Cloud Storage

FLOOPER

Hi all,

My iMac is suffering from lack of space due to my photo downloads. Firstly what's the cheapest cloud storage without a monthly charge. Would prefer to pay for outright sum for decent storage so not really interested in monthly/annual charges. Dreaming???

And would also like to know peoples thoughts on hard storage. Drives fail and that worries me so what do people think about hard storage in discs like dvd.

Seems a reasonable option right??? Although I know that most computers these days don't have CD/DVD drives but seems like safe and foolproof way to store.

Apologies but not that up to date with the latest. I have a limited Dropbox account which is great for sharing.

Thanks

Suckit

Have you looked at e.g. synology diskstations?
https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS220j

https://www.amazon.de/dp/B083KG3PXN?smid=A3JWKAKR8XB7XF

the_syco

FLOOPER wrote: »

Seems a reasonable option right??? Although I know that most computers these days don't have CD/DVD drives but seems like safe and foolproof way to store.

A lot of DVD's that you buy in the shop aren't meant for long term storage.

TBH, consider tape storage if you have enough images. Most likely expensive, but as tape backup has been around for a while, I'd say they'd be better than DVD backup.

Gregor Samsa

I don’t think you’re going to find a cloud storage solution that has a one-off fee. The whole point of cloud is that you’re renting server space, so by its very nature it involves a subscription.

The easiest cloud service to use with the Mac OS Apple’s iCloud, because it’s already baked into the OS. But you can use Google Drive, Amazon and other services too - they just require a bit of setup.

If you want to pay a single cost and manage your backups yourself, tape or Raid 1 or Raid 5 hard disk array are probably the best ways to go.

Tape is very reliable, but it’s a backup type that you have to restore from in its entirety to use. You can’t just decide to go looking for one single file on it. It’s best g do it when you have a set amount of data you want to backup: you commit it to tape and then store the tape somewhere, then the next time you have a load of stuff to backup, you do the same again on another tape. A large company might have enough data to write to tape every night, but it’s unlikely an individual would, so it’s not really a “home” solution for most people.

A hard disk array is best for incremental backups that you add to on a regular basis. Raid 1 uses 2 disks, and has a mirrored copy of the same data on both disks. So there’s redundancy and you effectively have 50% of your total disk space for backup capacity (as you’re backing up everything twice). Raid 5 used at least 3 disks, and spreads the data across them in such a way that even if one disk dies, the data can be recovered (it uses a combination of techniques called “striping” and “parity”). Raid 5 also gives you speed benefits over Raid 1, but it costs more as you need more disks. Backups using Raid 1 or 5 can also be searched just like a regular hard disk to find a particular file. So you don’t have to restore the entire archive to recover a small amount of lost data.

Companies like Western Digital make consumer hard disk arrays that can be used for either Raid 1 or Raid 5 at home.

Personally, I have everything on my Macs backed up to iCloud and then once a day I have Time Machine back any new files up to a WD My Cloud Home drive over WiFi. I’m not using Raid, it’s just a single hard disk. My photo library is then manually copied onto two other external hard disks from time to time, and very important photos are uploaded to my Google Drive and Flickr. So I have all my photos in 3 different places, most of them in 5 places and the really important ones in a total of 7 different places. Same with important documents.

Dinarius

I use BackBlaze for cloud storage. It’s about €75 p/a.

Way cheaper than a few hard drives.

That said, I also store on external drives too.

I only store RAW files and a very few TIFFs. RAW takes up less space. The only TIFFs I store are heavily worked.

Be aware that cloud storage is a race to the bottom. I started out paying about €150 p/a. I’m now on my third provider. The first two went bust.

If you have a lot of files, you will need to leave your computer on 24/7 for a long time for the initial upload.

If you’re not a volume shooter, then copying RAWs to a couple of big USB sticks at the end of each year is worth considering.

D.

magicbastarder

depends on how much storage you need, i guess. i have a desktop system which now has three internal disks - 1x500GB SSD for OS etc, and 2 x 1TB spindle disks which are essentially a copy of each other; plus a portable HD which also has a copy of my photos, and is usually stored in my parents house. so in theory, i'm covered for any single disk failure, or for theft/fire.