FileMakerFeller

Good on SentinelOne for making such detailed information available.

It seems GS is learning about the substantial differences between investment banking and consumer banking, albeit slowly.

"Suitably blurry" - hahaha! Good one!

entropys said:

Ha ha, no matter how hard Apple tries, it is never enough for activists, who will always go for the most visible target.

time for a spot of Kipling:

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!"

Ah, Kipling. Such a great poet, but sincerely willing to spend human lives rather than money. It's hard to square that with his admiration for the soldiers he reported on and spent most of his life with.

12TB of cloud storage, fully backed up, is NOT CHEAP.

I compare it to a 12TB WD desktop drive which Amazon is selling for US$229 - you'd want two of them so that you have a local backup, so that's US$458, plus for an off-site backup I think Backblaze is the best value at US$130 for two years (unlimited data, but you can't connect a huge number of external drives to your computer, so there's a practical limit). Electricity costs for the drives is a maximum US$4 per year each (as estimated here) but more likely to be negligible because they spin down while not in use.

Over the estimated 5 year lifespan of the drives, you'd pay a total of US$783 but you wouldn't have the ease of access that the iCloud storage provides. Backblaze has a web administration interface that's workable, plus iOS and Android apps for direct download to a smartphone or tablet, but it doesn't really have the integration of iCloud.

Five years of 12TB storage on iCloud is 60 months x US$60 pm for a total of US$3600. Interestingly, Backblaze has another product for storing data ("B2") that is priced at US$5 per TB per month, with an extra fee for downloading the data. It's designed for storage where you don't want to reserve any space up front, so you're charged only for what you use, but it's noteworthy that the pricing per TB is the same as iCloud (which doesn't charge for downloads).

For that amount of money it could well be worth building your own SSD-based NAS (Jeff Geerling has a great post here for a 40TB, dual 10Gbps networking NAS with a materials cost of US$4330; you can RAID that for 24TB of storage with 16TB of redundancy plus back up the NAS to Backblaze for the US$130/2yr mentioned above). 8TB SSDs are around US$400 for SATA drives and around US$750 for NVMe drives on Amazon, so you can modify the build cost according to your needs since the drives are the most expensive part.