Bobspez Loc: Southern NJ, USA

It depends on how much data you need to store. I tried to save a 7GB folder to Microsoft One Drive and could not do it. The program kept stalling, and I gave up after a few hours. I zipped the folder into a single zip file of about 6-1/2 GB and saved the zip file to Google Drive. It took a little more than 6 hours. I found out that my upload speeds on my cable service are 5 x slower than my download speeds. I can't see using the cloud for anything other than sharing files. For secondary storage and backup I use a 500GB usb drive that is attached to my desktop. The drive is smaller than a wallet and cost less than $100. I have used it daily for about 5 years.
For really critical document backup I zip a small number of files and mail them to myself on both excite mail and gmail, where they can be saved indefinitely.

louparker Loc: Scottsdale, AZ

Can you store RAW files in Fickr? I don't think so. But you can in Zenfolio with unlimited storage of RAW and JPEG files for $60/yr plus use your own URL and have a means of beautifully displaying whatever images you want in your own customized website while keeping all the others private.

Kuzano

I don't much care what you call it... cloud, either storage or backup, is a last resort. It is the highest risk of loss of any of your data.

The reason is simple... You don't own it... You don't control it, You have no say if it shuts down one day, NONE WHATSOEVER.

Been there, seen it happen.. to my self and to clients (25 year computer consulting)

Have you ever asked for the financials on any web site where you park your data or do business with.

I thought not!

Just not secure enough for me. I'd own and have in my possession all my own backups. Cloud is last resort.. perhaps for OFF SITE!

CooledgeR Loc: Sunny (Hot) Arizona

Big Bill, what imaging utility do you use?

Makaipi Loc: Lexington, South Carolina

I wouldn't trust " The Cloud " as far as I could throw it. Stay with hard drives.

JimEaco

I like MS One Drive.

In my basement are 3 dual CPU Xeon Servers: one was DC (Domain Controller) and Print Server, one was File Server with an array of SCSSI Hot Swappable drives in a RAID 5, and the other was an Exchange Server with a Partition for Terminal Services.
Other than the RAID 5 File Server, everything else was on Mirrored Hot Swappable Drives (RAID 1)

All drives also backed up to a set of SATA Drives and an off-site Tape Drive.

Everything was available to me via the internet, via a VPN Tunnel and/or Terminal Server.
Also there were Switches, VPN Router, Hardware Firewall...

So you can see I liked "Cloud Computing" long before the Cloud became popular.

I have pulled the plug(s) on all that hardware. I use One Drive and back-up to local hard drives.

I will say my private set-up was slightly faster than One Drive, but it was also a hell of a lot more costly.
Conservatively, I save $750 a year just on my electric bill. Add the cost of the Server software(s) licensing, and IT Support and the savings run into several thousand per year.

I save everything to One Drive and I back One Drive up to a 3-TB Drive on my local machine.
With One Drive I can access any file, any time, any where.
And yes it is compatible with iOS.
I can open files on my iPhone, edit, print, send, attach etc. or on a laptop, iPad, Surface...
I use MS Office 365 it comes standard with a 1-TB Cloud Drive (One Drive) Windows 10 came with 15 GB so combined I have plenty storage.

It is feasible I could load that drive with images and want for additional storage, but I store images on another drive provided by Adobe (Part of the CC Suite) Which is also backed up to a local Drive.

Therefore, all my data is available locally, if either Microsoft or Adobe go belly-up.

The option of using a personal cloud drive or a series of Personal (external network drives) is another good option.
You can buy external HD's at Best Buy for short money ($100-$125)

If I find myself in need of additional storage I will add external drives.
If I get paranoid about losing data in a catastrophe, I will purchase additional external drive(s) and install them at a relative or trusted friend location with good internet bandwidth. Set my drives to back up at 2:15 a.m. daily and be done with it.

