Today, I want to celebrate all storage resource of my personal cloud infrastructure sum up to over 10 terabytes. It consists of some storage VPSs and the home NAS, and monthly bill is less than 15 USD. A one gigabyte network port seems to be a minimal requirement for VPS nowadays.

So, you may be wondering why we need storage servers instead of some network drive. Firstly, it could make you feel like my data is in my control. You can manage your data. Other people can’t delete or spy on it. Secondly, some network drives may limit the download speed to force users to charge VIP. If you have a NAS or high speed VPS, you won’t wait years for downloading. 

Storing files on a real disk rather than mounting network drives via rclone also brings you another advantage. You can use BitTorrent download and set up your own Emby server. Emby can extract thumbnails from videos, but if you use network drive, extracting thumbnails and playing video will depend on the speed of down stream. That might cause inconsistent user experience and a longer loading time.

Furthermore, I want to mention BackBlaze here. It has been over one year since I start to use object storage service from B2. It’s cheap and safe. However, one of the drawbacks is you may need to use Cloudflare worker to avoid a download transmission fee.

The weather is getting warmer. At the end of this post, I sincerely hope the global economy will, like the coming spring, recover soon.