Very brief - my wife is big into photography (read: 50,000+ photos now)
She is looking for a way to store them digitally.
Currently she uses Adobe Photoshop (backs that up to an external HD as well) and keeps all SD cards in a safe. She is looking to a free, or subscription, storage solution - something like the cloud? Can anyone vouch for any of the cloud options - do you use any? Do they have a good track record? Are upload speeds fast?
Well, a lot of cloud storage plans are getting pretty darn cheap these days. Microsoft and Google both offer a good amount of default space, and if you pay a little money, you get a crap ton. Your real problem will be uploading all your images. Your very first upload session is going to drag on for quite a bit.
Do it at work or someone else's house - just bring the hard drive over.
On one out-of-town job I was at years ago I downloaded a crapton of stuff at a hotel I was staying at in the hotel lobby by installing a torrent client and hiding the harddrive behind the complementary lobby computer while chatting with the clerk (the wifi sucked even near the antenna). My friend wanted *all* the DBZ and it only took a week to get it. I removed all the viruses and spyware and upgraded their software while I was setting it all up and she still had no idea what I was doing or had done when I left. That computer never ran so well - another co-worker commented on it during the job asking if it was me who fixed it.
Personally I use Google Drive for backing up my photos. At $2.50 a month for 100gb, you can't go wrong.
You're going to have a hell of a time uploading on those internet speeds though.
Google Drive or Dropbox are the two most people I know use. Drive has the advantage of being able to integrate with your Google account. However what you can do is back up all the photos to a harddrive and store it at your parents and/or inlaws. Just update it every month or so.
The cloud has an advantage of viewing your data on any computer since it is online. The biggest disadvantage (though not likely) is if the site were to go down. Any dropout too much a risk, I would use the cloud as SECONDARY storage only.
I make annual folders (for example: \JPG 2014) in my hard drive and burn a CDR and or DVDR once a year. I also have a second external hard drive, a digital photo album connected to the USB of my DVD player. All JPGs and MPGs are backed up in their raw format so can easily be read and transfered to any PC. For additional archive backup, send a burned copies to relatives as anuual "Christmas cards". The discs rediscovered decades later will be easier for great grandchildren to find over a site gone under. The digital format is certainly much easier to get to versus older super 8 film or even VHS tape of the past.
Does carbonite still charge per year and per computer? That was the big turnoff for me, it was $60 per computer per year, and at the time I needed it on three pcs.
fastbilly1 wrote:Does carbonite still charge per year and per computer? That was the big turnoff for me, it was $60 per computer per year, and at the time I needed it on three pcs.
Yeah, it is $60/year/PC. Also, it is NOT online storage, it creates a backup. So, the file has to remain on your PC. If you delete a file from your PC, after 30 days it deletes from the backup as well. These two things are why it's far cheaper than online storage accounts like Google Drive. Some folks would rather have the option to store it entirely on the cloud and free up the HDD space.
