dusty3d Loc: South Florida

I back up my photos to two external hard drives but considering a cloud back up as well. What if any cloud apps are you using and why? Can you view these photos and work on them as you can with an external drive? I use a Mac. I am wondering do I really need cloud since I do have them on two external hard drives? Of course if I lost my house due to a hurricane or fire then the HD's would be lost. Just thinking.

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

DropBox is excellent for storing your finished images. I have 3 large external drives where I keep everything.

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

dup

Mac Loc: Pittsburgh, Philadelphia now Hernando Co. Fl.

Look in to Apples iCloud. The cost varies depending on how much space you get and can be changed if you need more or less. Your pictures will be automatically backed up to the Cloud. An Apple rep can give you all the specifics.

bdk Loc: Sanibel Fl.

I use Amazon cloud, its slower than other services but its $12.00 a year with unlimited storage . I currently have about 12,000 files there. . It is for pictures only , I use it strictly as an off site back up . I send the RAW files and any Tiff or JPG I may have created.
If you want to work on a file, you have to download it then load it into your editing program. which is time consuming so I only send finished files, never ones Im working on.
I believe if you have amazon prime, its free....

speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

I'm thinking of getting the new Seagate drive (for on the go). It is very small, can fit in your shirt pocket (it's about the size of a pack of cigarettes), has USB 3 connectivity and has a storage of 5TB. That's plenty when you're on the road! It's also under 200 bucks!!!

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

I figure the cloud as a way for Microsoft to look at your computer and devise other ways to keep us subservient to Microsoft. As far as storage the most cost efficient I found was Zenfolio. I use it for a website and post my best there so that when someone asks where is your website I tell them go to Zenfolio. My site is http://elm7photography.zenfolio.com/ I do not use it for storage. For storage I keep a file I call Nikon Pics on 2 external hard drives. I suggest keeping 2 drives because I have experienced the Seagate drive failure on 2 drives last year. I currently have 3 external drives in my backup physical storage(like on a real shelf). I have found that in the digital world the more copies you have the better are your chances of not losing it all to drive failure. I use the drives in the computer as program only drives and store everything on external drives. What I need now is a 5 to 10 terra byte drive to free up the drives in storage. This is where digital starts costing as much as film days. The storage mediums. Of course you can always use dvd's for the best of the best because they never loose data unless scratched. This of course means good labeling on the dvd so you can find the one you want.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

I use Amazon S3. For archiving, I use S3 - infrequent access at $.0125 per GB/month. For files that I access more frequently, I use regular S3 at $.025 per GB/month. For automated backup/mirroring to S3, I use Goodsync with good results. Amazon is by far the largest cloud provider, ~8x the size of Google and larger than the next 4 providers combined. I mention that because with a cloud provider, financial stability is key.

2016 Market share:

Amazon Web Services, 31 percent
Microsoft, 9 percent
IBM Cloud and SoftLayer, 7 percent
Google, 4 percent
Salesforce, 4 percent

SteveR Loc: Michigan

It was my experience that picture quality was lost when I backed up photos onto a backup disk via wifi. Why should I believe that backing up photos to the cloud would give me any better quality with my backups?

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

Ok first of all wifi and the cloud are pretty much the same just one is wireless and one is on someones elses hard drive. If quality is lost it is due to radio signal loss through wires and wireless signal paths to get to al of these very external devices. Hopefully as mentioned by another here on UHH you do not store your data on a subscription service that is not financially stable or has bad servers. The best storage is to buy more external drives and store it yourself on your drives. the best drives for me so far have been Toshiba. I say that because I am looking at 2 Seagate drives that no longer function and I cannot find an e-mail directly to Seagate.
your router at home is WIFI your phone is a wifi device as well as well hell these days almost all devices are wireless. Wireless has more loss than wire because the data has to be encapsulated in a carrier wave and sent into the air to another device and then in-encapsulated and stored. No wireless transmission is done with wire tied directly to your computer and plugged in by currently USB ports. Some line loss in voltage but the data gets through safely because it was hardwired in. Any wireless device can cause data corruption and usually does not. I have been an electronics engineer and have my video cameras hardwired to their recorder and monitor so no one can hack it. Wireless can be hacked into too easy. So can most every computer. but your pics are best stored at home on your own drive and not in the cloud where a good hacker can attach a virus to your connection which probably may not happen but why have an open back door to your computer because most people will not turn off their cloud connection when not in use.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

A file is a file, and unless corrupted, the quality of an image file doesn't doesn't change regardless of the transport mechanism or the storage media. Now if you were saving as a JPEG or other compressed format and saved at a lower quality than the original, then that's a different story, but it has nothing to do with wifi or the cloud.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

With respect, you're an electronics engineer and you wrote this? (Shaking head in disbelief). I don't know where to begin...

SteveR Loc: Michigan

Well, somehow, I had photos corrupted and even lost when backing them up to a backup disk through wifi, so I don't trust it.

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

sorry I tried to dumb it down and yes I have seen files corrupted during transfer.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Ther's a difference between data corruption and loss of quality. Regarding data corruption over wifi (or Ethernet), may I suggest Googling TCP/IP, which is the transport mechanism, and reading up on the characteristics?