The point about the expense of the drives is the problem.
Spending £500-£1000 on drives and ram for a home setup is hard to swallow, if that sounds expensive, you’re more likely to stay renting the space on subscription which is exactly what these tech companies want you to do.
You can cut costs with older hardware but you just pay for it in electricity and maintenance.
The streaming services argument is a good one, but don’t use a server in your basement to backup data. As they say, “if you have two copies of something, you have one copy of it.” Reliable backups need multi-site redundancy.
Recently HexOS added a “buddy backup” option. You can basically be the off site backup for a buddy, and he can be yours. Fully encrypted data with no access. At least I think it was HexOS. Basically solves this issue assuming you have a friend who also home labs.
Cloud computing has been around longer than the “share drive.” It’s weird that so many people think it’s some magical thing other than the data lives on another computer.
Its not just a cost thing. Running your own is so much better, I would pay more to self host.
