What cloud storage do you use?

[crzyfotopeeple]

Don't forget about magnetic tape backup too. Can't be too careful.

 

[vintagesnaps]

What happens if/when they pull the plug on it? Remember their Fire phone? apparently nobody wanted it, it tanked. So if they decide they're not making enough money on this, that could be the end of it.

I wouldn't count on getting any notice. Look at Yahoo, I had a 'My Yahoo' page, they literally did away with it overnight. I'd looked at my page to read local new headlines as usual the day before; next morning it was all gone.

Seriously though, why have an extra backup of thousands of photos? Do you really need to save all that? What about an extra external hard drive of significant photos of which you want to make sure you have an additional copy.

 

[table1349]

I'm swapping to a different/newer laptop and instead of transferring all of my photo files to the new one and bogging down the hard drive with thousands of pics, I'm going to upload everything to a cloud and keep it there. I saw that Amazon has unlimited photo storage for $11.99/year and it takes RAW photos. I'm not a pro so just looking for a back-up to my back-up drive and something that I can also access via my phone. Anyone using the Amazon option? What do you think of it? Other suggestions?

First ask yourself how important those photos really are to you and your family. Not every photo has that much value. Cull the photos down to the ones you want to pass on and consider them the treasures to look after. The rest, standard multiple backup swap and replace will do just fine. If you are truly serious about long, I mean long term backup you need to consider government/business class backup service. Keep in mind, this is something you will want to do only if you want it around for virtually forever. The general backup services are fine for most stuff most people need. If you need true long term backup you need to look into one of the companies that specialize in such things. They don't do a lot of advertising on on the net so if you are interested in this you might want to talk to the operations officer at your bank.
These services are heavily fortified, deep underground climate controlled facilities and each company will have multiple backup locations scattered around the country and for some even the world in case of natural disaster in any particular location. If something happens and one of these companies goes down completely then I wouldn't worry about the photos as mankind as we know it ceases to exist.

Things like 5D storage are in their infancy. Presently it is not available for real use, it is currently prohibitively costly and needs more development corporate input to develop further. 20 years from now or so it might be cost effective enough to consider, but not anytime in the near future.

For present if you have particular data/photos you just have to keep for posterity and don't want to pay the price of a truly long term secure data storage company then consider putting them on something like m-disc BD. They are better than the average optical media. If you want to use an online service then the only one I would recommend is Amazon Glacier. It is going to be more expensive than the standard Amazon storage or the other typical online storage companies, but as many in the field of long term data storage have suggested, it's the internet, no one knows how long one of them may be around.

 

[SquarePeg]

For $12 yr with unlimited storage, I think it works as a back up. As for external hd, I have had one fail on me already so I like the idea of one cloud and one physical back up. And who know how long usb connections will be the norm (hello CDs)...

Of the roughly 3k photos I have saved, I think at least 2k of them are probably family and vacation pics that I don't want to lose and that my daughter may want some day. The others are my favorite "for me" pics. Also it seems like every time I purge a bunch of pics I end up needing one of them later for whatever. I also like to go back and re-edit some as I learn new editing techniques.