If it doesn’t need to be regularly accessible from multiple devices, I would get something like a 2tb-4tb HDD and back the stuff up to there. I’m not sure you can find a cloud service that your not going to have to pay every month. If you can setup self-hosting, you can turn your own HDD into a cloud like device. You could buy one pretty cheap on ebay and wouldn’t have to pay anyone every month.
FYI these are often for the lifetime of the service. Some such as you see Mashable promoting from stack social are often unknown or may not last as long or will come up with reasons to close your account due to having a sustainable income.
I would just look for the cheapest provider you can find and then use a third party tool to encrypt, such as cryptomator.
Depending on use case, backup solutions tend to be cheaper then general cloud storage. For example Backblaze is $99/year with no restrictions on file type or size.
Filen offers 2TB for 9€/month, or 500GB for 4€ if that’s sufficient.
Borgbase has 1TB for ~70€ per year, but that’s a backup (encrypted) not standard cloud storage
Hetzner has storagebox for 3,2€/month + VAT for 1TB. It’s not encrypted, so you would have to use cryptomator, or hope they won’t have data breach, if you keep sensitive files.
I think that’s very sound advice, thank you!
Lots of what you said is very true. Though, it is the first time I’ve heard that this is generally consider a lot. I suppose it’s not far-fetched, because I am having trouble managing my storage, after all. I wonder if others are willing to weigh in?
I’m curious what the difference is between backup solutions and general cloud storage! It’s been brought up a few times here now.
I am gonna get some fire for saying this but I opted to use Microsoft 365 Small business plan.
It has no MS Office but only a OneDrive storage of 1TB and ability to add custom domain. The no Teams plan is more cheap compared to normal one. It’s 4.75 per user/month for 1TB storage.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business#xd101b2dd1ce34617ac94bc768ed83c52
Access patterns certainly are. For example for backups AWS S3’s Glacier Deep Archive is extremely cheap at $0.99/TB/mo, however retrieval can take up to 12 hours. They store that stuff on tapes, in a warehouse. Obviously such thing would be pretty bad for cloud storage.
If you are storing photos I would use a dedicated provider like Ente.
If you are storing other files that are just for you then I would use any storage provider + Cryptomator. I’d never pay more than $5/TB for storage like this. If you used a program like Cyberduck (which has Cryptomator built in) you could easily use more technical providers like Hetzner Storage Boxes or Backblaze B2 that will be more economical than most of the solutions that provide their own desktop app. That assumes you only need to access them on a desktop, if you want to access them on a phone you should research which providers work natively with the Cryptomator mobile app and use one of those probably.
If you are storing other files to share with other people, I would use Proton Drive or Tresorit.
Don’t buy lifetime plans.
I mean, when you’re talking about less than 1 TB like you are(?), the difference in cost between all these providers is going to be like… $1-2/month?
I have around 200 TB so the economics are a bit different 
The distinction you drew brings up a question for me. What’s the practical difference between photos and other files?
(I’m bit of a newb.)
It hasn’t been touched on in most of the reading I’ve done yet.
Some do come to mind from experience, for example, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of a versatile and uncumbersome UI for photo viewing. Features (or usually lack thereof) that get in the way of organization and searching process are painful. But I guess a breakdown by those more experienced with technology and media storage would help me before I make a poor choice in my provider, and then drag my feet for months due to exhaustion and vendor lock-in…
This:
I mean that’s the difference between all three options tbh. You can accomplish everything cheapest with the DIY approach of the second option, but for certain applications or for sharing with other people it is just useful to have things like a good gallery, search, one-click shareable links, etc.
I’m not gonna click through a bunch of folders to find photos, and I’m not gonna make someone download Cryptomator if I want to share an encrypted file with them.
Sync.com is a Canadian E2EE cloud service that starts at $5/mo for 200 GB
Similarly, Filen is a German E2EE cloud service that offers lifetime subscriptions that they run every year during Boxing Day week. You can buy from 100GB to 2TB and pay once forever.
That said, Filen is still a new service, so I would not recommend using it as your primary or only cloud backup up. The way I see it, the company should shut down at any point. I really wish them all the success and hope that they grow in popularity, especially in the privacy community.
Another important thing to know is that Filen has yet to implement global search as a feature. By this, I mean that if you have a file buried inside many subfolders or even just one subfolder, you won’t be able to find it by simply typing its name.