Off Site Aperture Backups

[kfordham281]

Anyone have a solution for off site Aperture backups? I have a MBP so my main Aperture library resides on an external HDD.

I'd like to create a backup of the library somewhere in "the cloud". Any ideas? Can you create a vault on Amazon S3? Does Mozy work well with Aperture? Other?

Please share any tips you might have. Thanks!

 

[OreoCookie]

Unless you have a really fast internet connection, this is probably not a viable option. I have managed backup servers at university where I work, so I can access them at 100 MBit/s.

I have a vault on a harddrive at my parents' place which I update about once a month.

 

[kfordham281]

I don't take an enormous amount of pictures, so speed isn't really a large factor. I'm really concerned most about the loss of the originals and having something off site (that does not involved swapping drives at friends/family homes).

Anyone else use off site backups via "the cloud"?

 

[onomatopoeia]

I don't think speed is an issue with Amazon S3. My understanding is that many of the 3rd party uploaders manage large content quite well. Sure, it's slow but it's backup. Upload overnight over the course of a few days.

 

[richard.mac]

what about purchasing a domain with 99% uptime and then FTPing the photos to your webspace and then adding some security.

if it was my pictures i was backing up in the cloud i would want it to be reliable and do it my own way without downloading some shoddy Mac software to do it for me.

 

[mrgreen4242]

Flickr Pro account is $25 a year for unlimited photo uploads, if you don't need raw format storage.


EDIT: I suppose if you are working in Aperture you need RAW, but you can always backup JPG versions with Flickr for what is really a small price for the service. It's better than nothing.

 

[ChrisA]

Anyone have a solution for off site Aperture backups? I have a MBP so my main Aperture library resides on an external HDD.

I'd like to create a backup of the library somewhere in "the cloud". Any ideas? Can you create a vault on Amazon S3? Does Mozy work well with Aperture? Other?

Please share any tips you might have. Thanks!

Unless you can afford a dedicated Internet connection (not cable or DSL) then your upstream bandwidth will be limited. Mozy only does 2GB per day or some times as good as 9GB per day. At that rate my system would take over a year to back up.

The cheapest way is to buy a few external hard drives and keep Aperture vaults on each one and rotate them to an off site location. Four drives is about the right number or three plus one for Time Machine. Getting the data off site should take no extra work. Most people go some place most days, just take the drive with you and bring another one back.

Sure, it's slow but it's backup. Upload overnight over the course of a few days.

Be sure and do the math. I just did and in my case "a few" means about 500 days. Some times if you shoot a lot of raw imaes you can shoot more images in a day than could be sent off in one night. And yes you have to do the backup at night because your Internet connection is not usable while you are sending data.

We actually do use this method at work. We have three sites each has an identical disk array. It's one of those huge six foot tall racks fills with disk drives. All three of the arrays are sync'd to each other. That way if there is a fire or Earthquake there will still be two copies of the data. But the company had to buy a very expensive network connections (OC3) to make this work

 

[kfordham281]

As it turns out I went with Mozy last night. 14hrs to backup about 5GB, some of that during an Apple TV sync so my network was definitely SLOW! It's not a perfect solution, but for the money ($55 a year) and space (unlimited), it's hard to beat. We'll see how it works out and adjust as necessary.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.