I have written many times about the need for genealogists to make frequent backups of their more important files, both genealogy files and non-genealogy alike. I am also a big fan of storing backups in the cloud. (For instance, I make complete backups of my data  and store them on a separate hard drive in my home plus in TWO different cloud storage services located in two different parts of the world.)

However, I also know that many people are reluctant to use cloud backups because of their concerns about security and the expense.

Security concerns are easily solved by encryption and I have written about that a number of times.

Expenses are modest, according to some people but not according to others. I suspect the reason for the differences revolves around the family finances of the people involved. I noticed an article today published by BackBlaze (I trust them... one of my backups is stored on BackBlaze). It states:

"Cloud storage specialist Backblaze expects the downward price trend for hard disk drives to continue. While that may sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy, Backblaze goes further than simply noting a well-known hard disk drive pricing trend: the company expects consumers to be able to purchase storage space at a previously unseen $0.01 per gigabyte ratio as soon as 2025."

The story continues with a rather interesting explanation. You can read the entire article at: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/backblaze-expects-one-cent-per-gb-hdds-by-2025.

Comment: one cent per gigabyte??? That’s amazing. I well remember purchasing my first hard drive more years ago than I care to mention. I paid $620 for a 20 megabyte hard drive! That’s megabytes, not gigabytes. I thought I would never fill up that huge storage space. I was wrong.