Sooo my university google email account is scheduled to be deleted on November 8th (1 week from today). I have used that account for 7 or 8 years and it’s connected to my Google Photos which is (was) unlimited due to the student status. I have 200,000 GB worth of photos and videos stored there (it’s been my primary backup for the almost decade I’ve had it) and I need to move it or lose it. Any suggestions for online unlimited cloud services? I’m not super worried about initial costs to set up I just want to know that it works and won’t delete my account or anything or consider me as abusing the unlimited storage. If such a thing doesn’t exist any suggestions for what to do lol There’s no way to recover the account because the university is essentially getting rid of all of their Google sponsored platforms.

  • TADataHoarderBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    been my primary backup for the almost decade I’ve had it
    I need to move it or lose it

    What do you mean by this?
    Do you have other local copies and another backup or is this your main archive of everything?

    Are you just looking for a convenient way to transfer this all to another cloud provider to maintain an off-site backup without having to re-upload from your local archive stored on your own hardware (probably stuck behind a gigabit modem) or are you in panic mode because this is the only complete archive of your data that exists?
    Will you be losing your backup or your data if this doesn’t get moved?

    You will probably have to use cloud to cloud data transfer services here because it is unlikely you’ll be able to download everything in the short time left. Consider getting everything moved to a pay-per-GB cloud storage service temporarily, just to save everything, then build your own server and look into colocation hosting for a cheaper long term solution. With those you own the hardware and rent rack space where it’s powered and connected to the internet, which means you can save a lot of money in the long run. Or just keep your server at home. Or build two and do home + colo so you have a real backup.

    You can fit 15 drives easy in a 4U case and with 22TBs that’d be 330TB raw. Plenty of space for 200TB after setting up some redundancy and having some hot spares.
    No matter what you choose you are going to be spending thousands of dollars to store this data if you wish to keep it and that’s why your account is being deleted. One day all this shit will fit on an SD card or single SSD, but that day is not today.