I second this. I can't fathom that on HN of all sites people recommend renting backup space from the same big tech companies that continuously fuck over people. Setting up a NAS is not magic. Setting up two isn't either. Put one in you parents basement and check on it once every year when you visit for Christmas. If you don't need 16TB go with an SSD (although with the current contamination situation not the best timing to buy flash).

Don't even need to be NAS, couple external HDDs work as well. Add the new videos every month or something. Keep one at work and one at home. Or in some other place. Anyone not Gen Z should be entirely familiar with process of moving files between disks.

Yup. I just buy bare drives, and have a SATA-to-USB adapter, and away we go. Although I did write my own rsync clone program to do the work (it only copies changed files).

Aren't you making it sound a bit too easy and straightforward than it actually is? It might be that simple for you but buying a NAS device like from synology can be pricey too, setting it all up so it is secure but network accessible, and then also handling possible drive failures down the line (and the chances of that are much higher than google fucking you over IMHO) is much more than an average non-tech-savvy user would be interested in.

How expensive was losing 7 years of work?

People look at the cost of properly storing the data without thinking of the cost of not doing it.

A team I was helping with was in charge of making a lot of training videos which were then used in paid classes. Several employees working at least 4 days a week shooting and editing videos. They had been keeping all their master copies on the same memory cards they used in their cameras, "backups are too expensive!". Then one of their memory cards corrupted, and I asked them to calculate the amount of salary went in to making the data on that flash card.

That afternoon a NAS was delivered with authorization to backup that to separate cloud services. Suddenly when they bothered to have that perspective the cost of a NAS was dirt cheap despite being way too expensive days before.

Maybe not really easy but it is really just due-diligence and getting a solution that is worth the money you are making by providing the service.

If you weren't a mechanic, you wouldn't avoid maintaining a car and then get upset that it broke down eventually, you would pay a specialist to maintain it for you.

Youtube is cool because it's "free" but you also get almost zero support from Google and they are pretty the worst in my opinion. I have got decent support from AWS and Microsoft (never tried with FB).

Yes, I wouldn't recommend my mom do it. This was with the average HNer in mind, but even an average tech enthusiast could do it. I think the OP commented here too saying he is a techie.

But tbh I think even getting and external drive and backing up to it should at least be done in parallel to any cloud service you choose.

You're making this too complicated. Upload the video to youtube, then plug in your 16TB USB drive and copy the file there as well, then unplug the drive and put it back on the shelf. When you fill up one drive, you buy another, and the first one stays in the closet, forever. That's it.

If youtube deletes your account, you take the drives out of the closet and re-upload. If a drive fails, you use youtube-dl to repopulate it.

The only way this fails is if a drive dies / house fire on the same day that youtube deletes your account. If you are really that paranoid about it, keep a second copy of each drive at work / home. But you really, really don't need to.