Hi. I am currently using google drive mounted with rsync (encrypted) to stream files over my VPS since my VPS provider charges a lot for extra storage compared to google. I have offline backups of the said data at home
I currently have a 100GB google drive plan and it’s working suprisingly great. Also it’s cheap in my country due to regional pricing
Now, as I learned, Google keeps your files for 2 years after you cancel your extra storage subscription. It also doesn’t allow you to upload anything which locks up Gmail but that doesn’t matter if it’s an alt account. So, can I just create an alt account, buy a 1 month subscription, upload everything, cancel it, then read it using rclone? Does Google restrict api access (for rclone) on drives with expired subscriptions?
Yeah I know I’m stretching this a bit too far but I just wanna know
The other cost to home lab serving lots of data is internet limits.
My internet will throttle after X terabytes (I forget the limit), whether upstream or down, and of course upload is slower.
It’s like playing a game of tetris with costs, performance, stability, reliability, flexibility, privacy, security, and personal effort.
I’m not saying don’t have a home lab, just that there are things to consider. It’s worth the effort for me, though I’m working to move some things to cloud storage (e.g. Hetzner/Storj.io) and a VPS to get some of the bandwidth off my connection, and remove my home internet as a bottleneck or failure point.