Looking for a good cloud storage solution

[Tight Knot]

Thanks so much everyone, the Amazon service does look good, and I'll also look into the BackBlaze (thanks Buster).
The funny thing is I looked into the Amazon service in the beginning of the week, but they didn't have that plan available the. It must be brand new (or I didn't look well enough).
I'll report back on what I use, and let you ll know how it works for me.

Thanks again, for all the input and have a great weekend.

Bruce

Looking into BackBlaze shows me a slight problem,
As per BackBlaze Online Backup of All Your Data Backblaze
Backblaze will keep versions of a file that changes for up to 30 days. However, Backblaze is not designed as an additional storage system when you run out of space. Backblaze mirrors your drive. If you delete your data, it will be deleted from Backblaze after 30 days.
This may create a problem. I need a system that will backup and store whatever data I upload indefinitely. If I want to delete something, I will do that manually. This way, I don't need to continuously buy new external hard-drives.

From my research, a service that offers that level of retention, that doesn't require the files to also live on the home machine, is going to cost considerably more. Those kinds of "storage" solutions, as opposed to "backup" solutions, are covered by services like DropBox.

As an example, Dropbox allows up to 2GB for free. Not enough for me (I have 15TB and growing). For $9.99 per month, I could get up to 1TB of space for storage. Still not enough for me. Beyond that, I'd have to go with a Business account, which is UNLIMITED storage. Cost: $15 per month per user, with a minimum of 5 users = $75 per month = $900 per year. That's just more than I'm willing to pay.

At those kinds of prices, it's far less expensive to simply buy more hard drives. The thing that the cloud backup/storage solutions offer to me that local drives don't is insurance against local catastrophe, and by that I mean theft, fire, tornado, etc. - something that takes out ALL my local hard drives in a way that's unrecoverable. I could fill them and take them to my sister's, but the same tornado could wipe her place out as well, unlikely as that is. Or I could pay to store them in a bank safety deposit box, sure. Anything off-site from me though means that I don't have ready access to them when I want it, making it a pain in the behind to work with them.

I'm considering the idea that if I can find 4 other local friends and family who are interested in having unlimited storage, and are reliable enough to participate with me, I could set up the business account, and collect $15 from each of them per month to make it happen. If I felt particularly entrepreneurial, I suppose I could charge them each $20 per month, get my storage for free, and pocket the extra $5 per month as an administrative fee (which likely violates the terms of service with the service, so you wouldn't want to try to go large scale with it and start trying to recruit hundreds of users and make a business of it). Other than that, I just don't see it as a viable solution for me, personally.

If anyone knows of a reasonably priced unlimited "Storage" solution for a single user though, I would LOVE to find out about it, because that would be the ultimate solution for me.

Hey Buckster,

Sounds like a good idea trying to get a few friends together to share the Dropbox unlimited.
I looked into dropbox also, and had the same issue with size limit and expense.

 

[Buckster]

Thanks so much everyone, the Amazon service does look good, and I'll also look into the BackBlaze (thanks Buster).
The funny thing is I looked into the Amazon service in the beginning of the week, but they didn't have that plan available the. It must be brand new (or I didn't look well enough).
I'll report back on what I use, and let you ll know how it works for me.

Thanks again, for all the input and have a great weekend.

Bruce

Looking into BackBlaze shows me a slight problem,
As per BackBlaze Online Backup of All Your Data Backblaze
Backblaze will keep versions of a file that changes for up to 30 days. However, Backblaze is not designed as an additional storage system when you run out of space. Backblaze mirrors your drive. If you delete your data, it will be deleted from Backblaze after 30 days.
This may create a problem. I need a system that will backup and store whatever data I upload indefinitely. If I want to delete something, I will do that manually. This way, I don't need to continuously buy new external hard-drives.

From my research, a service that offers that level of retention, that doesn't require the files to also live on the home machine, is going to cost considerably more. Those kinds of "storage" solutions, as opposed to "backup" solutions, are covered by services like DropBox.

As an example, Dropbox allows up to 2GB for free. Not enough for me (I have 15TB and growing). For $9.99 per month, I could get up to 1TB of space for storage. Still not enough for me. Beyond that, I'd have to go with a Business account, which is UNLIMITED storage. Cost: $15 per month per user, with a minimum of 5 users = $75 per month = $900 per year. That's just more than I'm willing to pay.

At those kinds of prices, it's far less expensive to simply buy more hard drives. The thing that the cloud backup/storage solutions offer to me that local drives don't is insurance against local catastrophe, and by that I mean theft, fire, tornado, etc. - something that takes out ALL my local hard drives in a way that's unrecoverable. I could fill them and take them to my sister's, but the same tornado could wipe her place out as well, unlikely as that is. Or I could pay to store them in a bank safety deposit box, sure. Anything off-site from me though means that I don't have ready access to them when I want it, making it a pain in the behind to work with them.

I'm considering the idea that if I can find 4 other local friends and family who are interested in having unlimited storage, and are reliable enough to participate with me, I could set up the business account, and collect $15 from each of them per month to make it happen. If I felt particularly entrepreneurial, I suppose I could charge them each $20 per month, get my storage for free, and pocket the extra $5 per month as an administrative fee (which likely violates the terms of service with the service, so you wouldn't want to try to go large scale with it and start trying to recruit hundreds of users and make a business of it). Other than that, I just don't see it as a viable solution for me, personally.

