goldbergbarry Posted June 7, 2011 Share Posted June 7, 2011 <p>Anyone have good experiences backing up their files in the cloud. I'm looking for a solution where I can backup 200GB without breaking the bank. </p> <p>I use Dropbox today for lightweight backups but for 200GB, they get too expensive. Jungledisk is out of the question at $360. Maybe iCloud but I haven't seen any details yet.</p> <p>If anyone has any recommendations for low-cost but reliable solutions, let me know. Thanks!</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
waltflanagan Posted June 7, 2011 Share Posted June 7, 2011 <p>What is your bandwidth for uploading? My downloads are in the 7Mb/s range but my upload are about 384Kb/s. When I did the math it would take me 7 months to upload my data.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charles_Webster Posted June 7, 2011 Share Posted June 7, 2011 <p>Low cost and reliable means external hard drives to me.</p> <p>I have too much data to upload to a cloud, so I just copy external hard drives on a rotating basis and keep one off-site.</p> <p>That covers my projected failure modes adequately for my piece of mind.</p> <p><Chas></p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phule Posted June 7, 2011 Share Posted June 7, 2011 <p>The most cost effective is probably Amazon S3. 200GB of storage is going to be, at the least expensive rate, ~$19/mo. but there are also charges for I/O. You'll have to calculate those based on your needs.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldbergbarry Posted June 7, 2011 Author Share Posted June 7, 2011 <p>Thank you for the quick responses!</p> <p>@Charles - I already have two Network Storage Devices but I am also looking for redundancy with automated off-site backup so that I don't have to constantly be swapping drives. You're right that I may have to end up with what you suggested. I'm doing that now and it is a pain.</p> <p>@ Walt - My current upload speed is 3MB/S. </p> <p>@Rob - I looked at Jungledisk which gives you access to either Amazon S3's services or Rackspace's cloud. They are both close in price with the difference is that the Rackspace solution is not charging for I/O.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alex_cowley Posted June 7, 2011 Share Posted June 7, 2011 <p>I use both CrashPlan and external hard drives, which I rotate. The initial upload to CrashPlan did take a month or two.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acedigital Posted June 7, 2011 Share Posted June 7, 2011 <p>I use Crashplan as well, it is slow, but for like $150 they will send you a 1TB drive to get a jump start on your backup. You backup and send it back to them and they add it to their Cloud.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mattb1 Posted June 7, 2011 Share Posted June 7, 2011 Another idea is to make your own home file server. An out of date desktop computer with Linux (like ubuntu) is not a bad way to go. The big investment would be on disk drives. Linux can support software raid, mirrored drives can give you some sense of security. No matter what, managing a large photo collection is not easy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john_markanich Posted June 7, 2011 Share Posted June 7, 2011 <p>I've thought long and hard about cloud storage. My conclusion for my purposes was NO. Why? I shoot RAW, I shoot a lot, my digital photo folder is therefore large and will continue to get larger. Uploading a days shoot would not be the problem but these cloud sites are, unlike a true insurance company, unregulated. I have heard of a situation where a cloud subscriber was notified that the site would be closing (i.e. going out-of-business). The subscriber had less than three days to download his accumulated files back to his own computer. He didn't have the capacity on hand so he ran out and got a big enough external hard drive. When he began the download it became evident that his multi-gigs of photo's just were not going to meet the deadline of the site's closing whether it was because of band-width somewhere along the line or because hundreds, if not thousands of other subscribers were trying to do the same thing.<br> For me, it's multiple external hard drives, constantly updated and swapped out to safe locations.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldbergbarry Posted June 7, 2011 Author Share Posted June 7, 2011 <p>Hi all - thanks for the responses. Very helpful.</p> <p>I'm going to look into Crashplan. This sounds exactly what I need. I'm going to trial their free plan to see if it works for me and if it does, I'll probably go with the family plan.</p> <p>@John and @Matt - I already have two NAS drives that I use. I just find it a pain to remember to swap out drives every so often. I'm looking for a solution that automates that and helps ensures that my cloud version is always current (at least very close). Also John you raise a good point about what happens if the site goes out of business. I still have two (sometimes three) local copies so I would be okay. I would never make the cloud version my only copy. That would be too risky in my opinion. </p> <p>Thanks again!</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brad_ Posted June 7, 2011 Share Posted June 7, 2011 Be careful. And don't rely solely on cloud backup. Last year several cloud storage/backup services went out of business. And with little notice provided before the plug was pulled. Maybe not likely with those that are S3 based. But who knows with others... www.citysnaps.net Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldbergbarry Posted June 7, 2011 Author Share Posted June 7, 2011 <p>@Brad - good point. I would never make the cloud version my only copy for that very reason. It would be my third working copy so I could relatively easily find another source.