Each family member has their own laptops and phones, and take dozens of high resolution images every week, school presentations and projects, receipts, and tax documents, videos -- lots of videos.
As a family of 5 with 2 working parents, I'm not really monitoring data use and want a mostly hands off solution to their data storage. And every new phone has a higher resolution camera though maybe JPEGXL will help us there.
We pay for 2TB of icloud data, but I am already eyeing upgrading to 6TB -- but that adds another $22/month. Moving to other cloud providers may save somewhat, but then its another management of a cloud ecosystem, and I know my family will mostly stick to icloud.
On a side note, we store alot of data on google drive too, and google takeout fails everytime I try to download a 50GB file -- so really its trapped there?! All of these have a lockin factor since with more and more data its a huge effort to export!
For what it is worth, the cloud is not a backup because it is one or two failed credit card transaction away from oblivion.
As a rule of thumb, if it is easy or convenient it probably is not a good back up method. But even poor backup methods that are easy or convenient might still be better than nothing. If you are lucky.
Good luck.
Obviously not all at the same time
That’s the “so long as you are lucky” part. The cloud is great for availability. Availability != Backup.
Backups to restore live systems can involve rewriting and pruning, but live system backups are about availability not archiving.
Prepayment makes financial issues more likely to be catastrophic because the timing of the issue is the mid term of the prepayment period…with a one year period the issue may go unnoticed for more than six month and gmail empties your spam/trash folder after 30 days.
You can stick hard disks in a box and there’s nothing to manage.
By contrast the photos and documents will barely take up any space. It's not worth worrying about those until you can do something about the videos. They probably wouldn't even be an issue afterward.
Or just make the kids do chores or get a part time job to help pay for the extra iCloud storage. $22 is not much for a whole family's worth of memories.
On this file server I am running Debian12 with Docker Compose. Then I built a management dashboard in TypeScript/Node that provides web servers you can spin up in about 2seconds and each server provides Websockets and http with fully proxy support over a single port. The dashboard also provides a command terminal via browser interface and a bunch of other server and connection management tools.
* I also included Samba for remote file system access from Windows with permission management.
* I run Jellyfin with metadata caching so that I can stream video without need for internet access or subscriptions.
* I run Pihole for DNS management.
* I just got WireGuard set up so now I can VPN directly into the home network from anywhere in the world via IPv6.
Therefore I don’t need a cloud storage subscription.
I haven't set up a NAS yet, but I probably will in the coming years. Right now, I do periodic drive image backups to a secondary drive, a few periodic file backups to USB drives for documents but not images, and some periodic drive image backups to external drives. Seems to work for me so far, but we also don't have a lot of file sharing going on, so it's mostly just storage.
but, I'm thinking putting a NAS in my home and do all the neccessary backup onto that.
I run it every few months (or whenever I remember to do so). I don't bother for word/excel/pdf, even if there are some 20MB PDF files, a 5min 1080 shaky vid from a concert you went 5 years ago is a far worthier target for your time.