I’m considering my backup strategy for general documents, photos and videos. I’ve got stuff backed up at my house but I suppose I need something off-site. There are a lot of RAW photos so I could do with a large amount of storage

Anyone cheaper than Google? They are offering 100Gb for $4.99.

I may have to try and find out how to batch convert all the non-special images to JPG, but that has proved problematic in the past.

Dropbox?

Was going to say dropbox but that Google deal is cheaper.
Might look into that myself.

Well I use both Dropbox and Google – the main issue with them is they tend to sync to your local machine rather than add extra space. But both are very good too.

I am currently testing Bicasa and so far I am really impressed – esp with infinite capacity and the ability to use it as an pure external drive (ie not being stored locally) and as a sync drive live DB and Gdrive.

Box are offering 50Gb for free currently.

I think my photography workflow needs to be looked at first, since that determines whether or not 100Gb is enough.

Maybe a new thread is in order.

Amazon S3 is very cheap – worth a look.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

We use it at work and it seems to work well.

I use Smugmug for my photos and videos. The power account allows unlimited stoarge and HD videos up to 20 minutes. There is a Android and iOS app for it as well.

If you join using the android app you get the first year half price (either by paying monthly or the annual fee)

Box are offering 50Gb for free currently.

If you have multiple email address and use a different phone number on the account, you can get multiple accounts of 50GB.

I think my photography workflow needs to be looked at first, since that determines whether or not 100Gb is enough.

Maybe a new thread is in order.

Molgrips – I had the same esp with the backup of RAW as they were taking up a phenomenal amount of space and hate just deleting them. Thats why I looked into Bitcasa – I can just drop all my Raw’s onto the cloud as a perm backup and just process the ones I want to use locally.

Wait – what? Have I read this right?

Amazon web services offering archival storage for 1.1 cents per Gb? That’s bonkers. $11 for 1Tb compared to $50 on Google?

ericmel – blimey, bitcasa is even cheaper!

how long does 100GB take to upload?

how fasts your connection.

I’ve been looking at this as well, but need a fair bit more space than you. I’ve just upgraded my nas, and am backing up my data to a pair of portable harddrives, rotating them so one of which will always be kept offsite. Less expensive than google drive etc, and access to large volumes is a lot quicker if needed.

EDIT: I looked at bitcassa after ericelmel posted about it the other day, but reviews seemed very mixed.

I’ve considered leaving a portable hd at my parents and syncing when I go up there, but that’s a right faff and I can see it not getting done very often.

Amazon S3 is what is underneath Dropbox. Their pricing charges for upload and download, whereas Dropbox bundles it into a single monthly fee.

Have a read of this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/15/cloud_storage_costs/

I’ve considered leaving a portable hd at my parents and syncing when I go up there, but that’s a right faff and I can see it not getting done very often.

This might be nonsense but would it be possible to leave a NAS drive or similar at a relatives house and back up remotely to that via broadband? There must be some device that would make this possible, no?

I’m in the same boat – I’m currently looking at crashplan after it was mentioned on here, with a Flickr pro account as an extra defence for pictures.

There must be some device that would make this possible, no?

You can do that with crashplan IIRC http://www.crashplan.com/consumer/compare.html

I’ve considered leaving a portable hd at my parents and syncing when I go up there, but that’s a right faff and I can see it not getting done very often.

Buy two, keep the one at home synced using whatever software, then drop it off whenever you visit, bringing the other back.

Have a look at storagemadeeasy They are a storage aggregator. Sign up with them get 5gb at amazon and register three others cloud providers, managed through through cloud service and software.

The crashplan software is pretty good – it lets you backup to a device locally and also off to another computer on the internet. If you and a mate have some spare storage, you can be each other’s “cloud” backup provider. All encrypted, etc so you can’t get access to each other’s stuff.

You only pay with Crashplan if you’re putting stuff on their servers – we do their “family unlimited” one which lets you back up 10 computers, as much data as you like, for $149/year.

simon_g – do all the computers need to be under the same IP address ie same physical address or can you add parents pcs in another house etc?

This might be nonsense but would it be possible to leave a NAS drive or similar at a relatives house and back up remotely to that via broadband?

That’s a pretty good idea. You could set up a VPN between the two houses and just map a network drive same as you do at home. A bloody good application for a couple of Raspberry Pi’s I reckon.

And I could get my parents’ consent by offering the same service in response – so they can back their photos up too.

Mega.co.nz is 50gb free i think

I use Backblaze, costs me about £4 a month for unlimited storage. Reasonably configurable, you install a small client and let it do the rest. It will pretty much back up everything if you don’t tweak it accordingly though!

I use Dropbox for important stuff as I like the way it backs up between my two PCs, my phone and the cloud but I’m limited to 18Gb for free so it’s not really suitable for all my pictures. I just use it for a select few

Hi MG,
I have been looking for the same thing and tried the Google drive upgrade but found it to be unuseably slow! I have lots of RAW files and videos, as well as work docs, and I use free dropbox for my work docs, and now use Amazon S3 for the 90GB of images etc. They have also now brought out Amazon Glacier, which is slower to retrieve in the event you ever need to, but is crazy cheap. I think Ill be about $3 a month or something. Glacier was limited initially, because you had limited support of clients that could move the data from S3 to Glacier, it was more just published APIs. But now a lot seem to support it, and it seems easier. Once transfered from S3 to Glacier, just delete the S3 files and you are down to Glacier storage only. I think they will be allowing direct Glacier upload soon also which should make it easier.

That’s a pretty good idea. You could set up a VPN between the two houses and just map a network drive same as you do at home. A bloody good application for a couple of Raspberry Pi’s I reckon.

Or just use crash plan for the same functionality as I said earlier.

But both your computers would need to be on all the time, would they not? Drawing more power and making more noise than a NAS and a RP I think.

But both your computers would need to be on all the time, would they not? Drawing more power and making more noise than a NAS and a RP I think.

Possibly, although it looks as though there is a linux client which you might be able to use with the NAS / RP.

Would be lovely if I could use their ready made software on a RP. I seem to remember vpn software is available for linux easily enough, I should look into it.

However don’t some ISPs block vpn traffic?

I use a Synology NAS, one local and one remote at the parents that sync across the web overnight so I always have backups.

Works really well and emails me when it’s done.

I use a Synology NAS, one local and one remote at the parents that sync across the web overnight so I always have backups.

That’s the sort of thing I was thinking of.

Now one more out of my depth question. Does the NAS receiving the data need to be connected to a running computer or does it work independently?

Now one more out of my depth question. Does the NAS receiving the data need to be connected to a running computer or does it work independently?

Nope, they are both independent of the laptop/ipad/iphone that has uploaded the content. Just needs plugging into the network.

Nope, they are both independent of the laptop/ipad/iphone that has uploaded the content. Just needs plugging into the network.

That sounds perfect, what model did you use?

I have the DS212J on both ends with twin 2 TB drives in a mirrored config so even if hard drives fail I still have backups 🙂

It not cheap to setup but shouldn’t need much upgrading.

Thanks, Looking at the user manual now.

Does the NAS receiving the data need to be connected to a running computer

(EDITED for a typo see below 🙂 )

No, otherwise it would just be S rather than NAS. NAS means Network Aware Storage ie storage that’s on the network not connected to a computer.

Does the NAS receiving the data need to be connected to a running computer

Yes, otherwise it would just be S rather than NAS. NAS means Network Aware Storage ie storage that’s on the network not connected to a computer.

I assume that was meant to be a no, it doesn’t need to be attached to a running computer… 😉