On-line back-up of photos (1 Viewer)

[Steve Babbs]

I'm not sure if this is the right area for this, so apologies if it's not.

I back up my photos on a number of hard drives, including one at a friend's house, in case mine burns down. But I am wondering if cloud storage would be best. Can anyone recommend a reasonably economical way to do it. I will need well over 1TB and it's going up all the time: I must get better at deleting!

Cheers

Steve

 

[nc_killie]

Normally the upload speed is teh issue.May take a while to upload 1TB!!!....even with a fast broadband!

 

[mdb2]

Hi I have read somewhere that amazon is at a good price ( free) when you pay for their annual delivery service.
Kind regards mike.

 

[CalvinFold]

Yeah I avoided this technique (cloud backups) for the reason cited by nc_killie: uploading your backups could take days or weeks. I actually ran into some articles that did the math and to get a handful of TB at typical broadband speeds could take months (delays, throttling at either end, etc.). Downloading masses of data may only be marginally faster.

Remember that many of the cloud backup services tier their bandwidth, so unless you pay alot, they will limit your download speed.

Others, for a fee, will simply load your backups to a hard drive and send that to you instead (and let you start your backup the same way). Not cheap, but alot faster in the grand scheme of things.

I went with the "redundant offsite backup" technique. Every quarter I bring my backup drives home from their offsite location, mirror the drives I have locally, then take the backup off-site again.

This can be as inexpensive as small stackable/portable hard drives (did that for more than a decade) or as thorough and my current setup (two identical 16 TB Synology boxes). :eek!:

My setup is overkill for just photos; it's my entire digital life (computer backups, tax records, applications, bookkeeping, etc.); I looked at is as "future proofing my infrastructure to support my life and hobbies."

 

[Tero]

You could select your very best and keep them in some form in a flickr album. Not full size but pretty good. See my two albums in my sig.

 

[Steve Babbs]

Thanks for your thoughts everyone. I think I'll stick with my present hard drive system, including one off site, after investing in some 4TB drives.