Dr J Loc: NE Florida

I shoot everything in RAW and edit with Mac’s Photos and Affinity Photo. I use Mac’s Photos for organization by date and folders for category/event/subject. Any advice for off-site back up would be greatly appreciated - iCloud? Thank you very much.

chapjohn Loc: Tigard, Oregon

Look at Amazon cloud for photos. It is free with prime membership and offers unlimited storage of photos.

Dr J Loc: NE Florida

Thank you chapjohn! I didn’t know about Amazon cloud storage.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

If I were using a Mac, I’d use ICloud unless the size limitation was an issue. Otherwise, I’d consider Amazon S3, Google, and Microsoft clouds (in that order).

rook2c4 Loc: Philadelphia, PA USA

Keep your backup hard drives in a safety deposit box at your bank. It is unlikely they will be stolen, and banks very rarely burn down.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I recently skimmed an article that recommended using several online services. Doing that can get you almost unlimited storage for free. Also, if one quickly shuts down, you don't have all your eggs in one basket. I use Google Photos for display purposes, with all my backups at home on hard drives. Amazon Prime give you free storage.

Dr J Loc: NE Florida

Thank you TriX and jerryc41. I have filled up a 2TB Mac Passport, will purchase another and choose 2 or 3 offline sites too. Since I am an Amazon Prime member, that looks like a good choice - plus iCloud and Google. I appreciate your input - great group of Hogs (with a cranky one or two at times) haha.

Dr J Loc: NE Florida

Thanks you rook2c4. I have a safe deposit box and haven’t visited for years!

bpulv Loc: Buena Park, CA

I don't like cloud storage for my photographs. It places them out of my direct control. The cloud service provider can change their rules or pricing, could be sold, go bankrupt, etc. Also, the upload time can be ridiculous; especially when I return from a trip with 3,000 40Mb RAW files. I use a Drobo RAID system with five mirror image hard drives. Four drives are in the Drobo at all times. The Drobo automatically updates drives when they are exchanged or if one fails and is replaced. One drive is rotated with a fifth drive between my Drobo and my safe deposit box at the bank. That way my pictures never leave my direct control and are protected from fire, earthquake (important in California), flood or any other desaster.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Without (yet again) citing how improbable it is for Amazon, Google or Microsoft to go belly up, and how having good internet access speed is important to utilize cloud storage effectively, let me again address your off-site DR suggestion.

Unless the 5th drive that you swap back and forth with you safety deposit box is the same size (or larger) as the TOTAL size of the other 4 drives COMBINED, you’re not accomplishing what you think. Ask yourself how the data from the other 4 drives is fitting on that 5th drive unless it’s 4x the size of each of the other drives. Unless that’s the case, what you’re doing is regularly failing 1 drive of your redundancy group and forcing the array to rebuild the newly inserted drive while in degraded mode. Not only are you subject to losing all your data if you have a second drive while waiting for the process to complete (which can take a long time with large drives), the RAID performance usually drops by 50% while in degraded mode and rebuilding. If you doubt my explanation, take that drive from the bank and attach it directly to your computer (not in the RAID array), and see what’s on it and if you can restore ALL your files. That simulates the situation if the RAID array was destroyed and the whole point of having an off-site DR. Using a RAID array is a good storage strategy (as long as you keep a spare drive handy), but you still need a FULL copy of your data off-site for disaster recovery (DR).

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

For off-site backup, the only service I'd recommend is Backblaze. https://www.backblaze.com/

Unlike other names that surface regularly when this question is posed, Backblaze has no daily upload limits and their fees are very reasonable.
--Bob

Martino Loc: Northwest Florida

It’s been said before, but have three backups.

1. To the Cloud. iCloud, Amazon, Adobe Cloud etc. You can use this for day to day transfer of images between devices so everything is constantly in sync (computer, phone, tablet etc).
2. To local storage - a removable drive. So you have complete control of your images should Apple, Amazon, Google or Adobe go belly up. Not impossible, but very unlikely.
3. Somewhere else. This could be in a bank vault (that’s a bit 1990s to be frank) or to a service like Backblaze or Carbonite. This is for archive storage or true back up.

It’s all your choice. My personal comment is this is 2018 not 1990, so make use of the technology around you. Nobody but the UKs National Health Service is using Fax machines these days, there are better ways of operating. Same applies to managing data.

LA Loc: Little Rock, AR

I tried amazon storage and gave it up because it was so so so slow. And I have a fast internet connection. My take is that amazon gives free space but says nothing about speed. Free storage seems to be more of a selling point than a practical solution.

I would like to know whether others have had a better experience...and how much they are storing.

bpulv Loc: Buena Park, CA

It sounds like you are speculating and have never had and or do not understand how a Drobo works. I do all my editing on my iMacs internal hard drive, which is erased after I am done with all editing activities and backups have been made both first on an external 5Tb backup drive followed by a totally separate backup on my Drobo. All my drives in the Drobo system are 4Tb and currently have about 2Tb of data on each. Your assertion that the swap drives must have the total combined capacity of the other drives is incorrect. Each and every drive has the same data. The Drobo is designed to automatically correct data errors of up to two bits per word when there are three or more drives in the array, which their always are. Also, the Drobo is always powered off except when I am backing up data at the end of each flash memory download session or editing session or following the swap out of the offsite drives during which the offsite drive is updated by the Drobo to mirror the data on the other drives. The fact that the Drobo's performance drops during that rebuild time is not material since no new data is added to or removed from the Drobo system during that time. If the entire Drobo were to fail, I can use my bank vault drive to rebuild my backup in a new Drobo with new hard drives.

Bill P

Without (yet again) citing how improbable it is for Amazon, Google or Microsoft to go belly up

No bigger chance than Sears or Toys-R-Us.