One of the goals of my home lab was to replace Google Drive. I hate paying money to Google. However, the more I tried to replace Google Drive, the more I realized that Google Drive was the solution I was looking for, so I realized it was time to adopt Google after all.
Replacing Google Drive was the goal
It costs too much and has too many storage limitations.
I have been a heavy user of Google Drive for many, many years. In fact, I don’t even remember how long I’ve been a paying Google One or Google Drive subscriber. It has to be close to 10 years, if not more, at this point.
First, let’s talk about the good parts of Google Drive. It is compatible with all major platforms out there. It works perfectly. Sharing is simple. It is a reliable and feature-rich platform. Actually, the main thing I don’t like about Google Drive is the cost or the fact that Google owns it.
On the other side of the coin, Google Drive can be quite expensive. I currently pay $20 a month for 5TB of storage with all the other Google AI features that I don’t really care much about.
Another disadvantage of Google Drive is simply that Google owns and manages it. Google is in control of all your files. They might claim that they don’t look at the content, but they definitely have the ability to do so. Google should keep your privacy top of mind, but what happens when that’s not in its best interest?
So I wanted to get out of Google Drive. Replaced it completely with my own hardware and software. That shouldn’t be too difficult, right?
I built a home laboratory capable of doing everything I needed
I have the processing and storage capacity to do whatever I want
Have a fairly large home laboratory at this point. With over 150TB of raw data capacity in my home lab, and at least 116TB of it on actually usable spinning disk after redundancy, I have further More than enough drives to meet my storage needs, right?
I definitely do. I also have more than enough horsepower in my home lab to handle running the servers. I even have a dedicated window air conditioning unit to keep my office cool, dedicated power circuits to handle the load, you name it.
So with all that hardware and storage, I set out to replace Google Drive (and many other services). I started with Nextcloudwhich seemed simple enough.
Except, next cloud It can be a bear to run and maintain. It’s pretty simple, until it breaks. Setting up external access for Nextcloud is also a bit of a hassle, but it’s doable. So I started it up and started trying to use it.
I initially had some problems with Nextcloud, but I finally fixed them and tried using it. Nextcloud apps work quite well. They are not Google level, but they work well.
However, problems started to arise when I couldn’t access my files if my home lab was down. There was a time when I was not at home and needed to access my files; This was usually not a problem.
The problem arose from the fact that my Internet was not working for some reason and I could no longer access my files. I ran into the same problem again when the power went out at my house and I wasn’t there.
With Google Drive, I never had that kind of problem. Normally there was always some way to access my files, even if there was a partial internet outage. If the internet was down enough that I couldn’t access my files on Google Drive, then that meant the internet was down for a lot of other services and I just had to wait a little while for it to come back online.
Those two cases started to show me that Google Drive was worth more than a few dollars for cloud storage; Google Drive also provided a reliability that I simply couldn’t match at home.
However, the biggest thing I finally realized was that a single location for my files wasn’t enough, and that’s really what brought me back to Google Drive.
9/10
- Brand
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Ugreen
- UPC
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AMD Ryzen Integrated R2514
- Memory
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8GB DDR4, expandable to 64GB
The Ugreen DXP4800 GT is the latest NAS from Ugreen, with dual 10Gb Ethernet, two NVMe slots and much more. It ships with 8GB of DDR4 RAM, in fact you can replace it yourself and upgrade it to have up to 64GB of RAM if the need arises. Additionally, UGOS continues to mature and is becoming a very solid NAS operating system.
Google Drive ended up being the cheapest solution in the end
One copy of a file is not enough and it turns out that it costs a lot to store adequate backups.
I recently tried to sign out of Google Drive once again to cancel my subscription. I repaired and configured Nextcloud. Then I started looking to do things. properlywhich didn’t worry me the first time I tried it.
A proper deployment this time meant backup everything to the cloud in case of a catastrophic failure at home. It’s unlikely, but possible. I personally have a friend whose house burned to the ground with everything in it. Fortunately no one was injured.
I have other friends who had their house flooded due to a burst pipe, and my family also experienced multiple burst pipes when I was a child.
So to ensure my files would be safe even if a catastrophe struck, I wanted to backup everything to the cloud. I was researching all of this right around the time Google went from offering 2TB of storage for $20/month to 5TB of storage for $20/month.
I started crunching the numbers and using Backblaze B2 as I was planning for cloud backups suddenly became much more expensive than Google. Backblaze B2 charges $7 per TB of cloud space per month. For 2TB, that’s only $14 per month, and I was paying Google $20 for that amount of space.
However, when Google increased the amount of online storage from 2TB to 5TB without changing the price, the cost per TB went from $10/TB to just $4/TB, or 42% less than Backblaze charges.
Plus, if I stick with Google Drive, I could still have the same benefits of Google Drive and not have to deal with Nextcloud. So, that’s what I did. I stopped trying to get out of Google Drive and just accepted it.
I now backup my home lab to Google Drive and Use it as my normal cloud storage. I have about 3.6TB of data stored on Google Drive, which puts me at about 70% utilization. That’s okay though, I can easily trim my backups so they don’t save as many revisions in the cloud if I want.
Sometimes the best tool is the simplest solution, even when other solutions are available.
What started as a journey to cancel Google Drive simply made me more accepting of it. I really want to stop giving my money to Google, but for cloud backups, it’s the best value on the market right now.
