Today I decided once again to stop fighting against apple’s devil plan to rule my wallet : I subscribed to an iCloud 200 GB storage plan.
I already have plenty of “databox”, either personal/free or corporate accounts, with free space. And to be honest, Apple’s databox is not the best one, nor the cheapest too. Yet I did the maths and came to the conclusion that for my particular use case, it’s a good enough solution with a fair price.
It’s a major mind shift for me : I always considered cloud databoxes overpriced.
My use case is pretty simple : I want to backup my iPhone, which hold up to 128 GB of data. Here is my context :
- My main computer is a MacBook Air,
- 256 GB SSD, I value every single GB of it worthy to be traded on the comex market,
- Anyway, my phone is plugged on the Mac approximately every ~never,
- My central “home Mac mini” holding the “global” iTunes DB is left for dead for years now : so yesterday solution design,
- I don’t want to feel the pain of managing (and carrying) USB drives & creating symlinks on my airbook to divert iPhone’s backup to it anymore : I value my time too much for that.
So I decided to be a nice cloud consumer, and delegate the hassle of running/maintaining the storage infrastructure : there is zero value doing it myself (geeky time is too precious to manage a backup nas@home).
Apple charge me 2.99€/month for 200 GB : that’s 35,88€/year.
200 GB is enough to hold all the data of my oneday-potentially full iphone (which is not atm), and leave me plenty of room for files on iCloud Drive and other “maybe one day” interesting services (iCloud photo library).
For the security & personal information aspect, I am willing to trust the cryptographic science (call me foolish).
A 200GB HDD is around 25€ on Amazon, so iCloud storage subscription is ~30% more expensive than a naked disk.
I consider this premium, as the price of peace of mind :
- No need to provision space on the home nas,
- Don’t need to run that disk 24/7 and care about HDD failure,
- Nothing to do when I come home : it’s just backed up, no matter where I was the whole day/week.
Okay, an HDD you own is a onetime purchase, while Apple’s service is a subscription : I pay the HDD again every year.
So basically, it could be like I throw my 200GB HDD through the window each year and buy a new one : it make no economical or ecological sense.
But in fact it’s a greener option! The cloud storage have already been bought by someone else anyway : I am just using it. That drive space is absolutely more efficient than the one in my nas sitting on the living room : deduped/compressed for sure.
And finally, I can cancel my subscription anytime if I am considering that I can go without that iphone backup for a period.
That’s agility baby!
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