A very nice feature of One Drive is that you can share the drive a folder or single file, password protect it and 'collaborate' at will. Instead of attaching multiple large files to an email you simply send a link. The recipient clicks on the link and has access to the files you have shared.

louparker Loc: Scottsdale, AZ

If "control" is your thing, you have absolutely control over what happens if your house catches fire or blows up from a gas leak and all of your precious hard drives that are in your "control" are destroyed -- same if a burglar breaks in and steals your computer equipment and external HDs. An extreme example is what happened to businesses in the twin towers on 9/11 -- all of them lost all of their hardware, including their hard drives. Cloud storage, on the other hand, protects you 100% against such disasters assuming you use a well-established service, like M/S's One Drive, Apple's iCloud, Carbonite, etc., all of which have redundant servers so if one goes done or is destroyed, your data is still there on their redundant servers. You need to get with the 21st Century and the age of technology. That's not to say that using your own external HDs is not a good idea, but that alone certainly does not assure that your images and data will not be lost -- and remember, all HDs crash, it's not a matter of if, but when.

jdrtexas Loc: Dallas, TX

I use SmugMug as it's basically unlimited storage for a minimal annual fee. Easy to protect and or share images and even videos (less than 20 minutes each).

Also, SmugMug offers the ability to sell images if desired and to present pictures in an attractive way. Their support staff is terrific--very prompt and helpful on any issue. I've been using them for over 3 years.

rehess Loc: South Bend, Indiana, USA

So, what did you personally do to protect your images in the daze of film??

louparker Loc: Scottsdale, AZ

As I noted previously, Zenfolio does the same thing, only its a lot easier to use and customize than SmugMug -- I have used both and ZF wins hands down. Besides if you want to have the ability to sell images, you have to pay more for your SM subscription, which is the same with ZF.

louparker Loc: Scottsdale, AZ

I didn't, but that was then and now is now and we're in the age of digital imaging. If you have film images you want to safeguard, you should get them digitized and then protect them as I outlined before. That's a paramount reason for digitizing film images -- besides, film images deteriorate over time, digital images do not.

sodapop Loc: Bel Air, MD

I recently discovered a number of boxes of 35mm slides that my parents took 50+ years ago. At least 5000 slides as well as some prints. Virtually all have lost all of there colors, except for magenta. Pretty much ruined... all "purple". Can make OK black and whites out of them but lost all of the color a they were intended to have. Photos of their world travel. Wish I would have found them sooner and digitized and backed up at least the best of them.

Indi Loc: L. I., NY, Palm Beach Cty when it's cold.

I'd do it! Just my opinion.

Indi Loc: L. I., NY, Palm Beach Cty when it's cold.

I just noticed that Amazon Prime Cloud Storage is NOT $11.99/month...it's $11.99 per YEAR.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I absolutely get where you're coming from, but I have to respectfully take exception on the security issue. I've sold storage for the largest storage companies in existence for 30 years (IBM, Netapp, EMC, Oracle...), and I've seen it all including cloud companies going "belly-up" like Nirvanix. I have seen cloud data lost and one company taken down by poor security practices, but that was a very small company (who will remain nameless). I've seen the most redundant systems available (N+4) fail for all sorts of reasons including A/C failures, floods, human errors, and of course a multitude of backup-restore and multiple drive failures, so I have zero trust in long-term hard drive reliability, especially the $100 variety (you get what you pay for in disk drives). I'm by no means endorsing any cloud storage (and I no longer sell storage or have any financial interest in any storage or cloud vendor), BUT consider the following: If you choose a major vendor like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc., the chances of them going belly-up without warning or being taken down by a security breach are exceedingly small, and if that's a concern, then the answer is to use 2 different services and write your data to both (sort of a RAID 1 for cloud). Also consider that all of the above store your data in 3-5 geographically separate sites - much better DR than you can possibly construct on your own. They're hosted in hardened data centers with excellent security, backup power and professional administration, and you can access your data from anywhere that you have an Internet connection. It's very, very difficult to achieve that level of reliability and data availability on your own. I, like you, keep multiple copies of my important data on separate systems which I control, but I also keep a copy in the cloud, and within the last year, following a break-in and theft, my cloud backup allowed me to seamlessly recover all my data quickly. At 99 cents per month for 50GB (Apple ICloud as an example), there's no way I could achieve that level of security or reliability/availability for anywhere near that price. IMHO, the cloud, despite it's limitations and your valid concerns, has an indisputable place in modern data storage and security. In the end, all the photographic equipment we discuss on this forum has only one purpose - to generate and edit data in the form of imagery. Keeping that data safe and secure should be our highest priority, and cloud storage is a very effective way of accomplishing that.