An unpleasant surprise for My Book Live owners

The 2TB My Book Live apparently cost £170 in 2011, and nowadays you can get a 6TB WD My Cloud Home for that price. A 2TB account on Dropbox costs £96/year (but 3TB is more than 2x the price, and it appears to be impossible to pay for more than 3TB on a individual account). So if you have less than 2TB of data, and buy two large local disks for redundancy, and you keep those disks for several years, Dropbox is quite a lot more expensive per GB of data. At that scale it's not a huge difference in absolute cost though, so maybe the difference is justified by the maintenance effort and the risk of data loss.

If you have less than 100GB of data then it looks like you can get Microsoft OneDrive for £24/year, or 100GB on Google One for £16/year, etc. That's probably enough for most people's remotely-accessible backed-up document requirements, and is cheaper than the smallest home NAS you can buy, so in those cases the cloud solutions sound a lot more compelling.

At the terabyte scale, I guess the bigger issues are the lack of flexibility (some people really want to store more than 3TB of, uh, Linux ISOs, and Dropbox simply won't let you) and bandwidth (many people will find it slow and expensive to upload terabytes of data from home, or maybe they're using the storage for real-time video editing and need higher bandwidth and lower latency than they get through the internet, etc).

So it sounds like a fairly small niche where a home NAS ends up being better value, but there are still some valid use cases, and the world is large enough that it's worth developing good technology for niches.