Computer security experts say you should always maintain a minimum of three (3) forms of backup for your photographs. At least one should be off site to protect against loss in the event of fire or natural disaster. The Cloud is not the best choice because your photos will be under the control of a second party that may have technical problems, financial failure or bankruptcy, sale to an unreliable party or may hold your data hostage to rising costs. My system provides both on and off site redundant backup that is completely under my own control.

My system consists of the following:

1) All storage of photographs is external to the computer’s (iMac) internal drive.

2) Downloads from the camera, editing, final product and primary storage is on a 5Tb Western Digital My Book drive.

a. Each shoot is stored in a folder identified by job name and date.

b. Within each folder are three sub-folders labeled “RAW”, “Edit” and “Final”. All uploads are made to the RAW folder and only copies of the raw files are copied to the Edit folder for editing. The final output that may include JEPG, TIFF, etc. files are transferred to the Final folder.

3) The complete primary storage drive is backed up to a Drobo 5-drive RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). This allows multiple backup copies of the data along with offsite backup. In addition, the Drobo’s firmware automatically corrects any data transfer errors and insures that all backup drives have matched data. The RAID consists of five Western Digital Red Drives, which are designed for this type of service and have an excellent reputation for reliability. Furthermore they are “hot swappable” which means they can be safely inserted and removed from the Drobo without removing power from the system.

a. The Drobo is only powered on when backups are being made. Otherwise, it is powered off. This limits the exposure to possible hacking.

b. Although the Drobo can hold up to five drives, only four are in the unit at any given time. Three of the drives are never removed and provide the basic redundancy.

c. The fourth drive position is used for the offsite backup. Two drives are used for that purpose.

4) Once a week or as necessary, drive 4 is removed from the Drobo and taken to the bank. Drive 5 is removed from my safe deposit box and drive 4 takes it place in the box.

5) Drive 5 is inserted into the Drobo where the data from Drives 1, 2 and 3 are automatically copied to it.

As a result, I have complete redundancy and no recurring costs. The safe deposit box costs me nothing because I keep at least the minimum required amount in my bank accounts.

Now tell me why I would possibly want to use cloud storage of my photographs?

You make a very good point. How you store the final result is key to future proofing your work!

When using non destructive editing tools this is always an issue regardless of the brand of editing software. It requires a process. And that process takes additional effort and organization. It's more convenient and less work to simply store the edits in and share/print from the editing software and many people do just that. I have done that in the past. No more. Because that is not future proof as us Aperture x-pats can attest.

But perhaps people who store their editis within the software feel that owing an infinite license makes is somehow less risky to take that path. Experience tells me that is not the case.