Never could understand the fascination with the “cloud”. Anyone care to enlighten me?
I’ve asked the same question a number of times in the past 2 years or so. I still haven’t gotten an answer that makes much sense to me.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but it’s a way to reduce hardware costs…both compute and storage. From the storage side, it’s also a means of disaster recovery. It’s nice that I have stuff on local drives. It’s also nice if those local drives are backed up to redundant media locally. However, none of that does me much good if the house burns down. Whether I choose to utilize the Plex cloud server or not, cloud storage makes sense.
@mdnitoil said:
Can’t speak for anyone else, but it’s a way to reduce hardware costs…both compute and storage. From the storage side, it’s also a means of disaster recovery. It’s nice that I have stuff on local drives. It’s also nice if those local drives are backed up to redundant media locally. However, none of that does me much good if the house burns down. Whether I choose to utilize the Plex cloud server or not, cloud storage makes sense.
The hardware costs are offset by the costs of TBs of cloud storage? I agree with the redunancy argument. Personally, I would never rely solely on cloud storage, I like having my media locally. That’s the reason I bought a DVR and didn’t use the cloud DVR offered by my cable TV provider.
It’s an unlimited backup of all our digital possessions for a mere $60/year. Cheaper than having to buy another 12TB worth of disks and having to replace some/adding more every few years.
@per_PLEX_ed said:
It’s an unlimited backup of all our digital possessions for a mere $60/year. Cheaper than having to buy another 12TB worth of disks and having to replace some/adding more every few years.
True, like I said I like it for backups. The other reason I like having it locally is for traveling\camping, I have a couple of 4 TB 2.5 HDs coupled with a PI that I take with me where there is no internet.
I would never abandon our local copy, look what Microsoft OneDrive and Bitcasa did. There is no guarantee that Amazon or Google won’t pull the same stunt one day.
But for a cheap, external backup the Cloud can be useful.
@ucjb said:
Never could understand the fascination with the “cloud”. Anyone care to enlighten me?
As a heavy-computer user (to state it lightly) I can assure you the fascination with the cloud is mostly by people who are not interested in spending:
- Money on computing hardware or gear.
- Time to learn how to manage their data, media and/or access to data or media.
Quite simply it’s a useful feature if you cannot use the technology in a meaningful and backed-up fashion. And to all of humanity’s woe, what I call “Cloud Proponents” are essentially assisting large corporations entrap the populations of hardware and software users into subscription-based sales.
And I’m not kidding here: I’ve heard of talk of subscription based cars, ongoing Windows monthly subscriptions, what’s the point of all of that? To keep you paying without owning, forever.
There is NO CLOUD, only someone else’s computer. 
If I was starting over I would definitely consider the hosted route as my only PMS.
I could rent a dedicated server in a datacenter and subscribe to a cloud provider for unlimited storage and pay those fees for 5 years before I reached the amount I spent on my current hardware. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the cost of electricity.
Other than a slight delay when clicking play, the user experience when streaming from a setup like above is just like playing from a local server. Assuming you have decent bandwidth.
It’s a buzz word.
Sales people love it. Like Agile Development (LOL) and Freemium
Yes, “cloud” is a buzzword, but it doesn’t change what it can be used for. Assuming Amazon will continue to sell their server space (to avoid the word “cloud”) at a next-to-nothing yearly fee, I see no reason not to make use of it. It’s cheap storage, it’s off site and I know for a fact their servers & backup facilities are probably a million times more reliable than that WD hard drive buzzing away in the computer under my desk here. To me it makes sense to use “someone else’s computer”, in this case Amazon (and two eBay Google accounts as a backup of my backup and the occasional use with Plex Cloud).
it isn’t very viable anymore once you get to a certain amount of media.
currently at 16TB.
@hthighway said:
If I was starting over I would definitely consider thehosted routeas my on PMS.I could rent a dedicated server in a datacenter and subscribe to a cloud provider for unlimited storage and pay those fees for 5 years before I reached the amount I spent on my current hardware. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the cost of electricity.
Other than a slight delay when clicking play, the user experience when streaming from a setup like above is just like playing from a local server. Assuming you have decent bandwidth.
Except it can take a long time to “gather” your videos locally then turn around and re-upload them to another provider. Can be a no go for people with an ISP that restricts or meters your usage. Of course you could rent a VPS and do this processing on that as well in the cloud.
To me the biggest advantage of the cloud approach is for those people who want to share their libraries with family/friends but can’t get adequate upload bandwidth from their ISP. There are a lot of people who can get 100+Mb download but only 10Mb upload but realistically only get 6 or 7Mb upload consistently which makes for awful streaming. The cloud version of Plex is ideal in this type of situation.
It of course can also be advantageous for those who don’t want to be bothered by purchasing hardware and maintaining it.
With our current options we have something that can appeal to both camps or even hybrid setups. There is no reason why you can’t have a local Plex system where you keep recent movies/shows for local streaming while archiving them in the Cloud where you still have access to them (as well as friends/family). This type of approach could be quite handy for those wanting to both run their own system for local devices with recent releases but want to share and just don’t have the bandwidth. Sort of a WIN/WIN.
With Plex Cloud we have more options then ever and if you use your imagination can come up with a powerful system to meet almost everyone’s needs.
Carlo
@cayars said:
To me the biggest advantage of the cloud approach is for those people who want to share their libraries with family/friends but can’t get adequate upload bandwidth from their ISP. There are a lot of people who can get 100+Mb download but only 10Mb upload but realistically only get 6 or 7Mb upload consistently which makes for awful streaming. The cloud version of Plex is ideal in this type of situation.
