In home scenarios, you usually care about documents, pictures a few specific videos and some music above everything else. This tends to be a fraction of the total capacity. The rest doesn't change very often and is not such a loss but tends to be quite huge in comparison. So to backup all documents and pictures one or two external drives and/ or a cloud backup is sufficient.
Personally, for some important documents I use orgpad.com which I help build. I am personally responsible for the infrastructure - so the backups actually have at least three tiers, independent providers etc. That is just a side effect of having a SaaS platform with a reasonable and contactable team behind it.
Targets:
1. That NAS off in the corner built from an old desktop.
2. rsync.net and similar.
3. your encrypted cloud backup service of choice, through an adapter.
If the value of your data is less than the cost to protect it, you know it is disposable, you just wish it weren't.
These 2 solutions cost less than 10 USD/month: Jottacloud [1] and zfs.rent [2]. The former is even hosted in privacy-friendly Norway, and its 5 TB unlimited with going over that you get upload-capped. So I pay 90 EUR/year for Jottacloud. Which is approx 10% of your projected 1000 USD.
zfs.rent is an interesting model, though quite beta and currently not accepting users. And those prices add up pretty fast. Let's say you want to back up about 4 drives of data. That's $960 a year for the first two years, then $480 a year after. Or if you want any redundancy at all, $1200/$600. You'd probably want to find your own cheaper box to stuff hard drives into, and at that point you're far gone from "cloud".
2. You can build a 8TBx4+2 raidz2 with EasyStores for $720. Backing that up to a raidz1 zfs.rent is $1200 for a single year. $2500 for 3 years by prepurchasing the drives.
An estimate of $1000/year for full cloud backups isn't wrong.
If I had an amount of 24 TB to back up I'd buy my own server and harddisks, and I'd physically set that server up at work or at home. Then, travel to the data center (I live in Amsterdam Area, so enough choice) and put the server there, again, physically. No need to "upload 24 TB".
RAIDZ et al. is about availability. Which makes sense for businesses, but for personal data an offsite backup makes more sense. I'd just go with a mirror of 2 different disks, with different serial numbers (ie. different orders).
But using that pricing, 24TB with Jottacloud would be 450 EUR/year, which is still on the order of $1000. The larger point is that disk sizes are always growing, and while 24TB may seem unnecessary to you, it's very easy to build an array that is cumbersome to backup. And IME this has remained true for the past two decades.
You're right that the cost effective way of performing large backups seems to be just buying another array and hosting it somewhere offsite. But that still doubles your array cost, and so is not something to be done lightly.
FWIW personal users want availability too, unless rebuilding arrays from scratch is your hobby. A simple mirror is a form a raid, which you can only get away with if your storage requirements can be taken care of by a single spindle. If that's where you are, fantastic. But that doesn't describe most home ZFS users.
So for 24TB you would use two accounts, assuming they're fine with that, and your uploads would run at 5Mbps per thread, with 12 threads in parallel.
That will let you upload 100GB every 4 hours, which should be enough. And the total cost would be 180EUR/year, which is pretty far from $1000.
https://www.cloudwards.net/backblaze-pricing/
It does sound good. :)
Its also just the first backup which takes a (long) while. If you got only 10 mbit upload, then you're able to upload 600 mbit per minute, or 36000 mbit per hour. Which is about 4500 mB/hour (or ~4,4 GB/hour). Which results in 108000 mB/day (or ~105 GB/day). Its about 3/4 of a TB a week.
I'm glad I got 30+ mbit upload with my VDSL2. My first backups took ages (I got 5 TB with Jottacloud). First I thought it was Duplicati being slow with regards to cryptography or being .NET, but nope that ain't it.
Incremental backups during night are not going to hamper the connection though.
That's best case. Anyone who's done large transfers over the internet knows reality will be much worse.
The point is that home users can have good reasons for relying on redundancy.
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
I only have a few TB, but the setup cost almost $1000 (it is less than half full), and it will take longer than I expect the hardware to last to spend $1000 on backups.
But it's still $4/month/TB or $48/TB-Year. Assuming a two 10TB drives are $300 each (actually can get them for less than $200) and last 5 years or warranty expires. ($300*2 drives /5 years / 10 TB = $12/TB-Year). So AWS glacier is still ~4x the cost of buying physical drives with RAID 1 and keeping them at a friends house.
Honestly if there is any cloud storage that trades resiliency for price that would be awesome. As long as the cloud storage can tell me if any of the storage has been corrupted/lost, I'd except a 10% yearly failure rate. If my home raid is 95% and the cloud is 90% then I have an effective yearly data loss of only 0.5%.
It can be expensive, so perhaps just prioritise what you actually need instead of backing up LATEST.MOVIE.2020.Remux.r250
Keep personal media metadata and download it again, maybe, but back it up?
Better still, only store what you’ll watch and delete it.
I only backup scans of truly useful legal documents, photos go to the cloud.
Everything contemporary, disposable pop culture is “backed up” online from my perspective.
Eh? We're talking ZFS here. Built-in atomic low cost snapshots are part of the core feature set. If we're talking using a pool and backing up another pool it's a reasonable baseline assumption that one would be using either their own or one of the many mature scripts to have regular automatic snapshots and retention schedule. Ie., once every 10 min for a day, once an hour for a week or two, once a week for a year, and monthly thereafter (or whatever fits your use case), along with preservation of any manual custom snapshots. I mean, it's right there, for free.
I know. Doesn't change the fact there exist no sensible way to backup a decently sized pool in a home-user scenario.
Now we might disagree on what is sensible. And some things might not need a backup.