Internet Storage

[rmh159]

Can anyone recommend an online storage service to use for backing up photos? Free is obviously ideal and I'd probably be looking for about 10 gigs of space. I've tried Xdrive previously but didn't dig too deeply into it. Any other services that can be recommended?

 

[Garbz]

Not a permanent solution I hope. http://www.petergabriel.com/ Datacenter theft is all the rage now. A server hosting Peter Gabriel's website was stolen recently.

Any specific reason why you would choose to entrust online storage over a home job?

 

[usayit]

Perhaps they want off-site backup in case of fire flood etc.

 

[rmh159]

Just knowing myself... my hard drives crash fairly often (lifespan seems to be ~2 years) and I'm not disciplined enough to reburn a small pile of DVD's after every photo shoot. So for me it comes down to reliability and I trust another company's hard drives and servers more than I trust my own.

Plus I think if anyone stole my pics I'd be more flattered than offended. I'm not at the point yet where the fear of theft is greater than the fear of data loss due to equipment failure.

I've also thought about buying a network drive but I don't think that's a viable short term answer.

How would you guys back up pics if burning DVD's wasn't an option?

 

[Overread19 7]

myself I would use an external harddrive to back up the data and also burn DVDs at semi regular intervals.
If I were not burning DVDs I would use 2 external harddrives -- memory these days is cheap!
Also at the moment all my webstuff is resized and at 1000pixels at most - so if anyone does steal and start to make money only I have the RAW and only I have the unedited original shots - so I can prove that I originally took them

If, however, they stole all my stored shots RAWs and all it gets a little trickier (though files will store the make and model of a camera that shot them its not impossible to edit this data out)


</SPAN>

 

[CanadianMe]

Get yourself one or two external HD's as back up. I do everything from home and have 3 external HD's, two are kept at home, one on continuous back up, the other is turned on every other day to back up the back up and one is kept in my safety deposit box and is brought home every 3-4 weeks to again back up my others. I have in my life only had one HD crash so not sure why your last you on average 2 years. Once mine are full I buy larger ones and transfer all my data to them, store my old ones, I never format of give them away. I work from home and keep all my files on computer so if you want to make sure you don't lose any always do some sort of raid setup.

 

[Iron Flatline]

Google mail allows up to 4 Gigs of data... and if that doesn't suffice you can set up additional free accounts.

 

[S2K1]

I have a couple external harddrives at home, and I just burn DVD's of each shoot I do and keep them either at my parent's house or at work in my desk. I have a bunch of DVD's but they're relatively cheap when you consider the cost of data loss.

 

[Garbz]

How would you guys back up pics if burning DVD's wasn't an option?

Physical offsite storage. Our storage system at home is redundant, but dad still takes a hdd with the important stuff to work and leaves it there. While the life span of a running hdd may be 2 years (i'm sorry to hear that, mine all last much longer), an unplugged hdd doesn't die.