We have a laptop with heaps of photos, a wifi connected HDD that I backup to and I’d like to add some extra security/backup/redundancy to my backup practices.

I should at the very least move the HDD to a different room where it’s less likely to get pinched in a burglary but I like seeing the LED change when I access it.

Are online backup places pretty reasonable these days? The HDD is a WD Mybook so I’m sure there’s some integrated cloud stuff there – it’ll be likely be easy to do but poor value (I also had a lot of emails from WD about the service being down when I had just bought the HDD..).

So in true STW fashion, recommend what you use!

QNAP in the garage. It also mirrors to a USB disk hanging off it in case things go really pear shaped.

Hourly backups through time machine though I’m sure similar must exist for Windows/Linux if you use those.

Occasional backups to a USB disk left at work for insurance against fire/theft but this isn’t refreshed that often.

Edit – should add some cloudy things for docs but I live in the sticks and cloud for 150GB photos and 200GB videos isn’t happening.

Google drive, currently all my school (teaching) stuff is on my desktop drive, constantly synching with Google. All my personal stuff is backed up to a different account that I pay Google actual money for (I know, I thought it was all free!) Think it is less than a couple of quid a month now for an extra 100 Gig of space. School stuff in two places, laptop and Google. Personal in 3, different laptop, Google and NAS at home.

So, get Google to do it for you. Expect the first online backup to take a while even with pretty quick broadband. I didn’t have pretty quick broadband but the estimate of 10 days was only out by about half a day…

I periodically take a HDD up to my mum’s. Not very high tech I know.

If you and someone you trust both have reasonably fast internet access – keep a NAS drive at their house and have it automatically backup using rsync – you can set it to either delete files that are no longer on the source drive during synchronisation or to keep files that no longer exist on your local drive for maximum safety ( say for example if you accidentally delete some photos ).

Carbonite. You will forget you have it. But it will never forget to back up your stuff.

Does your WD Mybook not have a USB port on it so you can plug an external drive into it and schedule a daily/weekly backup?

you can set it to either delete files that are no longer on the source drive during synchronisation or to keep files that no longer exist on your local drive for maximum safety ( say for example if you accidentally delete some photos

be aware google drive can not do this and isn’t really.suitable for archiving

Would Microsoft’s OneDrive be suitable for off site backup?
I have over 500GB of RAW photos that I want to backup and at $2.50 per month for 1TB of storage this looks like a cheap option.
Google is $9.99 per month for 1TB IIRC

One thing to bear in mind, most domestic ADSL will have a pretty slow upstream connection. So your *handwave* 10Mbps down might only be 1Mbps up.

500Gb is 4,000,000Mbits, ie, will take 4 million seconds to upload.

4000000 / 3600 = 1111 hours = 46 days to make your initial upload.

Obviously, subsequent syncs will be change data and much faster, and if you have to restore it (using my example figures) it’ll “only” be 4.6 days for the recovery which may well be fine for home use.

Of course, faster or slower ‘net connections it will vary accordingly, it’s probably a non-issue on cable / fibre and a showstopper if you’ve got a shonky connection.

I have a NAS drive at home for first stage of backup, using Karen’s Replicator, which seems to do the trick nicely. I then also have Backblaze, which admittedly took forever on the initial backup on our connection, but is now backing up as and when the type of files and locations I set are changed. I can now sleep peacefully at night (or at least the reasons I can’t aren’t file backup related…).

I sync my home and work PCs to Dropbox accounts so everything is backed up in the background 24/7.

For massive data sets, like photos, I do manual backups to multiple USB drives which live in a fire safe.

As mentioned upload speed is generally really slow which is a killer for photos and video. Does anyone know of software that will shrink a photo first. In reality I don’t need an image file so large I could print it at A1 size. As the backup is for emergencies only I would be happy to only have photos stored at A4 size. This would massively reduce the size of the backup and therefore speed. I currently use Dropbox which is great for documents, etc but non of the online backups really handle photos, videos, music etc that well as they just take up so much space.

A Lightroom export preset would take care of the resizing and moving all/specified photos into a certain folder with subfolders for you. If configured to be the backup source, that would do the job you require, Woody.

Edit – for photos only, of course…

Picasa will shrink photos for you very easily as a batch…