It of course can also be advantageous for those who don’t want to be bothered by purchasing hardware and maintaining it.
With our current options we have something that can appeal to both camps or even hybrid setups. There is no reason why you can’t have a local Plex system where you keep recent movies/shows for local streaming while archiving them in the Cloud where you still have access to them (as well as friends/family). This type of approach could be quite handy for those wanting to both run their own system for local devices with recent releases but want to share and just don’t have the bandwidth. Sort of a WIN/WIN.
Carlo
This is basically my usage, what you describe above. I have a local server and maintain a remote box that attaches to ACD that my remote family streams from. As far as my local server, I don’t see my self expanding it’s current storage beyond what I have now. I’ll simply drop older stuff from local and have ACD mounted so Plex still sees it after it’s removed from local storage. Having the content backed-up to 3 separate cloud accounts makes for a good bit of redundancy
And at some point if the remote continually improves I may just turn off the local server completely
@jmeehan11 said:
it isn’t very viable anymore once you get to a certain amount of media.
currently at 16TB.
Why does viability drop when your storage requirements increase?
I have more than double the amount you quoted stored in the cloud
And I probably have double what hthighway has stored in the cloud as well My ACD account is over 100 TB. Same price as the guys who only uses 5 TB. My files on ACD are encrypted so Amazon has no idea what the content is. Unfortunately that makes using it with a cloud provider rather tough but great for backup.
If Plex were to enable the combination of servers linked to one account I’d be all over using Plex Cloud as well. By this I mean combining Movie libs, TV Shows Libs, etc as one view or being able to search and play a movie regardless of which server it’s hosted on. Basically a Virtual Server interface that hides the physical servers (cloud or local). This to me would be the next “revolution” of Plex. Maybe someday!
I’ve got a bunch of old people who are technology impaired using my system and it’s hard enough to help them navigate movies and TV shows let alone how and when to change servers in their Rokus!!! So I presently have no choice but to host everything on one server. 
Carlo
Because it is not truly a viable backup in terms of a reasonable turnaround time.
Once your library is built locally it would take a very large amount of time to backup on the cloud.
If you experience total failure, how long would it realistically take you to recover “from the cloud”
Lets’s say you are using Google for storing your files for the Cloud. If they have a crash is it going to be up to you or them to fix it and restore data? Google has backups and redundancy.
I add files at a good pace but my backup tot he cloud keeps pace.
If you are talking about using the cloud as a backup for your local setup like I do with ACD then yes it can take a while to pull it back down again. However, keep in mind what we are talking about here. These are “hobby” videos. The files aren’t business related or files I make a living from so they don’t in my mind require the same type of backup. I have parity drives local using SnapRAID, so I can recover from most things gone wrong (deleted drectories, couple of drive crashes, etc) , but if I had a house fire and the place burnt to the ground I at least know I have 99+% of my library elsewhere that I can pull back down once I’m back on my feet and ready to rebuild my libraries.
In the mean time I could setup a local server with a mount to ACD (with my encryption) and play my media directly from the cloud.
While maybe not appropriate to publicly say, but I also have friends/family that run servers who pull data from me to back up my system and I do the same for them. I could give them several USB3 drives to copy my stuff back and have close to an instant library again even if only a subset. Same for them if they had a tragic event.
Again I’m not running a business system (e.g. Amazon or Netflix) that I profit from and Plex for me is a hobby. So in my mind I’ve taken appropriate backup situations under consideration.
I might be able to “source” the files again from another source (use imagination here) but some of my older films or less popular stuff won’t be available so having them backed up in the cloud is just extra protection even if slower to retrieve. Might take a while but I’ll get them back which is the end game in my mind.
At the end of the day if I were to loose everything and had to start over I could. While I might not have a huge library for quite a while I would/could get the files I really wanted and I would always have the knowledge I’ve gained up to this point.
Every person’s setup is different and their needs are different as well. But having a cheap backup in the cloud is just added protection.
Make sense?
Carlo
@jmeehan11 said:
Because it is not truly a viable backup in terms of a reasonable turnaround time.
Once your library is built locally it would take a very large amount of time to backup on the cloud.If you experience total failure, how long would it realistically take you to recover “from the cloud”
Actually, in my case, the only real impediment is getting the content up. That would take, for me, around 250 days. (I have VERY poor upload speeds) But restoring it would take only 10-20 days and my entire library would be usable during the process by simply linking to the cloud drive.
I keep going back and forth about using the cloud as a backup but I think I will simply bite the bullet and begin the process of copying my Library to Amazon. (I have to keep Amazon’s storage for other reasons anyway)
Since I can use a mapped drive letter to and encrypted StableBit CloudDrive I do not even have to deal with storing my movies/audio/videos/photos in unencrypted form. Most of my files are already in a form that will directly play so I, in the event of an extreme catastrophic failure would have complete access to most of my library as soon as I establish connection with Amazon. BTW: I keep things like encryption keys etc in a fire proof safe and backed up off site.
Of course in the quite unlikely event that my local backup system is rendered nonviable I most probably have much more serious issues to deal with so access to my media would be WAY down of my priority list so, maybe, using the cloud for backup is too much redundancy.
After all I may be a “belt and suspenders” kind of guy but adding “staples” to the mix could, even for me, be construed as a bit of overkill.
I agree @Elijah_Baley
