gmcase Loc: Galt's Gulch

Skydrive has 7 gigs of free storage last time I checked.

strikerazde Loc: Phoenix, AZ

A hacked server does not make you lose your original photos, neither does a server failure. Hard Drives on the other hand are local and in a fire or break in all your memories are gone.

Rathyatra Loc: Southport, United Kingdom

Don't need any at the moment but would they work with a mac computer? - I use Time Machine, a mac application, for my backups currently - would it still work on these hard drives?

strikerazde Loc: Phoenix, AZ

Bottom line is one backup is never enough. You should have a backup copy locally. People often confuse this by thinking they have one copy on their PC hard drive. You need a backup of the original. However this is NOT enough, you also need an offsite backup in case of fire or theft. Offsite can be a cloud, Carbonite, DVD's in a safe deposit box. As long as they are not in the same location as the originals. Think about Hurricane Sandy, or New Orleans Flood, any natural disaster and you could lose everything.

Having a backup and not testing it is just as silly as not having one.

Take this from a person has lost 6 months Genealogy research to a Hard Drive crash. I had a backup drive, but never tested it. When it was needed, I found the drive had failed. At that point I had a choice, Do the research again, or pay big $$$ to retrieve the data from a bad drive.

The reason you have backups like this is the same reason you buy insurance for your car or home. You hope you never need it, but if you ever do, it will save you more than you ever spend on it.

Adicus Loc: New Zealand

I have just signed up for the one app plan with Adobe so I now have CS6 and cloud storage . I'm not going to be using the storage as it is only 20 gigs. I just loaded my photo's onto an external drive and I have 335 gigs so 20 gigs free is pretty much useless. I am just going to use external drives.

paulevy Loc: Lawrenceville, NJ USA

And if you get a Target RedCard, you get 5% more off plus a $10 gift card!

robert-photos Loc: Chicago

We are all "In Search of the Ultimate Back Up"

Maximum PC has an excellent article:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/search_ultimate_back?page=0,0

Golden Rule Loc: Washington State

How about saving photos on a memory stick? Everyone has mentioned the external HDs and now I'm thinking my photos are vulnerable to loss because I have them on a stick. Warning, I'm not tech savvy so please pardon me if this is what some of ya'll are talking about.

rebride

Interesting this should come up, considering all the backup I have been doing the last two days. Catching up, been slacking lately.
I have Pogoplug. $4.95 a month unlimited storage. Just started using so no review. Decided to use as off site storage considering my off site external hard drive is usually here and not off site. Really, really slow uploading.
Have multiple externals and RAID array.
Mostly use ioSafe, now. A bit pricey so I buy when on sale.
http://pogoplug.com/
http://iosafe.com/

charles brown Loc: Tennesse

I would be less worried about a company going belly usually some kind of warning. I'm more worried about a company going bankrupt. Usually hidden until last minute. Then what. Love my external hard drive, soon to be drives.

robert-photos Loc: Chicago

I'm not sure what your ISP's upload speed is but per Pogo:
"A general rule of thumb for your maximum transfer rate is to divide the Upload speed where Pogoplug is installed by 8. In the case of a typical DSL connection with a maximum Upload rate of 512Kb/s, the maximum transfer rate would then be ~512Kb/s divided by 8=64KB/s."

I also don't know the size of your upload but I have nearly 4TB of photos and at that tranfer rate it would take over two years to upload my photos based on uploading 24/7 with no glitches!! Or no additions!!

I use JimmyDrive and my upload speed is ~275KB/s. (I have highspeed cable running at about 2MB/s+ upload speed.) I've calculated my initial upload as 6 months barring glitches and additions.

The reason that these cloud services promise you unlimited storage at $60/year is that they give you a straw to push an elephant's worth of data through.

They are great as a failsafe offsite backup but if you have a lot of data (photos, videos, etc.) they should not be used as your primary backup. Just imagine if you have a total crash and loss and you want to recover all that data that took you two years to upload. How long do you think it will take you to download that data?

The download pipe is also restricted to 12.5% of your ISP's max download speed. Typical DSL max download speeds are 384KB/s, 768KB/s or 1.5MB/s....you do the math.

RaydancePhoto

I am a programmer and primarily write software for web servers (cloud) - I would NEVER store my important stuff 'in the cloud', to insecure, corruption of data, "oops, we can't find that document", and no matter what they tell you about privacy, U HAVE NONE. Being the programmer, I can look at any data users have uploaded to my sites very easily, so can Gov and anyone with advanced computer knowledge.

Jinzee

From what I have learned by reading the forum is that people use the cloud while on vacation to upload photographs in order to save data space, giving them unlimited storage capability. Also if their equipment is damaged, lost, or stolen, then they have a way to retrieve the photographs.

*However, since you brought up this question... Are we able to upload photos to the I-cloud on an I-phone while on vacation, or elsewhere?

SteveR Loc: Michigan

I also prefer a direct connection to a backup than something that may result in lost data.

rebride

You got me laughing. You are right.
At the rate it is going I figure a week or two or three??? And the back up is under 500 GB.
I might just let it run just to see.
Needs a fire hose. A straw won't do.
I read that Max PC article. Very good. Carbonite won't do video. Pogo seems to but?