Online Backup Services for Photos

Does anybody use any of those online backup services to back up their photography? I want to backup about 50GB of photos and the size of many of them (some are 20MB+), makes it hard to use something like flickr, webshots, etc.

I don't want to buy an external hard drive since I'd have nowhere offsite to store it.

Anybody have any recommendations?

Thanks!

I have been really excited about off line backup since S3 technology was announced. It must be about 3 years now. But it's not working the way i wanted. I needed 1TB of space and once you get over some small limit like 100GB then it becomes too expensive. Also Uploads to all of the sites I have tried are incredibly slow. I have actually been a customer of Mediamax and then they went out of business and lost the files of thousands of customers and never recovered them. Scary stuff. I lost one year of work, fortunately I had an imperfect collection of external hard drives and recovered most of it. So for now I am uploading jpegs to flickr for sub $30 per year unlimited (I have about 9000 photos on flickr but only one photograph is public ;-)).

I have lost about 6 months of full resolution work on an external hard drive. Ironically when the Rockland Center for Contemporary Arts came knocking this Fall they wanted most of the photos from those 6 months. So this April the new exhibition they open will have 13 of my photographs of which 8 are 6x4's LOL - that is what I salvaged from Flickr.

Ever since this mishap I upload low res and full res to flickr.

I have also bought HP MediaSmart center. Very good decision. It has 4 bays, hot swappable, mirrored. It serves Itunes and Media Library, I popped 2 1TB drives into it adding to the existing 2 500GB drives to a total 3TB of disk space (1.5 TB mirrored). If a drive goes down I can swap it with another easily. Of course if my house burned down then I'd be pulling my shots off flickr again but that's the fate I'm prepared to accept at this juncture.

If your primary concern is off premises security for photo archives, a bank safe deposit box will hold a small auxiliary hard drive (or several of them) or other storage media. I rent one for about $15 a year (to hold valuable personal papers and some other things).

This was an impractical solution for photographers in the days of film negatives and transparencies. It is a much more practical solution in the digital age.

You cannot totally eliminate exposure to loss. You can only hope to minimize it. Remember, film photogs lived with and bore the risk of losing their original images for decades without unduly fretting over it.

G.

Good tip.

+1 Grumpy on the Bank Safe Deposit Box. I would have never thought of that. I will check it out.

Brambor said:

+1 Grumpy on the Bank Safe Deposit Box. I would have never thought of that. I will check it out.

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That and you can now buy a 1 TERRABYTE -> 1000 Gig -> 1 Million Meg - hard drive for $99! Amazing!

I just signed up for mozy. The initial backup takes a loooong time, but every backup after that is quick as it just does a backup of any new/edited files. It's $5 a month. I asked several techie friends about online backup and they both said mozy was a good choice. Carbonite was also mentioned. Jungledisk is good because it's on the s3 network, but it's more $$ than I wanted to spend ($0.15 per GB per month).

The safe deposit box is also a good idea. I just knew for me I needed something online.

In addition to the network backups I have at home and at work, I keep a couple of portable/USB drives around - I backup the home stuff and keep that drive at work, and the work stuff and take that drive home. Just in case I couldn't grab the laptops and the backup drive on the way out of a burning house.

I'm not worried about co-workers stealing my HD with my personal stuff on it. You could encrypt it if you were.

Tim

sweet avatar Groundhog!

Personally I would not rely on an on-line service to back up my pictures. On line services like Flickr can drop your account with no warning and no possible recovery of your data. This is basically for serious violations of the account terms but it is possible. I keep a external hard drive backup and then back up to CD anything really important as well.
I do have a Flicr account but the purpose is to share my pictures and not as a back up resource.

Thanks for all your responses! I think I might take a look at Mozy or maybe even go the bank safety deposit box route. My main goal is to get these photos off-site, so I have to figure out some way to do that as cheapily and reliably as possible.

What software do you folks like to use to backup to an external drive? A friend of mine said to use Norton's Ghost.

I just copy my files to the external drive using a drag-and-drop maneuver.

G. (Mac user)

Grumpy said:

I just copy my files to the external drive using a drag-and-drop maneuver.

G. (Mac user)

Click to expand...

