Amazon Cloud Drive

Off Topic & General Discuss
#1

Is anyone else using ACD Unlimited for Plex Media library Storage? If so, what is your experience with it thus far?

I discovered the service about 2 months ago and it’s AMAZING! It is by far the best cloud storage solution out there. It basically allows you to have an unlimited plex server. Some people have mentioned that the soft limit is set to 100TB :open_mouth: I’ve only uploaded about 6TB so far and the performance is outstanding. I get about 50MB/s on upload and 90MB/s on download (10 connections). That’s superb for a cloud service provider.

I used the amc.ovh blog to help with my setup. It’s a little complicated if you don’t know much about file systems and mounts in Linux. But once you understand how everything works and you get it setup, it’s fantastic.

I have a nightly backup that runs to upload any downloaded media to ACD. I also have a cron setup to delete any files older than 2 weeks. I’m in the process of moving ALL my media to ACD. Everything is encrypted so there no way for Amazon to know what I’m uploading.

@ $70 per year, it is a steal and you will never have to buy addition hard drives for your server EVER again.

3 Likes
ACD/GDrive with rclone
Plex+QuickBox+Amazon Cloud Drive?
ACD with acd_cli
#2

Looks very interesting !
Where are you situated…Europe or US as I´m wondering if you´d get the same performance as a EU citizen :slight_smile:

#3

Neither. I’m in the southern hemisphere mate.

ACD is available in EU and US.

1 Like
#4

I use it, and find it good for backups of all my content. I’d say i have around 8TB or so of stuff there.

I do have the drive mounted, and my plex does point to it, and in theory it streams ok, but i haven’t watched a full TV episode or movie yet. I just have flicked thru a few things and it seemed to play fine.

I have seen when the drive is mounted it has a theoretical limit of 108TB. But, you’d need some library to fill that. As it is i have around 170 different TV Shows and over 6,500 individual episodes on my server and that takes up around 6TB, and thats with all my shows being 720p WebDL quality.

Do you encrypt your content?

#5

@smilingheadcase Yes. I use encfs to encrypt. It works quite well but you do sacrifice some system resources (it encrypts and decrypts on the fly). I’ve got a strong server and not that many users, so the sacrifice is well worth the privacy.

#6

I’ve never been able to get my head around the encoding side of it, and haven’t managed to get it working well. I’ve a pretty solid server myself, so it would be up to the task, but i just stuck with a normal mounted drive.

I must test it out a little further with streaming.

#7

rclone’s next update will support better encryption than encfs and mounting. I want to work on a module for QB that supports it since it will work on ACD, GDrive and many other providers. I will be celebrating once this comes out.

I have yet to be happy with a ACD_CLI/ENCFS combo. It works but its finicky to keep working properly. You cant write directly to it so you have to upload. rclone does a way better job at uploading but then you have the mounts that would unmount on me for no reason without a reboot. I think it was all acd_cli issues.

#8

I find this fascinating, thanks for the heads up. Have spent the last hour since reading your post learning more on /r/datahoarder/ on Reddit. It would appear a few people are doing this.

I suppose really my main concern would be them deciding to pull the plug because I had violated some TOS. We have all used various services where unlimited really meant limited and discovered the real limit.

We have to remember that Amazon are in the business of selling music, tv and films (amongst other things) and some of our “special” files might not please them :slight_smile:

#9

From reading other posts on people getting their content wiped due to violation of TOS is down to one of two things

1-having scene releases on ACD, ie, FLEET, KILLERS etc, it’s been suggested that Amazon could run a script to identify these

2-accessing the ACD from multiple locations, ie, having it mounted on a drive at home and on your remote dedi.

I could be entirely wrong of course.

#10

Some people are using software that also encrypts the file names as well as the contents. Which seems like a good idea for privacy.

It looks like my VPS doesnt support fuse which is needed for all this to work :frowning:

#11

you dont have root access on the vps?

#12

I do. But apparently it has to be enabled in the OpenVZ container. The provider says “Due to security reasons we do not support FUSE.”

#13

sorry…OpenVZ kinda sucks…which is why its cheaper than a KVM vps. I started out on OpenVZ boxes on the net. That shared kernel sucks. I’m surprised QB even works on it.

#14

For what I want to do it actually works very well :slight_smile:

Just read that the Amazon service is only unlimited for Americans, hence the $ price. In the UK 1 Tb = £320 a year ($417)

#15

What about google drive?

pick up a domain and you’re good to go.

The pricing page is incorrect(at least on the US page). You can have a single user on your domain and have unlimited storage. I pay $10/US a month for unlimited storage on google drive.

If you trust someone else with your data you can buy an unlimited account on ebay for a very cheap one time fee but the domain owner would ultimately have access to change your passwords or even take it over.

I have been playing with Amazon Cloud Drive and Google Drive to see which one works best for me. I’m really waiting for rclone 1.33 to kick this up…mostly just playing for now.

#16

I wouldnt put anything on any cloud that wasnt totally encrypted (names and data).

Whats the story with these Ebay accounts? Just seen one for $15 , 100 TB, how are they getting them? Is this the Apps for Education program? Wouldnt Google expect that at some point the person stops being a student?

#17

ACD IS based on Amazon’s S3 offering. Been using it along with Google Apps for Work Unlimited ($10/month/user) and I hit 150-160Mbps (Mbit), in both directions, from both providers, at any time of any day and I have Verizon FiOS 150/150. I should point out though that I always see 150-160Mbps 100% of the time downloading torrents, over sftp, ftp, ftpes, https, ssh, and https direct downloads from just about any provider, unless they’re on a congested network or it’s a Kimsufi for example, which you’re only gonna get 100Mbps from at the most.

For anyone thinking that Amazon throttles speeds, either download or upload, and/or thinks that Amazon employees look through anyone’s cloud drive unless they call and specifically give permission. See a reply I got from their support team just a few weeks ago:

Hello,

I understand that you’re concerned about the security of your files on Amazon Drive. Please keep in mind that your personal information is subject to the protections of our Privacy Notice, which you can find at:

https://www.amazon.com/privacy

In addition, each file is stored within Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3); the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. You can find more info about S3 here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Welcome.html

Your Amazon Drive can only be accessed by you, or anyone you give your Amazon.com account information to. There is no known way that viruses and spyware can access your files while in Amazon Drive.

I was also able to confirm that Amazon doesn’t throttle upload speeds but there are a lot of variables outside of our network that may affect upload speeds.

I hope this helps! We look forward to seeing you again soon.

We’d appreciate your feedback. Please use the links below to tell us about your experience today.

Best regards,
censored

#18

so when it says unlimited i think they are lying cuz i have been reading that they get upset if you use a lot. so say i wanted to use 24tb of storage i think they might mind a bit.

#19

I have a Google Apps for Work Unlimited account and I can add unlimited user accounts for $10/month/user, they DO pro-rate for new accounts and bill at the end of the month (postpaid, NOT prepaid). It is registered to an account using my 100% totally anonymous LLC (yes in the USA some states allow you to setup a totally anonymous LLC using a registered agent, and I never gave any personal info, let alone a copy of any form of identification lol) and a (close-to) bulletproof registrar and domain. Why the hell is anyone skeptical of Google’s unlimited offering when ACD costs half as much each year (ACD IS $60 NOT $70!), and Google is just larger in terms of servers, datacenters, infrastructure.

#20

Not true…it’s just not…total assumption.

Source: Well, let’s say I know employees of Amazon…not going any further than that.