Online Backup

Curious if anyone is backing up their footage/photos online - and if so, which sites people are using and their experiences with them?

Thanks!

Bryce

No responses and virtually no views? Is there no one on this thread using online storage? I feel like with this day and age with digital - that it's surprising there are not more dependable desktop hard drive/storage mechanisms out there. Knock on wood - I have only lost one hard drive in my life - but I don't want to wait till I lose something important to care about this. I have multiple TB of drive space on my desk - all backed up to other drives - but still feel it may not be enough.

After speaking with Lacie and asking them their thoughts, they were very open about not depending on their drives or any drives for that matter. Horror stories abound. All extremely important footage should be backed up online in their eyes. DVD storage is obviously another option but does not interest me.

Right now, I backup a TB drive and put the backup TB drive back in the box and in my closet. Unbeknownst to me, they told me that was bad as well. HDs are like cars, they said, and need to be spun up often to keep them running properly. So, even though I use my drives daily for the past 6 years with no problems - I felt the need to at least look into this for my most important data.

Some of the sites that look interesting:

1. Jungle Disk - $.15/GB - this is most interesting to me as it's backed by a big company like Amazon - but would be pricey paying per GB.

2. Carbonite - $50/year - unlimited

3. Mozy - $4.95/month - unlimited

I'm in a technological bubble out here in Hawaii - and would love to know if anyone on these forums has added online storage to their workflow.

Mahalos,

Bryce

My online backup is slightly different. I use web hosting service to host all my pictures in on online gallery that I created with jablum. Jalbum has a option to to store full originals and a scaled down slide for each picture. So if I lose my picts I would have to scour out the originals from the slides. But this backup scheme gives me the ability to show of my picts to people. www.mwdives.com

I paid 160 for 2 years.

I got a free membership to Carbonite, but it kept crashing my desktop. I switched to Mozy and haven't looked back. And it works!! I've had to recover a few files that "disappeared" when I mistakenly hit the delete key - imagine that!!

Photos, videos, music (all on external hard drives) are backed up on Mozy. My c: drive is backed up to another external hard drive and that backup file is also dealt with by Mozy. Mozy does have an advantage over Carbonite - you can use it to backup external hard drives, where Carbonite only allows internal drives to be backed up!!

I'm in a technological bubble out here in Hawaii - and would love to know if anyone on these forums has added online storage to their workflow.

 

Mahalos,

Bryce

It is probably worse in Alaska, with only a couple of providers. I have no cable link to the outside world. Either the TV cable or phone company where I live. Both feed by satellite. I use the cable co., which is often down. It is also very slow. A minute or more for 1 meg. On-line is DOA.

Tom

I got a free membership to Carbonite, but it kept crashing my desktop. I switched to Mozy and haven't looked back. And it works!! I've had to recover a few files that "disappeared" when I mistakenly hit the delete key - imagine that!!

 

Photos, videos, music (all on external hard drives) are backed up on Mozy. My c: drive is backed up to another external hard drive and that backup file is also dealt with by Mozy. Mozy does have an advantage over Carbonite - you can use it to backup external hard drives, where Carbonite only allows internal drives to be backed up!!

the mozy site is hard to find info. Is the price really $5 a month, when I looked last year it was much, much higher. Also, I guess you do not trust them with your personal files.

Thanks Kim. Good to know it is working for you. I'd only be backing up my externals and didn't even think that would matter.

$5/month does seem cheap, huh, marcw? Also a little curious about the security of it all....

Tom - you're probably right. We're not so primitive out here - but I just don't run across too many discussions with my local buds about MB, GB and TBs - if you know what I mean.

Curious if anyone is backing up their footage/photos online - and if so, which sites people are using and their experiences with them?

 

Thanks!

Bryce

I have at least three hard drvies with photos and video. One running, one handy back-up and one off away safely. I will use FTP as some back-up when travelling from time to time, but usually also carry at least two portable drives so I have three copies on me. Of course that does not stop loss or theft, but I stay in places that have safe deposit boxes in the rooms very often, and one of the drives go in there.

To upload everything I need to have stored would take a good chunk of time even with a T1.

the mozy site is hard to find info. Is the price really $5 a month, when I looked last year it was much, much higher. Also, I guess you do not trust them with your personal files.

They do get my personal files, just in a compressed format. I use Windows Backup (yes, still a Windows person) to do a backup every night that compresses the data and then that backup file goes to Mozy. Otherwise it would be even more files than the outrageous number I am already backing up LOL!!

Also, that way, if the c: drive dies, I can more easily restore the files - using Mozy I'd likely have to order a restore CD and wait for it to arrive. That would be OK for photos, etc., but emails and work files would be needed quite quickly. You can download all the files, but with large files it takes a long time and now that my internet provider has put a cap on the GB I can up/download each month (without additional fees), this seems to be the best solution to all my backups.

I'm shooting RAW, so unfortunately my photos folder is growing at an alarming rate (by the gigabytes). I gave online backup a thought but discarded it quickly due to the sheer volumes involved.

As a Mac User I invested into a 1TB Apple Time Capsule for this. Backups work over Wifi at up to 130MBit/s on my local network which is a lot better than what I would get online, and are still transparent, i.e. I don't have to initiate them, it's just a regular background activity. I back up my whole Aperture file system like this.

The bandwidth will be your main problem for backup (and worse: restore).

IMHO spend the dollars on a trustworthy local solution, that's just my $0.02

Cheers,

Simon

Having lost hard drives in the past (but no data as it was just the backup drive), I like to have an off-site backup of all of my pics. Here's what I have.

I'm using a Mac, and keep my pictures in Aperture. I delete the ones that are obviously out of focus or so badly exposed that nothing could be recovered. I keep everything else. Most of the images form the last few years are RAW, the very early ones were JPG.

Within Aperture I have it set to create another vault on an 2nd internal drive. This vault contains the master images, edits, metadata, albums settings, smart album settings etc - everything that is in the full library except the preview jpgs that are generated on demand as required.

I have Jungle Disk set up to back up this vault to Amazon's S3 disk service. I've got about 120Gb of data up there, and it costs me about USD 18 per month (there are some costs for upload and download bandwidth, plus the number of request made). To make this work in a reasonable time you need a good, fast internet connection

In addition to this I have the Mac OSX Time Machine set up to back up to a 1Tb Time Capsule.

This gives me my data on 4 separate hard drives (if you count Amazon's S3 service as as 1 drive, which it isn't). Now that I've written this I'm fairly certain that something will die and cause me to have to recover that data

One drawback of this system is that I'd have to pull down the whole Aperture vault if I needed to recover anything on my local machine - that would be slow. It took me roughly 4 days to do the initial upload, I'd expect the downloads to be a little faster - but still not much use if you needed to recover anything in a rush from offsite. Recovery from my local sources would be faster.

Even if you don't have everything online, you should definitely have a backup drive kept offsite and updated every month or so - fire or flood in a house would likely take out both your main computer and any backup drives in the same place.

Cheers, James.