I have accounts! Boy, do I ever have accounts. I have accounts here, and there, and there, and there. And I am just a sysadmin for my own house!!
What I want is ONE place for ALL my storage needs. Let me drop Amazon Glacier, Backblaze, and Wasabi for my long-term cold-storage needs for my home NAS.
I would like a *generous* low-cost paid option as an add-on for a pro plan. What I envision is...
1) The ability to purchase *cold storage* in 5TB increments. I see no reason for a max, but please don't go lower than 50TB so I can archive every single file on my NAS and keep in there indefinitely, as long as I keep my subscription current.
2) To help make sure it is used for archival purposes, disallow the deletion of files through the API. This should be long-term archival storage. This will keep your costs down and disuede non-personal use. This is also a home license, so deleting files only by the Web UI is reasonable limitation as it should be rare. The main need for deletion I see is the accidental upload of files. Or deleting files more than say five years old.
3) Limit the service to a single download (bundled/compressed) every six (6) months. IOW this should be used only for disaster recovery and it is reasonable to limit a home-use service to twice a year. Allow additional downloads for an additional charge. Reasonable for those cases of people having a really bad-luck year.
4) Don't allow any online "interaction" with the archived files. IOW no integrations with other services or even your own like Paper. Limit functionality to upload and download only. Again, reasonable for this type of a usage scenario.
5) To keep your costs down, it is reasonable to only provide "personal levels" of security. IOW things like only duplicating once, so only two geographically seperated instances of the files. Maybe charge for additional clones as an option.
6) It would be reasonable to throttle the uploading bandwidth.
7) Since only "disaster recovery" downloads will be performed, do not throttle the downloading bandwidth. It is already an emergency and I would want to get back my important files ASAP.
😎 Maybe provide a shipped-to-you-drive option for an additional cost. Some people might be willing to pay a reasonable, but one-time fee to retrieve files in this manner if not doing so would cause them even higher financial costs for not getting quick access to the files in an offline manner.
9) It would also be acceptable to limit these types of archives to being retained on your "oldest systems still in production". IOW, extend the profitible lifetime of your legacy systems. If not in direct cost savings, but possibly in increased subscriptions due to this feature coming "standard" at no additional cost.
10) Send a Lucite trophy to any subscriber on each decade of subscription. 🙂