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How I cut my monthly cloud storage bill in half - with 5 tough decisions

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My file and backup servers. That's a tenth of a petabyte right there. My security server is on a different shelf and the offline backup server mentioned below is upstairs. David Gewirtz/ZDNET

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ZDNET's key takeaways

Cloud storage costs exploded after unlimited plans vanished

Backing up everything was expensive and unnecessary

Five strategic changes saved over $1,200 per year

60 terabytes. I'll never see that much cloud storage again. On one hand, I'm relieved. On the other, I'm deeply saddened.

This is a story that began many chapters ago. It culminated with some serious self and infrastructure examination, a couple of hard conversations, and a few tough decisions.

This is a story of online data hoarding in the guise of best practices, where too much became way too much, and the seemingly simple task of maintaining backups became an on-call emergency response second job.

I changed all that this week.

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