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kris-bochenek Posted June 8, 2011 Share Posted June 8, 2011 <p>I back up all my photos and music to 3 external hard drives 500GB and 1Tb. Whenever I am done with shoot I save RAWs in one folder and JPEGS in another with the same name as RAWs and I just add JPG extention. Then I transfer all those to my drives and keep one off site and two other are always plugged in and ready to go. I had a disc fail once and I would think I'd have to be real unlucky to have all 3 fail at one time.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldbergbarry Posted June 8, 2011 Author Share Posted June 8, 2011 <p>@Kris - I'm not worried about all three failing at once. I am more worried about an event such as a fire and not having to constantly swap out a drive with one that is off-site.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john_harper9 Posted June 8, 2011 Share Posted June 8, 2011 <p>I have been looking at cloud backup for both personal and corporate networks. The bandwidth restrictions in my area kills the practicality of routine full backups and most of my incremental backups. The upload is not finished by the time the next work day starts. If you want to use cloud backup for images, be very aggressive editing down the collections you upload. Some cloud backup methods need local storage for staging what gets uploaded - I use NAS for this, so I have the original, local backup, and the cloud.<br> Given the dropping cost of hard drives vs.tape, I'm transitioning from tape to plug-in hard drives for local backup.<br> As with everything in the cloud, you are transferring the cost of infrastructure and software to a 3rd party. They have to maintain their servers and ensure data is available and recoverable. Who do you trust and depend on?</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john_c16 Posted June 8, 2011 Share Posted June 8, 2011 <p>Backblaze. end of story. backblaze.com Unlimited backup for $5/computer/month.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indraneel Posted June 8, 2011 Share Posted June 8, 2011 <p>I just got 4x1TB external drives (seagate freeagent 2.5" which will support any future connectors) for quadruple backups. Cheap and good value.</p> <p>Backups are overhyped. Most data loss occurs due to intentional deletion of data.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldbergbarry Posted June 8, 2011 Author Share Posted June 8, 2011 <p>@ Indraneet - sort of like life insurance. Overhyped until a disaster happens.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
indraneel Posted June 8, 2011 Share Posted June 8, 2011 <blockquote> <p>sort of like life insurance. Overhyped until a disaster happens.</p> </blockquote> <p>disasters too are overhyped. Leading causes of death are malnutrition, heart disease and infections; all detectable and mostly preventable in advance with some planning. The same goes for data backups. The chance that I delete a file today and will find myself looking for it a month later is significantly higher than drives failing; most backup systems (including clouds) do not take this into consideration.</p> <p>The most effective backup would be to delete in staggered stages. e.g. I have a current duplicate (current data duplicated on two drives), a copy of my data 6 months ago, and a copy of my data 2 years ago. Depending on my personal growth I conservatively delete and modify the 6 month and 2 year backups every 6 months to a year. These are archives and I keep them around in case I need to make a fresh start if both my current duplicate disks fail or I mistakenly delete files. What I keep on the archives depend on how much energy I'm willing to put in to recreate lost data or my ability to forever do without it.</p> <p>There is of course a much better backup strategy, and has been in use for text files for decades. It's called revision control, and is used for software development. With recent improvements in binary diffing, one can consider putting all of one's life's work into version control and simply keeping a few clones of that. backblaze does that... for the past 4 weeks. Maybe use <a href="http://git-scm.com/">git</a> if you need versioning forever. These are still a bit geeky for now, but if you need that one file you deleted on Christmas eve of 2004, this is the only way to go.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldbergbarry Posted June 8, 2011 Author Share Posted June 8, 2011 <p>@ Indranel - Thank you for taking the time to respond however your response is completely off-topic, I'm not sure how to respond but I will try.</p> <p>I've been in IT for 20+ years and I understand back-up strategies. Your notion that disasters are overhyped is absurd. For example, while the chance of my house burning down is quite low, I still have homeowners insurance to protect my family. It is the same reason that I am looking for off-site storage that allows me to setup scripts on my computer to automatically back them to the cloud. It would be devastating to lose all of my files.</p> <p>With your staggered back up every six months, while I am glad that works for you, I want something that handles off-site back ups in real time with no manual intervention from myself...thus a cloud solution.</p> <p>Regarding the whole paragraph on version control, again way off topic because I am not looking for version control.</p> <p>Thank you for contributing. I do appreciate the effort that you put in.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmanthree Posted June 9, 2011 Share Posted June 9, 2011 <p>Use a combination of local and remote backup. I use HD/Optical for local, and Carbonite for remote. Yes, it took a long time for the initial Carbonite backup, but it's done, and updates pretty quickly now.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davebryce Posted February 14, 2012 Share Posted February 14, 2012 <p>I use large HD's here on site and I back up all my photo's to disc and store them Off site.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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