Sia usage report #2.

Some time ago I tried out Sia UI, just uploaded/downloaded few mp3 files.

Now I wanted to see if I can use it for something practical: backup. So I used it to upload 3 files 28 GB total.

This time I used command-line interface as I run it on a server. I liked command-line more than GUI.

Upload speed: I don't have exact number but it took many hours to upload, perhaps 24 h total. I expected it to be faster as I'm using fairly powerful dedicated server with fast internet connection. But OK, it could be worse, recently I was a customer of an online backup provider which was MUCH slower than that.

Cost: I loaded wallet with ~60K SC, and right now it's empty. Thus at current price it cost me 60000 * 0.00000024 = 0.0144 BTC, or $6. As I understand, that's for ~1 month. In comparison Amazon S3 standard costs $0.03 per month-gb, thus 28 GB would have costed me $0.84 per month. So I'm quite disappointed, it looks like Sia is 6x more expensive than S3 standard, and 17 times more expensive than "Infrequent Access" option.

User interface: I'm quite disappointed with a lack of control over costs and redundancy, as well as a lack of status visibility. E.g. I'd like to know what degree of redundancy it has, what contracts are already paid for etc.

Stability: siad crashed twice during within 1-2 week time frame. Not cool. (I'm using this server for many years so it's unlikely to be a hardware issue.) I don't have any detailed crash report, some messages are in logs but nothing special around a time of crash. I'll try to get a better log.

Resource usage: I think siad memory usage went up to 3 GB during initial sync & upload, that's rather excessive. CPU usage is also quite high at times (e.g. during upload).

So, overall, I'm not going to actually use Sia for backups this time as it's more expensive than cloud storage providers. But it definitely looks promising.