Offsite photo backup

[dimme]

I have a photo collection of about 120GB and growing. I would like to backup off-site. My solution now is I have two WD Passport hard drives. I leave one at work and rotate every few weeks. My work area has changed, and I feel it is not very secure to leave the drive there, so now I carry it in my bag to and from work. So I am thinking of backing up in the cloud. Is this too much data to have on line? I realize it could take weeks to upload or download. Any suggestions?
Thanks

 

[firestarter]

WD hard drives are cheap and fast... offsite backup could get expensive quickly. If you look at something like Jungledisk, it's $0.15 per GB/month - but at 120GB or so already, that's going to be more than $18/month and as you say, it'll get more expensive.

What worries you most about the security of your WD drives? That someone could steal the drive itself, or the risk of someone seeing private data or photographs?

I used to leave offsite backups at my office, but I always backed up to an encrypted DMG archive on the drive, rather than just on the drive itself. So if the drive was lost or stolen, sure - I would be down the cost of the drive, but my data would be safe.

 

[termina3]

If you switch to cloud you'll pay more--but you can ditch all of your drives and 'just let' the company worry about it.

Amazon S3 is a widely used service--similar pricing to the JungleDisk option already mentioned. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

 

[SelfMadeCelo]

For large libraries S3 gets crazy expensive. I've been looking into BackBlaze. It's $5 a month and looks like a pretty good service. In my situation I load up all of my photos onto my laptop so I'm looking for an online archive. I think with BackBlaze if you delete it on your computer, it gets deleted online. I'll have to test it...

 

[compuwar]

I have a photo collection of about 120GB and growing. I would like to backup off-site. My solution now is I have two WD Passport hard drives. I leave one at work and rotate every few weeks. My work area has changed, and I feel it is not very secure to leave the drive there, so now I carry it in my bag to and from work. So I am thinking of backing up in the cloud. Is this too much data to have on line? I realize it could take weeks to upload or download. Any suggestions?
Thanks

Depends on how much you shoot and how large your files are. Rotate a drive to your parents or a good friend's house every month, keep backup copies of the intervening period online, or adjust the time schedule based on how much you shoot and how large your files are.

 

[knmlee]

I use crashplan.com for backing up my photo collection to the cloud. The cost is reasonable (about $5/month) and they will send you a hard drive to do the initial load (for an extra fee). I chose them for this reason. Loading 120GB over most internet connections would take a very long time. By doing the initial load with a drive, you then do only the incremental changes over the net.

Another nice feature if you use iPhoto or Aperture is that they can handle incremental changes to these libraries. That is not the case for all of the backup services.

 

[anubis]

Smugmug's basic service is $39.95 a year and includes unlimited photo storage and unlimited transfer. They use Amazon's S3 service on their backend so you get excellent reliability. Way cheaper than paying for S3 directly. I've uploaded terrabytes of photos... very happy with their service.

 

[miles01110]

Smugmug's basic service is $39.95 a year and includes unlimited photo storage and unlimited transfer. They use Amazon's S3 service on their backend so you get excellent reliability. Way cheaper than paying for S3 directly. I've uploaded terrabytes of photos... very happy with their service.

Plus you get a nice gallery to view your photos in. It's worth mentioning that if you want them to send you your photos via hard copy you have to pay them additional fees unless you want to go through every one of your albums and re-downloaded every photo again.

 

[ChrisA]

I have a photo collection of about 120GB and growing. I would like to backup off-site. My solution now is I have two WD Passport hard drives. I leave one at work and rotate every few weeks. My work area has changed, and I feel it is not very secure to leave the drive there, so now I carry it in my bag to and from work. So I am thinking of backing up in the cloud. Is this too much data to have on line? I realize it could take weeks to upload or download. Any suggestions?
Thanks

Yes it would takes many days to upload all you photos. But you only do that once. The real question is how many images you shoot every week. And can you upload that much data every week

What happens if the on-line company folds or you want to switch?

What if you had a house fire and needed the data to put on the new computer? how long would it take to download the data?

 

[stagi]

I use pictage which is very similar to smug mug. They archive all of my shoots forever and although it's not cheap ($99/month) the galleries are very nice, they market to my clients for me and have specials to increase sales so worth it in my mind.

 

[anubis]

I use pictage which is very similar to smug mug. They archive all of my shoots forever and although it's not cheap ($99/month) the galleries are very nice, they market to my clients for me and have specials to increase sales so worth it in my mind.

I think Pictage is overkill for what the OP wants... OP only mentioned wanting a backup solution, not a $100 a month photo marketing package

 

[stagi]

I think Pictage is overkill for what the OP wants... OP only mentioned wanting a backup solution, not a $100 a month photo marketing package

True, just thought I would mention them since someone had mentioned smugmug. Unfortunately haven't used any backup solutions so don't have much to add but did get an email recently from swiss picture bank (http://info.swisspicturebank.com/) which looks like it might be a good service, they don't have monthly fees just a one time fee based on how much space you need.

 

[mmoto]

Smugmug's basic service is $39.95 a year and includes unlimited photo storage and unlimited transfer. They use Amazon's S3 service on their backend so you get excellent reliability. Way cheaper than paying for S3 directly. I've uploaded terrabytes of photos... very happy with their service.

The basic SmugMug services, including Pro level which I pay ~$150/year for, only allows storage of JPG, GIF and PNG. To store RAW files you would need to pay extra for Smug Vault. Smug Vault is $0.22/GB per month. 100GB would be $22/month. There is also a data transfer fee.
Other services, such as BackBlaze are more economical. I'm looking for a service myself.

 

[firestarter]

How much stuff do you guys shoot? I'm easily shooting 10 to 20GB of RAW files per week at the moment. These options all look a bit expensive compared to a few good old disks in rotation.

 

[anubis]

The basic SmugMug services, including Pro level which I pay ~$150/year for, only allows storage of JPG, GIF and PNG. To store RAW files you would need to pay extra for Smug Vault. Smug Vault is $0.22/GB per month. 100GB would be $22/month. There is also a data transfer fee.
Other services, such as BackBlaze are more economical. I'm looking for a service myself.

True. Smugmug does not allow archiving of RAW files with their standard service, although assuming you've already done the photo editing and don't care about the "original", archiving JPEGs only isn't too much of a compromise for the price.