I know there are a few photographers on here.

What do you use for safe backup of your photo’s ?

I do backup the PC locally but was thinking I would like some form off site storage for the family photo’s.

I have 30 or 40 Gig and was wandering if I needed to sign up for Skydrive or something or google drive and upload them there or is there a better / cheaper way ?

Thanks !

Do you have picassa?
You can upload everything to Google that way, you will need to pay something though.
Dropbox can get you up to 50gb for free with the right offers (samsung one)
No idea about the MS offering, office 365 only lasted a week while I had to wait for them to shut it down.
Mega Upload guy has a new online storage going on, but the first on didn’t end well….

Files on PC and a NAS for a local backup. I print everything.

So unless my house burns down I’m secure.

Jpegs get backed up online to picasa – they’re low resolution but good enough for 6x4s (e.g. several photos per page of a photobook). Which is my house burning down backup.

I have been using Backblaze, seems fine but I guess the proof of the pudding is only found when you need them to send you the lost data 🙁

I use CrashPlan.

It and BackBlaze seem to be the market leaders and I reckon you’d be set with either.

Portable USB drives are so cheap now you’re just as we’ll dumping everything onto another drive and keeping it in a different location to your pc.
I keep all my photos stored on my iMac, which has a USB drive permanently connected, so that everything is being backed up automatically. Every few months I’ll make a backup of my photos onto another drive for safe keeping.
Another option is to burn them onto bluray or DVDs and file them away.
40gb is probably a bit much for online storage – it will take forever to upload everything and you need to factor in the cost of buying the storage space.

Thanks all, I do use a portable HD, it is the off site thing that bothers me or as someone mentioned the what if the house burns down etc.

I do use picassa but not the on line part as I wasn’t sure how the costs would compare

I have multiple copies, a yearly DVD, local imac HD, external HD and a copy on the server at work.

25 GB of storage for Drive and Google+ Photos. $2.49 / Month
New Plan:100 GB of storage for Drive and Google+ Photos. Plus, an additional 25 GB for Gmail. $4.99 / Month

Look up Google Drive for prices, you need to set the permissions right as they will appear in your Google+.

After that as I said I have 53Gb with Dropbox for free currently (2 years) just by having a Samsung phone. Just pop your Pictures folder under Dropbox and leave the house for a bit…

edit# it gets around the faff of manual backups, remembering etc. Once it’s on the PC it syncs within an hour or so and I don’t have to worry.

So unless my house burns down I’m secure.

Or if you’re burgled.

I back up to an external disk and then leave it at my mum’s.

I think the chances of getting my pc, nas and prints all nicked at once are slim.

What do you use for safe backup of your photo’s ?

for archive:3x copies
2x on site
1x off site

for current working files 2x copies on separate drives inside computer plus one other external working back-up
a few select portfolio images as zipped tiffs on box.net thatonly i can access.

i don’t do jpegs or sharing flickr/picassa sites with dodgy intellectual property/copyright small print.

Mine are on two external drives at home and my PC at work. Nothing is backed up even if you have a hundred drives if they are in one location.

There are, in my view 2 basic options.

1. Hire a cloud storage service ( dropbox or the like )
2. Get 2 NASes ( NASi ?? ) One for your place, and another to be held by a relative/friend and both set to automatically sync.

I’ve done option 2, giving me the benefit of centrally stored data, it works with my Squeezeboxen and allows me to play video on my Smart TV. Also, backups of data from my parents are automatically copied to the NAS at my place.

So on one side – low ( zero ? ) set up cost and set costs each month for a simple backup of data.

On the other side – highish ( £400-500 ) start up costs, zero cost per month thereafter, and the benefits of having a smart media server in both locations.

EDIT:
Oh, and due to a healthy level of paranoia, I keep a copy of my photos on my PC at work as well.

both set to automatically sync.

No protection against accidental deletion, then? (-:

On the other side – highish ( £400-500 ) start up costs, zero cost per month thereafter, and the benefits of having a smart media server in both locations.

You should probably assume a 5 year lifespan for the hardware, so not really zero monthly cost.

No protection against accidental deletion, then? (-:

Set to sync once a week, but other than that, the only protection is a mirror and a baseball bat – I wield the bat, look in the mirror and offer my self a really good kicking if I start deleting stuff that I shouldn’t.

You might want to take a look at backing up to Amazon’s Glacier servers. Cheap slow,cloud storage for seldom needed data.
http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

Theres a bit of a write-up here
http://blender.ca/blog/2012/off-site-backup-with-amazon-glacier/
and a follow up here

50 days with Amazon Glacier backup

… in addition to the flippant reply above…

Just remembered/checked the server – with QNAP NAS<->NAS sync you can set “Delete extra files on remote destination” on or off,and it is set to off for my documents and photos, so I am covered for accidental deletion.

The hoop puckering lesson I learned as a placement student at IBM where I cockily ran “del . ” in the wrong directory ( c:\ ) of an OS/2 server was indeed a lesson well learned.

I’m interested to hear just how long it takes from someone who’s had to pull all their backups and data down from a cloud based source.
And how long it takes to upload a terabyte or so of data.

Synology nas here, backing up the laptops, as well as holding the bulk of the data. This in turn backs up to 2 USB hard drives, rotated so one is at home and the other at the mother in laws.

I’ve got a couple of USB drives with a lot of photos on. They’re fariyl cheap and I just pop one round to the folks now and then to keep it ‘off-site’.

The really, really important “first pics of baby Breathe” type pics are on dropbox and SkyDrive.

I’m interested to hear just how long it takes from someone who’s had to pull all their backups and data down from a cloud based source.
And how long it takes to upload a terabyte or so of data.

Theoretically, restore should be considerably quicker than the initial backup. You’re pushing a backup the ‘wrong way’ up an ADSL connection, so it’s going to be painful. After the initial sync though, your subsequent ones are incremental so shouldn’t be too bad depending on your amount of change data.

Overnight on a healthy connection to repopulate a 50gb dropbox account onto a new PC. (I also have the dropbox folder replicated on the laptop too without hassle)

Oh Ryan you spoilt it by having just the one post

To: fozzyuk and the rest of thread members…

Looks like my previous post was in violation of forum policies. Sorry for that! It’s cool, sorry for being a bother.

Ryan at Code 42.