What are your thoughts on finding a good level of subscriptions for online services, such as storage, photo backup, music streaming, video streaming?
Personal situation: I don’t want a ton of subscriptions. I take lots of photos. I listen to music quite a bit. I live in a household that has Android, iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Linux, … and a Synology NAS that is already filling up with old music and video stuff from before streaming, phone photo backups as well as the photos from the big camera (manually copied so far). I currently pay for two cloud storage thingies and have to free ones, 3/4 are full :P We also have Spotify Family and cut down to only (HBO) Max and public service for video plus sometimes getting something specific for a month or two.
Any experiences or other observations welcome as well!
This answer is very different depending upon your life circumstances.
A single person with fixed income, is different than a two income household with children. I’m not saying they can’t both reach the same conclusion, just at their circumstances justify different choices being valid.
There’s also your technical proficiency, and pain tolerance for saving money.
For example, you could eliminate all external services, self-host everything, and then configure an S3 object storage provider for critical cold storage backups. That might also require you spending a bit more upfront to expand your NAS storage capacity.
While that may save you a bunch of money in the long term, it will definitely cost you a lot of time and effort.
What’s convenient for you? What can you not afford to lose access to? What’s your budget? How much time do you have to manage different solutions?
Those aren’t questions for you to provide me answers for, just some of the considerations that will impact different people’s answer to this question.
I’m skilled with IT stuff (I guess many are on here) but have plenty of that at work and a highly varying degree of time for such things based on what’s happening in life. I guess the more handheld something is the more I fear it might break when I absolutely don’t have time or mental capacity to deal with it. I’m getting quite comfy with how well the Synology works. It’s kind of weird there isn’t a “pay up and just extend the synology into the cloud automagically” - it all sounds adding more possible failure sources.