Let’s be realistic. No company is offering storage solutions for altruistic reasons. They have their own costs and own profit margins to maintain. Whatever your cost is for adding storage at home, it has to be more for Amazon, Google, Dropbox, etc. Why? There’s redundancy (RAID), backups, disaster recovery, geographic replication, and so forth. And I’m pretty sure those disk arrays aren’t made with the $99 USB drives from Amazon (ironic, right?) that you tear apart and reuse the disk somewhere else because its cheaper than buying the raw drive.
No, the profit comes from the fact that for every user that has 1 TB, you have 1000 or more users with 2 GB who are paying the same price. True, one user with 1 PB can raise alarms but they’re still better off shutting him/her down than upsetting the whole apple cart.
The real problem comes, though, when your overall client behavior changes. When people start seeing “They don’t enforce the 5 user minimum” posted everywhere–Facebook, Twitter, forums, product sites–someone is bound to start asking “yeah, why don’t we?” When there are press releases saying “Store all your huge media files in the cloud for pennies” they’re going to notice that the average user goes from 20 GB to 500 GB and the number of 1 TB+ users goes up disproportionately.
They have to add new servers, new drives, expand their network, and so forth. That costs money and anyone who is asking the accounting department for a few more millions of dollars has to explain why there’s really no increase in profit from this new expenditure.
Right now we can only offer guesses. I, like others, doubt that we’ll wake up one day and our (legit, not eBay) accounts will be deleted. I also doubt that they’ll randomly choose a number of files to just delete and bring us within limits (either new limits or newly enforced limits). But, you don’t know until it happens.
I have seen the discussion hundreds of times now… person A brings up the “no wonder, someone uploaded 1PB of random stuff just because they could” and person B counteracts “yeah well but they advertized unlimited so good for them”, then person C chimes in with more blah blah… in the end, the companies will do exactly what they need to do to stay profitable.
I definitely foresee the end of Gsuite unlimited but like everyone else, I can’t guess what form it will take. A few possibilities are that they will enforce the 5 users requirement, that they will have customers pay beyond the magical 1TB limit all others are now imposing, or have Gsuite business users prove they own a company like they require schools to prove they are non profit.
Time will tell, but one thing I predict with near 100% certainty: the days of unlimited buffet will be over one day, probably sooner than later Sadly
It seems to me that Cloud Sync is mainly a Plex Client in the Cloud that one can Sync to, just like to an iPhone client. It can then run as a Server and provide the synced material to other clients. A good idea, but it has many limitations compared to being connected to a full server. However, Plex definitely has the Sync function available to send content, meta data, and watch history to other clients/servers.
Plex Cloud on the other hand is a full server instance running somewhere in a Cloud virtual environment. While it also has its limitation, it is always on, and typically peter available, reachable then the home server. However, it has no capability to Sync with the home server or from the home server to Plex Cloud? Although, the Plex Home server has that functionality built in. And Cloud Sync has the receiving functionality build it.
Most of us will still run a Home server anyhow, for local pleasure and for local recording. And most users probably will store our content somewhere local. Also, as long as recording is not supported in the Plex Cloud, we don’t really have DVR capability there. **So how about just merging Plex Cloud Sync and Plex Cloud so that someone with a Plex Home Server can easily Sync its content to the Plex Cloud server for better accessibility? ** (That would also remove the confusion as what Cloud Sync and Plex Cloud really are).
For those who are running a VPS, do you have any h265 content loaded on your cloud drive and if so, does your streaming box handle h265? For me, I have a couple movies in h265 and my Shield TV does handle h265 but my VPS still transcodes to h264 even though I have it set to direct play. I would’ve thought that since my Shield can read h265 I’d have gotten the original media.
@simon_lefisch said:
For those who are running a VPS, do you have any h265 content loaded on your cloud drive and if so, does your streaming box handle h265?
I justed tested a H.265 720p 8-bit with AAC 2.0 and a H.265 2160p 10-bit AAC 5.1 file, both direct played fine on my OpenVZ VPS.
@simon_lefisch said:
For those who are running a VPS, do you have any h265 content loaded on your cloud drive and if so, does your streaming box handle h265?
I justed tested a H.265 720p 8-bit with AAC 2.0 and a H.265 2160p 10-bit AAC 5.1 file, both direct played fine on my OpenVZ VPS.
I actually looked at the properties of the media I was trying to play and realized that it has .ass subtitles embedded in the video file, which is causing the transcoding. I remuxed the file by removing the subtitles and it didn’t transcode, so that appears to be the issue. Thanks for replying/confirming @Wiidesire.
I installed 4.0.0. I used these instructions to get PlexDrive going:
To install MongoDB, I used this page:
Works like a charm, scanning is super fast, so is the time before content starts playing. I hardly notice a difference between the VPS and our HT PC anymore!
I concur, using plexdrive 4 myself. I see that they’re preparing the next version in GitHub, not feeling like beta testing though, I’ll wait for them to release it.
Finally got the thing running. I get particular about where data gets written, so mongodb was giving me all kinds of crap when I was trying to move the default database location, etc. Once I got that working, created a user and database, added the mongo user and password flags to my plexdrive command, everything was finally good. Still, hardly intuitive. Hopefully they settle on this general config for future versions.
Works like a charm, scanning is super fast, so is the time before content starts playing. I hardly notice a difference between the VPS and our HT PC anymore!
Works like a charm, scanning is super fast, so is the time before content starts playing. I hardly notice a difference between the VPS and our HT PC anymore!
Does it somehow prevent API limit bans?
Oh gosh yes! I haven’t had a single ban since, because apparently PlexDrive caches just enough information on the VPS that Google is not hammered by Plex scanning. So far PlexDrive has been a smooth, fast and stable experience, I couldn’t recommend it more.
Hey guys, maybe someone can help me with getting plexdrive 4.0 running on my VPS (Ubuntu). I followed the instructions that @per_PLEX_ed posted but whenever I reboot I lose the mount. Here is the script I use to run plexdrive mount
However I am unable to exit the screen when pressing CTRL+A. I am literally pulling my hair out trying to get this going. I’m contemplating going back tor clone since I had that working without any probs, but would like to get plexdrive working instead. If someone can put out a literal step by step of what they did, I would be much appreciative. TIA
Okay, so if you manually start the service you have your mount? If that’s the case, it should be a simple “sudo systemctl enable plexdrive.service”, or whatever it is you called your service. That tells Ubuntu to run at startup.
Sadly 