On another note, I wanted to write a bit about the Cloud and how we’ve been working with it. Lately we’ve had a few support incidents regarding different aspects of storage in the Cloud. Those have gotten me thinking about how we should be recommending folks move to a server-less infrastructure.

For cloud storage, there are a few options in the Microsoft Azure portfolio. The first and easiest one is Microsoft SharePoint, specifically OneDrive. Each time you create an environment in Microsoft 365, you get 1 TB of storage for that company in SharePoint. Each additional user adds to that total, 10 GB per license to be precise. So, an organization with 10 licensed users gets 1.1 TB of storage in their SharePoint environment. This is a massive number of documents. For example, we have around 10,000 files in our Team Site and it’s using less than 20 GB, around 2% of that 1 TB total. Even if you have a bunch of pictures, 1 TB is going to be enough.

When this is not enough is when you introduce video to the mix. Whether it’s a rendering of a 3D model, marketing ads, or meeting recaps, video eats up storage fast. And if you need more space for those videos, SharePoint storage is expensive. It is sold in 1 GB increments at the price of $2.40 per year. An additional 1 TB of SharePoint storage costs around $200 per month, making it one of the most expensive ways to expand your space.

Another server-less storage solution that Microsoft offers is called Azure Files. This is a more conventional storage option, where you map the location to your computer, and it shows like any other network drive. You can get fast storage or slow storage, and pricing is complicated but generally for slow storage you could pay as little as $60 per month per 1 TB or as much as $170 per month per 1 TB. There are a lot of caveats here, which will likely increase that monthly fee, but for a handful of people in an office, you could use this route.

Finally, what is probably the hardest sell is building a server infrastructure on Azure for file storage. If all you need to do is store a bunch of files somewhere, a dedicated server solution probably will not be the way you want to go. Costs can skyrocket with multiple servers, VPNs, and bandwidth fees. At this point, if you are looking to store much more than 1 TB of stuff, you probably need to look at a local solution.

But there is hope, I guess. SMB over QUIC which I touched on when I wrote about Windows Server 2025 could provide a way to access files easily without a server. Currently, Azure Files does not support QUIC, but if it ever does, the promise is that you have access to those files on your mapped drive without all of the VPN hassle. And if you’re careful, you can have your older stuff on an HDD share and faster things on an SSD share, potentially making it cost effective.

At the start of 2025, storing a large volume of files on the cloud is just costly and hard drives are comparatively cheap. That 10 TB volume of Blu-Ray rips just needs to live at home for now.

-Nate