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Cloud vs. Physical HD Storage


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<p>Photography has become a serious hobby with me and I am going through the same dilemma that I'm sure you have already solved regarding backing up photos and I could use some advice.<br>

As it stands, I only keep only my most recent photos on my computer and keep everything else on an external hard drive which works decently, but I'm considering storing backing up my photos all in one place using cloud storage instead of dealing with multiple external HD's. Is one system better than the other?<br>

I'm a Mac user, and have MobileMe, is their iDisk adequate or is Google's Picasa any better? Is there anything else that works better or should I just stick to physical storage.<br>

Thanks for your help!<br>

Zander</p>

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<p>At the moment, I would only use the cloud as a third back-up: Hard drive and dvd are your first two. I most definitely would not use the cloud "instead" of anything.</p>

<p>The only cloud source I trust at the moment is google. If you have your own domain name, you can get Google Apps For Free and is incredible that you get 50 users at 7 gig each. If you wish to pay $50/yr and get 25 gig per user, you can go with Google Apps For Business and to a large extent, is what I use.</p>

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<p>The biggest issue is always going to be bandwidth. I can easily create 4GB of RAW files on a busy day of shooting, often more. On anything other than a blazing fast connection, that would take many, many hours to upload to some online service. And many hours to pull it all back down if I needed it. And then there's the risk of simply having it all go away ... such places don't make too many real guarantees, if you read the fine print. Just buy a couple of $75, 2TB drives, mirror your content to them, rotate occasionally, and keep one off-site incase of theft or fire.</p>
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<p>I trust, for example, google's ability to keep their drives and servers and backups safe FAR more than I trust myself to do so.</p>

<p>However, as Matt says, bandwidth is currently the issue. I look forward to the day when I can use the "cloud" to backup images. But we aren't there yet as far as I am concerned.</p>

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<p>The disadvantage of online storage is the time it takes to upload photos. Depending on your file size requirements and internet connection, it could take weeks to upload everything and days to upload new content from a single shoot. </p>

<p>The other problem is when a business fails your images go with it. This has happened to a couple online backup sites.</p>

<p>However, in a reliable environment, internet-based storage (amazon.com's Simple Storage Service [s3], for example) does offer another quite a bit of redundancy. </p>

<p>Personally, I use multiple computers, external and internal drives on both, and a fire-proof safe. </p>

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<p>Garrison -</p>

<p>And I still remember when a 10 MB (not GB) hard drive was considered excess. After all - Who could fill 10 megabytes?</p>

<p>I'm still looking for a good $75 external 2 tb - I have seen internals for that - but not externals.</p>

<p>Dave</p>

 

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<p>That's going back a bit David :)</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I'm still looking for a good $75 external 2 tb - I have seen internals for that - but not externals.</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>I buy internals and use eSata docking stations. I love them. Less space, easy to swap. Soon they'll be in USB3 and even faster.</p>

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<blockquote>

<p>I trust, for example, google's ability to keep their drives and servers and backups safe FAR more than I trust myself to do so</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I think google and other large corporations will do a lot to keep their own data safe on their own drives and servers but when you're using a free or very cheap service I don't trust them at all.<br>

I remember a few years ago there was a photo service that stored images and when they went out of business everyone using it was going crazy trying to get their data before they shut down. You can also read about T-Mobile and Microsoft's data loss here.<br>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_data_loss_2009</p>

<p>Of course I am super anal retentive about my data and have 3 rotating backups and once a month I rerun a checksum of every file on every drive to make sure nothing has changed. Everything is automated other than plugging the drive in and typing one command.</p>

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<p>I looked at this a few months ago but for the size files photographers deal with (I have about 100GB of data) it literally would take me days and days to upload it and cost more than I'm willing to pay. I opted instead to get another external HD and keep it offsite in my climate controlled office. I also back up the original pictures to DVD by month, so for each original there are 3 copies.</p>
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<p>I took a hard look at this a month ago and decided to go with Mozy for cloud back up. It is the third tier behind two external hard drives. I'm retired now and no longer have an outside location (e.g., office) to store one of the hard drives. Between work and photo files I had 49 GB to back up. As others have noted, it is slow and the process took 4 1/2 14 hour days to accomplish. I did not leave my computer running 24/7 which could have shortened things. It is now set to automatically backup twice a day and the backups now take only a couple of minutes to accomplish.</p>

<p>One thing to be very careful of if you are a Lightroom user and have xmp files with your edits; Mozy does not recognize this file extension in their default list and it MUST be added. The worst thing to have happen is to back up all the RAW files and not have your xmp files there. The cost is about $50/year for unlimited storage.</p>

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<p>Roger<br>

"I looked at this a few months ago but for the size files photographers deal with (I have about 100GB of data) it literally would take me days and days to upload it and cost more than I'm willing to pay."<br>

What cost? I use backblaze and it is unlimited for $5/month. Also they will do a recovery on a usb hd for a very reasonable cost. <br>

Zander: <br>

"I looked at this a few months ago but for the size files photographers deal with (I have about 100GB of data) it literally would take me days and days to upload it and cost more than I'm willing to pay."<br>

Actually it is a pretty mature product IF you use the right company. I am an Apple user and I first started with Mozy. But looking at the resources Mozy (continually used disk resources and memory. They said it was fixed in next version but I didn’t want to wait to see if it would cause my internal hd to fail sooner). I went to BackBlaze because they are very MAC experienced. Their program puts very little stress on my system.<br>

I am very religious about backups. I run a 2 tb usb drive using time machine continually. I backup a full clone using superduper every week to 1 tb firewire 800 drive and I continually back up to backblaze. I am backing up over 250 gb of data to the cloud. <br>

On my photos I also backup a dvd for each month of pictures. </p>

 

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<p>@Roger, to clarify what Charles said in his response, you can mark an entire directory for backup BUT it will only back up files whose extensions are in the Mozy dictionary. As I noted, the xmp files are not and it was only when I was almost finished with the initial back up that I noticed that the directory sizes did not match up. That's when I discovered that the xmp extension needed to be added. You cannot assume that Mozy will have every file extension in the dictionary.</p>

<p>@Ed Nsb, Mozy consumes virtually zero resources on my Win7 PC. It's programmed to back up only twice a day following the initial backup.</p>

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<p>Charles, I believe the LR catalog also stores the recipe for changes to your files, hence the option to also write XMP files as separate files.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Lightroom automatically writes adjustments and settings metadata to the catalog. You can also instruct Lightroom to write the changes to XMP. <br />Source: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Lightroom/2.0/WS638E3AC9-A04C-4445-A0D3-F7D8BA5CDE37.html</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Ed, thanks for the backblaze link. Most services have high costs for large data sets or are cheap but have gotten very mixed reviews.<br>

Also, here's a nice summary of online storage sites I found:<br>

http://tomuse.com/ultimate-review-list-of-best-free-online-storage-and-backup-application-services/</p>

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  • 11 months later...

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