DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

My first wife was an archivist and she beat into me “Always save the originals”!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Amazon S3, Google Drive, Microsoft Azure or One Drive, Apple ICloud. Of those, Amazon owns the cloud in that they are as large as the next 4 or 5 combined. They have 3 levels depending on your needs: frequent access, infrequent access or Glacier, each tier being less expensive. You can move files, folders or the entire file system between tiers in real time as your needs change.

lwhitlow

There are a few originals we are keeping, but had boxes and boxes of photos and slides that we needed to do something with, as we have downsized our home and no longer have room to store them.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

If they are family photos can you find another family member to take them?

traderjohn Loc: New York City

I gather she didn't save her "original"

yssirk123 Loc: New Jersey

Checkout Backblaze

lwhitlow

Thank you 😊

lwhitlow

Yes, I have already my daughter who are going to keep the ones we are saving. 😊

srt101fan

Read the responses carefully. You asked about cloud "storage"; some are giving you cloud "backup" suggestions. There is a difference. I think it has to to with accessibility and the ability to share content. I'm not totally smart on this issue; maybe others can elaborate.

(I use Backblaze for my cloud backup)

Robertl594 Loc: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Nantucket

I use Crash Plan by Code 42. I like it. It is truly unlimited. Many “unlimited” solutions cap out at 1tb.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Me too. Several things I like about Crash Plan.

(1) Crash Plan saves versions. So if something gets backed up, then you edit it and it gets saved again, the older one is still there so if you really screwed up the edit you can go back. Also, since it saves changed files, if a file gets corrupted, it's changed and a backup program will save it. If you restore it you get the corrupted file. But you can restore the one before it and get the uncorrupted file.

(2) Crash Plan will save your stuff to the cloud. But you can also set it up to simultaneously save your stuff to a local disk. If you want to restore a lot of stuff, you can restore it from the local disk and you won't be limited by your internet speed.

One other point. The OP specifically asked about cloud storage. I think cloud storage is an important part of a backup strategy. But due to bandwidth limitations, local storage is much more convenient than cloud storage. Due to professional maintenance, cloud storage is much safer than local storage. I think it's important to use both local storage and cloud storage. Local for convenience and cloud for safety.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

👍👍 I absolutely concur that versioning is important and that you need both a local backup copy and an off-site disaster recovery copy in the cloud.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

👍👍
A lot of people think that "off-site" means they should store a disk at aunt Minnie's house or the local bank vault. While every little bit helps, that is not enough.

If aunt Minnie is local, you could run into the Paradise problem. In one of the wildfires a year or two ago the entire town burnt down. That would include the local bank vault.
If aunt Minnie is distant, the inconvenience of synchronizing the off-site copy would lead to gaps in coverage.

Cloud storage is not only off-site, it is widely duplicated and distributed so there is no single location to have a regional problem that would impact the storage.

Robertl594 Loc: Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and Nantucket

[/quote]
One other point. The OP specifically asked about cloud storage. I think cloud storage is an important part of a backup strategy. But due to bandwidth limitations, local storage is much more convenient than cloud storage. Due to professional maintenance, cloud storage is much safer than local storage. I think it's important to use both local storage and cloud storage. Local for convenience and cloud for safety.[/quote]

Could not agree more. It took me a month to back up my files to the cloud. I use multiple back up strategies. 1. 2 separate Internal 8 tb SSD hard drives for back up and synchronization of my main data Hard drive (D) (you can use USB but internal are faster). 2. Cloud storage with multiple versions of my files. If somethings goes bad. I have my local back up to restore from, if my computer dies, I have my off site cloud back up. Unless the drive goes bad, the backup disk still has the data and can be put into a different computer. (I have an SSD as my boot drive (C) with a separate drive for my scratch disk to speed things up). I also synchronize my computers to each other using SugarSync so all of my files (except photos) are on synchronized drives on all of my computers. If one fails, my other computers are exact replicas of each other. They offer protected files as well which are previous versions of the same files sorted by date. So if you have an issue (ransomware) you can restore from a previous version.
Even though I have redundancy, crap still happens. A hard drive recently failed. I was able to restore all of my data, but it took a while. So be diligent in your back up strategies.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Exactly!