Archival storage is something everyone should consider. But it all depends on how much you value your stuff. And by stuff, I mean everything on your computer, not just the photos.

Level 0: no archive. Everything is on your computer's hard drive. You risk it all. You can get wiped out by a lightning strike 30 miles away, coming through the power lines. If you don't have anything you want to save on your computer, you can stop here.

Level 1: an external hard drive with a copy of everything on your hard drive. (Programs and Operating systems are easily replaced, so no need to copy them, but you should have a copy of your installation keys for the programs you use). This is a minimal archive. It can protect against accidental deletes. Line glitches can wipe out everything on your computer and your archival disk if the disk is connected to the computer.

Level 2: two or more external hard drives with a copy of everything. At least one of the hard drives is stored off-site to protect against local disasters.

Level 3: two or more external hard drives and a cloud account. The hard drives give you level 2 protection and the cloud account gives you protection against regional disasters (such as the Paradise fire, where the whole town burned, probably including everything that was in the local bank vault).

If you choose levels 1-3, consider that an essential part of archiving is maintenance. Hard drives have a finite lifetime. Copy the data to a new hard drive every couple years to protect against aging failures. This also gives you the opportunity to increase the capacity of your system since you have been taking more photos, producing more word processing documents and spreadsheets, getting more email, etc....

Local storage (the external hard drives) will be your primary archive. If you have to restore something, that is where you turn first. There are no bandwidth issues and the download time is fast. Cloud storage is secondary. It's there if all your primary archives fail. Your local hard drives are maintained by an amateur (you), and are all in close proximity to each other. Cloud storage devices are maintained by professionals, and are duplicated across countries, if not continents. Local storage is convenient. Cloud storage is safe. (Assuming you choose a reputable cloud provider).

Go professional and buy Dropbox storage. I have no limits on file size, performance is excellent, and I keep my Lightroom and export folders in Dropbox, so backup is realtime. You have discovered that thrid tier cloud services are dangerous.

But you should also never, ever have all your eggs in one basket. Just like keeping everything on 1 external hard drive runs a huge risk of drive failure.

A few years ago, the HD that held my photo directories failed. I lost about a 4 Tb of date, including 2½ Tb of movies scanned from (my own) DVDs. My photographs were in Dropbox and were protected. Installing a new HD and letting everything restore overnight was simple.

Now, I have all critical files on a Drobo 5C RAID array, backed up by Dropbox, and mirrored several times per week on a Netgear NAS using Acronis True image.

The setup was not inexpensive, but far less of an expense compared to what I might loose.

Archival storage is something everyone should consider. But it all depends on how much you value your stuff. And by stuff, I mean everything on your computer, not just the photos.

Level 0: no archive. Everything is on your computer's hard drive. You risk it all. You can get wiped out by a lightning strike 30 miles away, coming through the power lines. If you don't have anything you want to save on your computer, you can stop here.

Level 1: an external hard drive with a copy of everything on your hard drive. (Programs and Operating systems are easily replaced, so no need to copy them, but you should have a copy of your installation keys for the programs you use). This is a minimal archive. It can protect against accidental deletes. Line glitches can wipe out everything on your computer and your archival disk if the disk is connected to the computer.

Level 2: two or more external hard drives with a copy of everything. At least one of the hard drives is stored off-site to protect against local disasters.

Level 3: two or more external hard drives and a cloud account. The hard drives give you level 2 protection and the cloud account gives you protection against regional disasters (such as the Paradise fire, where the whole town burned, probably including everything that was in the local bank vault).

If you choose levels 1-3, consider that an essential part of archiving is maintenance. Hard drives have a finite lifetime. Copy the data to a new hard drive every couple years to protect against aging failures. This also gives you the opportunity to increase the capacity of your system since you have been taking more photos, producing more word processing documents and spreadsheets, getting more email, etc....

Local storage (the external hard drives) will be your primary archive. If you have to restore something, that is where you turn first. There are no bandwidth issues and the download time is fast. Cloud storage is secondary. It's there if all your primary archives fail. Your local hard drives are maintained by an amateur (you), and are all in close proximity to each other. Cloud storage devices are maintained by professionals, and are duplicated across countries, if not continents. Local storage is convenient. Cloud storage is safe. (Assuming you choose a reputable cloud provider).

I have used SugarSync For a number of years. Yesterday, I discovered that none of my photo backup files were on their system. Within the past year, I had increased my capacity with them, because of the number of files I was building up and wanted to have backed up by a cloud system, in the future.

Now, without any warning of which I was aware, they have suddenly decided that they would no longer entertain any files larger than 300MB. Since I was doing a lot of RAW work, it was not unusual for me to have far more than 300MB in any given file.

Keep in mind that I have had my files there in that kind of size all along, for years. But what I discovered was that all of my files that were larger than 300MB had suddenly disappeared from their site! In fact, what I discovered was that all of my multiple photo files had now simply vanished from the backup system. I had paid additionally for greater capacity, but I'm now using less than 9% of what I had paid for, in advance. From previous experience, I should be using about 50% of the capacity for which I was enrolled.

So I am asking any of you in the group, who has used SugarSync? And have you had similar difficulties?