from Hacker News

Ask HN: Data Usage for Family Exploding

by nytesky on 3/29/25, 8:23 PM with 15 comments

How do people manage their household reams of data that our family generates?

Each family member has their own laptops and phones, and take dozens of high resolution images every week, school presentations and projects, receipts, and tax documents, videos -- lots of videos.

As a family of 5 with 2 working parents, I'm not really monitoring data use and want a mostly hands off solution to their data storage. And every new phone has a higher resolution camera though maybe JPEGXL will help us there.

We pay for 2TB of icloud data, but I am already eyeing upgrading to 6TB -- but that adds another $22/month. Moving to other cloud providers may save somewhat, but then its another management of a cloud ecosystem, and I know my family will mostly stick to icloud.

On a side note, we store alot of data on google drive too, and google takeout fails everytime I try to download a 50GB file -- so really its trapped there?! All of these have a lockin factor since with more and more data its a huge effort to export!

  • by austin-cheney on 3/29/25, 9:48 PM

    I set up a house file server. It’s a pretty minimal piece of hardware that came with a 2tb nvme disk. I added two 14tb disks in a RAID 1 array and they don’t even fit in the box physically. The RAID array is just for redundancy so that a disk can fail and the data is still available from the other disk.

    On this file server I am running Debian12 with Docker Compose. Then I built a management dashboard in TypeScript/Node that provides web servers you can spin up in about 2seconds and each server provides Websockets and http with fully proxy support over a single port. The dashboard also provides a command terminal via browser interface and a bunch of other server and connection management tools.

    * I also included Samba for remote file system access from Windows with permission management.

    * I run Jellyfin with metadata caching so that I can stream video without need for internet access or subscriptions.

    * I run Pihole for DNS management.

    * I just got WireGuard set up so now I can VPN directly into the home network from anywhere in the world via IPv6.

    Therefore I don’t need a cloud storage subscription.

  • by solardev on 3/29/25, 9:35 PM

    It's probably mostly videos. Upload the ones you don't really care about to a private YouTube channel, which doesn't charge you for storage, and delete them from iCloud. Keep the ones you really want to keep on both (it's safer that way).

    By contrast the photos and documents will barely take up any space. It's not worth worrying about those until you can do something about the videos. They probably wouldn't even be an issue afterward.

    Or just make the kids do chores or get a part time job to help pay for the extra iCloud storage. $22 is not much for a whole family's worth of memories.

  • by shortrounddev2 on 3/29/25, 8:49 PM

    I would delete stuff personally. Not everything needs to be saved

  • by giantg2 on 3/31/25, 1:51 PM

    You can set up a home NAS like people are saying. Just one point many aren't saying as a part of that, is you still want a disconnected backup (probably in a fire safe or off-site) of anything truly important to avoid data loss in the event of a lightning strike, fire, etc.

    I haven't set up a NAS yet, but I probably will in the coming years. Right now, I do periodic drive image backups to a secondary drive, a few periodic file backups to USB drives for documents but not images, and some periodic drive image backups to external drives. Seems to work for me so far, but we also don't have a lot of file sharing going on, so it's mostly just storage.

  • by brudgers on 3/29/25, 9:32 PM

    We pay for 2TB of icloud data

    For what it is worth, the cloud is not a backup because it is one or two failed credit card transaction away from oblivion.

    As a rule of thumb, if it is easy or convenient it probably is not a good back up method. But even poor backup methods that are easy or convenient might still be better than nothing. If you are lucky.

    Good luck.