Intro
In this post I’m going to share an idea that I’m working on and why it’s important to me.
Goals
- Establish consistent development progress on the Boxyvault system
- Practice technical writing
- Start a habit of capturing dev logs
Boxyvault
Boxyvault is the codename I’ve chosen for this project.
The name intends to reflects the concept of a container that is a safe keep for valuable content.
So what is this Idea?
I want to use the AWS’s S3 service to store and manage my family photo’s and video’s. In order to interact with these stored files, I’m developing a front-end in React. Boxyvault will enable some custom functionality such as tagging, previewing and archiving of content.
Why not use Google Drive?
I am very cheap and enjoy free stuff and with this comes use of the default 15 gigs of storage Google Drive offers. Unfortunately I’ve maxed out this free storage very quickly as the size of my family content far exceeds this.
So I looked into the pricing tiers offered to upgrade my Google Drive storage and despite it being somewhat reasonable at lower sizes (100-200 gb) the jump to 2 tb (max) was too expensive. Additionally I foresee my 4k video’s needing more space in the future.
Surely you can find some alternatives?
What are my options here? I’ll list them as I saw it:
- Buy physical hard drives, enough to make backups. Remember this content is precious
- Google Drive with the most expensive tier and perhaps create more paid accounts.
- Look for alternative cloud based solutions and accept the cost
- Build my own system and rely on AWS S3 and Glacier to make it cost effective
I decided to develop a custom system (4) for the following reasons:
- As a fullstack software engineer this is great practice for me
- I’m interested to see if this can become and open source project or income source
- A large project like this will give me many opportunities to practice technical writing