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#1
Free Online Storage
After looking at a few free online storage/cloud services I am not sure (I would like to backup just photos) so can any members please suggest a storage provider ? thank you :)
After looking at a few free online storage/cloud services I am not sure (I would like to backup just photos) so can any members please suggest a storage provider ? thank you :)
Free online storage is always a bad idea except for very temporary storage, such as a few days, because those sites have a history of disappearing with little or no warning. While using free online storage for backups is better than no backups at all and is less risky than using it for your only location for your photos, you still run the risk of permanently losing your photos should you lose the originals and the online photos also get lost.
Far safer is a paid online backup service, such as Carbonite or CrashPlan. I prefer Carbonite myself, even though it costs more ($60/year), since it has a better reliability track record than CrashPlan, although CrashPlan reportedly has improved recently. Paid backup plans exist to make a profit, which give them far more incentive to stick around than the free sites have.
Carbonite and CrashPlan both have software that will encrypt your data before it ever leaves your computer and automatically uploads it in the background without slowing your computer any. You can use the default settings or use your own settings to determine what gets backed up and when it gets uploaded.
The price I quoted for Carbonite is for a data only plan for one computer. Carbonite also has other plans for multiple computers, for making a mirror backup to an external HDD, for backing up USB external HDDs (hint: if an external HDD is connected 24/7, or at least half of the time in a given month, via e-SATA, Carbonite treats it as an internal HDD), etc.
I use both SkyDrive (7GB free for new users) and Google Drive (15GB free shared between GMail, Google+ and Google Drive). Both have programs to sync to your devices. There is not much to chose between them.
Google is notorious for discontinuing services for no apparent reason, no matter how popular they may be, so I would put Google Drive at the bottom of the list.
I've tried Flicker for temporarily backing up photos taken while on trips and found it too unintuitive to use for my tastes; I never did figure out how to retrieve them (granted, I didn't waste a lot of time on it) and the site itself showed the photos with a Flickr watermark in the corner. All of Yahoo has been rapidly going south ever since the Google defector, Mayer, has taken over; I wish she would go back to Google or just go away.
I presently use Amazon's Cloud Drive—it's only 5GB but I rarely need more than that— for photo backups when on the road but I also backup to my notebook, a 32GB card I keep in my purse, and leave them on the card in the camera (I carry spare cards so I never run out of room). Although Amazon's cloud drive is about as safe as any free site will be, I still don't trust it for long term storage. Heck, as reliable as Carbonite is, I don't fully trust it. I keep two local backups and one offsite backup on HDDs in addition to Carbonite. No matter how reliable a medium may be, it is still subject to failure and the only protection from that is redundancy.
I have multiple local backups, between multiple devices, and external drives, I only use online storage for "published" images, and have dual redundancy between flickr and my 25GB skydrive.
at the end of a days shoot my images, (can often be in excess of 16GB a day), from the day are uploaded to my local drive, plus a copy to a second drive for temporary storage until my scheduled backup runs.
It's so refreshing to see people who "get" the idea of what reliable backups are and why. I still see way too many post saying all their data went away for whatever reason and they want to recover it, not realizing that data recovery is usually a crapshoot at best unless one has a good backup scheme in place.
At home, I keep a backup of each HDD in my computer on two separate HDDs I keep locally—I run backups on those once a week—and one in a safe deposit box at my credit union—that one gets swapped out no less than once a month. The Carbonite backup is mostly to fill the gap since the last backup on the HDDs although it could be used for full data recover (although that would take several weeks). Carbonite also has 30 day versioning so I don't have to fool with it locally.
I learned the value of backups very early in my IT career and later I was responsible for designing and testing the IT part of the company's disaster recovery plan. I take the security of my own data every bit as important.