Online backup storage

[Drake]

I don't feel safe enough with my current backup service and would like to know how many of you actually use an online storage for backing up your work.

At the moment I backup my photos to a secondary hard drive and DVDs. The hard drive is getting rusty though. During the 8 years of it's existence it has been spinning for thousands and thousands of hours. Now it's unplugged most of the time, connected only for the moment of backing up new photos, but still, I expect it to stop working pretty soon. DVD also isn't the most reliable way of backing up. I've seen and had too many 'high quality' DVD discs refuse to read to feel safe.

That's why I thought of using an online service to backup my photos. Since I am just an amateur, my photo library is not that heavy, it's just about 23 GB. That would probably take a couple days, maybe even weeks to upload with my internet connection, but I am not in much of a hurry.

What do you guys think of such a solution? Do you use it? Can you recommend a free or inexpensive website providing such service?

I've been looking into the SkyDrive owned by Microsoft. They give 25 GB, which wouldn't be enough for my needs, but still is plenty. Two of such accounts would probably be all I need for the next 3 years or so.

Any other suggestions? Thoughts on the whole idea?

 

[KmH]

It's slow. A lot slow. Sucks slow.

 

[Josh66]

Believe it or not, Flickr works as a cheap backup.

The pro account is $24 a year, and gives you unlimited storage space. The only restriction of any kind is that individual images must be under 20MB.

Granted, they will all be JPGs - you can't upload your RAWs, but it's better than nothing, especially if it's something you're going to use anyway for posting pictures on-line and such.

I kinda see it as a way to kill two birds with one stone. My pictures are on-line where I can share them, and if anything ever happened to my hard drive all I have to do is download them.


I do mostly shoot film though, so only having JPGs doesn't bother me. I can always scan the negatives again it I needed to.

 

[Drake]

Believe it or not, Flickr works as a cheap backup.

The pro account is $24 a year, and gives you unlimited storage space. The only restriction of any kind is that individual images must be under 20MB.

Granted, they will all be JPGs - you can't upload your RAWs, but it's better than nothing, especially if it's something you're going to use anyway for posting pictures on-line and such.

I kinda see it as a way to kill two birds with one stone. My pictures are on-line where I can share them, and if anything ever happened to my hard drive all I have to do is download them.


I do mostly shoot film though, so only having JPGs doesn't bother me. I can always scan the negatives again it I needed to.

Thanks for the info, but I am shooting mostly in RAW now, so Flickr doesn't really cut it. But it seems like a great way of backing up photos for someone who has his photos stored in JPEGs.

It's slow. A lot slow. Sucks slow.

That's not really a problem for me. Photos can be uploaded in the background while I am doing something else. My computer is on for about 10h every day anyway.

 

[jamesmartin86]

Online backup services are a good way to have an offsite backup, but you must have a local backup too especially with large files because it might take several hours to recover your data in case of a hard drive crash. I use MYPCBackup, the service is reliable and not expensive.