Jottacloud could be a useful offering, but someone considering the best way to balance many drives on a NAS and worried about spending $1000/year to back it up is probably not going to fit into a single account.

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".

What about the initial replication? My NAS is currently sitting at about 8TB used, which even at the maximum 10Mb/s upload of my current ISP (best in the area of course, because 'murika) would take 75 days. Your first link doesn't seem to say anything about alternatives for getting the initial data set to them, and your second link, well "We have queued up 200 users and have decided to close new requests for the time being. Please check back soon!" basically means it is imaginary for the time being.

Buy a second hand "enterprise" server and buy some new HDDs. Set the server up at work/home, and physically put the server at a data center near your vicinity. If you already live in USA, hosting elsewhere doesn't get you much. The problem with hosting in USA is for sensitive data for people outside of USA (EU for example).

1. "Unlimited" plans marketed for personal users are unsustainable, which is why they invariably push you into some proprietary app. Sure they might let you dump 24TB on it while they're growing, but they'll inevitably tighten that up. And a key feature of backups is long term - do you really want to be reuploading 24TB in a year or two? Look at their business pricing for the actual no-nonsense cost.

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.

It isn't "unlimited", it is "unlimited with caveat". It is 5 TB soft cap after which upload limits apply, which get progressively harsh the more you are from that 5 TB soft limit. Just like I wrote in my previous post, and as they write on their website. For me, 5 TB in a privacy-friendly country is a bargain deal. Duplicati has support for Jottacloud, and they also provide an CLI for their API.

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).

I was speaking generally. I'm glad the service fits for you, and it appears that they have setup reasonably-structured incentives.

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.

Unless you have tons of data churn or really love burst uploads, you should treat Jottacloud as roughly 15TB of capacity. Here's the speed chart: https://docs.jottacloud.com/en/articles/3271114-reduced-uplo...

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.

Thanks for taking the time to explain the details of their offering. I agree that looks well thought out and a much better value than anything else I've seen, especially for the market of personal NAS stuff we're talking about. And a quick search looks like it can be supported by Free (ie secure) backup solutions like duplicity.