Same for a pc user?

kevinmac said:

What software do you folks like to use to backup to an external drive? A friend of mine said to use Norton's Ghost.

Click to expand...

I have an Acomdata drive (500 Gb for around $100 bucks) which comes with software that does full or incremental backups. I back up both mine and my wife's system and it knows what to back up depending on which system you plug it into. Just plug it in, one click and you're off and running. I back up the whole system, not just pictures.

For retrieval, it presents what looks like a set of folders and you can get the latest version of whatever, file or folder.

When the drive is full (this is my second one in 3 years) I just stick it somewhere safe and get a new one. Next one, I'm sure will be several terabytes the way things are going.

For me (a computer professional prior to retirement) a packaged solution beats the h#ll out of a roll-your-own.

kevinmac said:

Same for a pc user?

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I am guessing the file drag-and-drop procedure for copying files to a backup drive works similarly on a Mac and PC. I happen to be a Mac user. Can anybody who is a PC user help us out here?

For whatever reason I've never felt it necessary to use an automated file or disk backup system. An awful lot of what I do is (like this post) ephemeral insofar as I am concerned. I only want to back up selected items that would be impossible to replace or that have (in my view) a special need for protection. Photo files fill the latter bill, for me.

In addition to copying photo files (whole shoots, by the way) to a backup drive, I also burn DVDs.

One further thing about archiving that I would note. Archives are not especially useful without at least basic caption information for each image: when, where, who, and what. (Include the "how," too, if that floats your boat.) I put that in the in the photo metadata ("file info") for each image that rides with image wherever it goes, before archiving. Using batch processing capabilities in Photoshop and Bridge speeds the work very dramatically.

G.

Yes the same for a pc user.


FWIW - I do not save anything to CD's or DVD's. I have a bad track record with losing data on DVD's or CD's. For all practical purposes I will blame it on CD Rot

My sister's fiancee recommended an Amazon S3 powered online backup service, Jungledisk. Seems easy and relatively cheap for what you get.
http://www.jungledisk.com/

For my own machine backing up to an external drive I use MS's SyncToy. Just simple and barebones backup program.

Brambor said:

FWIW - I do not save anything to CD's or DVD's. I have a bad track record with losing data on DVD's or CD's.

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If you choose to use CDs or DVDs:

CDs are significantly more reliable than DVDs--they have a lot more error correction. (DVDs are designed for video where a few bad bits don't have much effect.) Write-once CDs also have better long-term storage properties than rewritable CDs.

CDs are cheap: make two (identical image) copies of each CD. That way if you have a problem with one, you might be able to use the second copy or assemble a good image from the two copies. You can also store them in different places.

One should also stay away from proprietary data storage formats. Otherwise you can lose access to your backup data when you upgrade your OS and discover that you can't get a version of the backup software for the new OS version. (Open source software is safer than proprietary software for this issue--if necessary you can upgrade it and compile it for the new OS version.)

For long term storage, one should occasionally make new copies of the backup media. (And there is also the risk that at some point in the future, the ability to read a medium or its data format may be lost. (Don't laugh--significant amounts of valuable data have been lost this way. IIRC, there is a last hour initiative on to rescue the Apollo Moon mission data.)) I don't know the expected lifetime of a CD.


Also for any backup strategy, check it by reading back at least some of the data. Many a sysadmin has discovered to his dismay that he couldn't restore from his backups... (I used to manage and sysadmin a group UNIX computer facility--we did daily backups to tape and, yes, we checked them.)


I personally backup all my data to a mirror disk using rsync (*NIX only).

Doug

I recently backed up everything on Carbonite. Hopefully, I'll never know if it works!

I've always made 2 copies of everything ( on 2 seperate CDs ). One CD goes into a safe deposit box at the bank, and one goes into a fireproof safe at home.

I'd never heard of CD rot How do you prevent that from happening?

forestgnome said:

I'd never heard of CD rot How do you prevent that from happening?

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I don't know how to prevent this, but 50% of the CD's I have burned that are older than 7 or 8 years old already have problems. I checked all of them when I burned them as well and there were no issues at the time.

Because of this, I remain VERY hesistant to trust CD/DVD as a backup source.