If anyone knows of a reasonably priced unlimited "Storage" solution for a single user though, I would LOVE to find out about it, because that would be the ultimate solution for me.

Hey Buckster,

Sounds like a good idea trying to get a few friends together to share the Dropbox unlimited.
I looked into dropbox also, and had the same issue with size limit and expense.

Yeah, the problem with MY friends and family is that none of them need that much volume, so they can get by much cheaper. They also don't have much in the way of stuff they really treasure - in most cases, it seems to be basically none. If their whole machine burns up in a fire, they'd just get another one at Walmart and go right back to Facebook, email, and a few games, and start over without much hand-wringing at all. Their photos are still on Facebook and Flickr.

 

[qleak]

AMAZON has just introduced unlimited cloud storage for $60 per year. Job Done

Amazon Cloud Drive

Holy crap! I'm gonna have to try that.

Amazon has a relatively cheap cloud but the problem is the upload times.
Same with every service I've investigated.

Have you checked what your ISP upload cap is?

When i lived in the country my upload was capped at 1 MBPS. Sometimes i had to upload videos to a school server that would take roughly 30 min to upload and another 20 to process.

I now live in toledo and pay for double the upload 5 MBPS. I'm much happier with life.

Of course if i upload from work the throttling is less. Thank you academic freedom

Hi qleak,

Good point about the upload speed, I have no clue. Considering how much I want to upload, it may behoove me to check.

You can usually deduce your max upload speed by visiting speedtest.net i think ookla or some crap like that owns it now.

6 mbps Not bad at all!

 

[Buckster]

AMAZON has just introduced unlimited cloud storage for $60 per year. Job Done

Amazon Cloud Drive

Holy crap! I'm gonna have to try that.

Amazon has a relatively cheap cloud but the problem is the upload times.
Same with every service I've investigated.

Have you checked what your ISP upload cap is?

When i lived in the country my upload was capped at 1 MBPS. Sometimes i had to upload videos to a school server that would take roughly 30 min to upload and another 20 to process.

I now live in toledo and pay for double the upload 5 MBPS. I'm much happier with life.

Of course if i upload from work the throttling is less. Thank you academic freedom

Hi qleak,

Good point about the upload speed, I have no clue. Considering how much I want to upload, it may behoove me to check.

You can usually deduce your max upload speed by visiting speedtest.net i think ookla or some crap like that owns it now.

6 mbps Not bad at all!

Yeah, that's almost twice my UL.

 

[The_Traveler]

It's not the max speed of your upload, it's what the upload service will allow.
And that's difficult to know in advance.

 

[Buckster]

It's not the max speed of your upload, it's what the upload service will allow.
And that's difficult to know in advance.

If you mean volume per month, or cap, it's actually easy - just ask them. I did, and mine is unlimited both up and down with Charter.

 

[The_Traveler]

the actual upload speed is highly dependent on lots of factors, speed allowed by one's provider, the physical distance to where it gets off the web, number of hops, size of file, etc.

I have a need to know that my pictures are safe and where they are when it gets dark.

 

[Buckster]

the actual upload speed is highly dependent on lots of factors, speed allowed by one's provider, the physical distance to where it gets off the web, number of hops, size of file, etc.

I have a need to know that my pictures are safe and where they are when it gets dark.

Given that, what's your recommendation?

 

[The_Traveler]

I have no recommendation.
I don't want to take the time to experiment with the cloud when my current system works well, particularly given the problem of restoring from the cloud.
As it is, if my main data drive goes, I can swap in any of the two duplicates in my house and be up and running in ten minutes.
The system backs up my images every time I exit LR and my workflow is always LR->PS->LR
A full data backup is done every day at 4:30 so I have 2 mirrors on site.
I always use raw files so I always have the originals if, by some odd happenstance the edited file on my main drive gets blown up.
If the file gets corrupted on either of the backups, it gets overwritten.

So I feel secure and cozy and can, if I desire, hug my photos before I go to sleep.

 

[Buckster]

I have no recommendation.
I don't want to take the time to experiment with the cloud when my current system works well, particularly given the problem of restoring from the cloud.
As it is, if my main data drive goes, I can swap in any of the two duplicates in my house and be up and running in ten minutes.
The system backs up my images every time I exit LR and my workflow is always LR->PS->LR
A full data backup is done every day at 4:30 so I have 2 mirrors on site.
I always use raw files so I always have the originals if, by some odd happenstance the edited file on my main drive gets blown up.
If the file gets corrupted on either of the backups, it gets overwritten.

So I feel secure and cozy and can, if I desire, hug my photos before I go to sleep.

Yeah, I've got virtually the same thing going on locally. So, locally, I'm VERY covered.

My safety level goal is one step beyond that however, and it is the ability to restore in the case of TOTAL catastrophic LOCAL failure of ALL my hard drives including ALL backups. When I say TOTAL catastrophic failure of ALL my hard drives including ALL backups, I'm talking about an event like a fire, tornado, mega-theft, etc.

The OP's goal appears to be that PLUS a LOT of additional off-site storage, which I also wouldn't mind having.