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Cloud photo/video storage

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aimeemiller21

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I am an amateur photographer, mostly just my children. I have thousands of photos/videos. I am quite paranoid about losing them. I have external hard drives and even read some recommendations from the forum on here. But I was wondering what some of you use for cloud storage?? I have iDrive but it is soooo slow. It takes all day to download 3% of my files. I'm afraid I don't trust it quite as well as I would like. I don't want to break the bank either. I do however want an added place to store my photos/videos that does not decrease the quality of my media. Please assist!! :)
 
Razor512 said:
If you are looking for data security, and want to minimize costs, there are a few options that does not require cloud storage.

If you are not in a location that is prone to massive natural disasters, then consider doing a RAID 1 or RAID 5 setup in your PC, and then use a NAS (you can build or purchase a NAS (building will be cheaper).

Then if you need offsite backups, consider using some of the syncing functions and see if you can get any other extended family to also set up a NAS, then simply share the storage (you can encrypt the backups if needed).

One issue with paid cloud storage, is when you need to store lots of video and raw files, the monthly fees quickly become a horrible value, this is why I avoid it. For the price of a cloud service, I can literally gradually tile the walls of my house with WD red hard drives.

The issue with cloud services is when you need to backup 15-25+TB of data, cloud storage gets expensive.

Furthermore since most of the cloud services that focus on the consumer market, also have data limits, a large scale backup or restore can take months. Many will wither cut you off or throttle you significantly after a few hundred GB.

While building up local redundant storage has a higher up front cost, in the long run given the lifespan of modern drives, it will easily pay for itself compared to a cloud service within a few years. Furthermore, the local storage route will have more functionality. For example, My NAS build is connected via 2.5GbE, while not as good s internal storage. the mapped network drive to the NAS is fast enough to edit photos and video over the LAN. I can mount a system image and even launch a PC game over the NAS and it runs decently. If there is no DRM, and all modified data is stored in a local folder (such as the app data or saved games folder), them multiple systems can access a single game install from the NAS at the same time.
The flexibility is unmatched compared to cloud storage.

Beyond that, I share the storage with a remote NAS, thus off-site backup with my brother, thus each NAS acts as offsite storage of the other.
Click to expand...
RAID isn't backup. It's to protect against disk failures in real time.
 
Software that has a proprietary format locks you in to the same issue. Your backup format needs to (for me at least) simply plug into a new computer and work. Different if you are an IT genius or have an IT department working for you. Ages ago a version change of Windows Backup made old backups unusable (IIRC).
 
Exactly. Anyone who needs to ask on here about backup doesn't need RAID. In fact most people outside of a business enterprise don't need RAID and it is actively bad for many.
 
PhotoFactor said:
RAID isn't backup. It's to protect against disk failures in real time.
Click to expand...
That is why 90% of my reply was about having at least 2 local copies and a lower cost method of having one off-site copy.

You still use RAID as the storage pool created is more fault tolerant and easier to back up to your NAS and off-site backup.

For example if doing this setup in 2020, your PC will have the usuan NVMe SSD for the OS, 1, 1 to 2 TB SATA SSD, and 3 or more 8TB hard drives is RAID. For an internal archive.

That data will then be regularly backed up to your NAS, where it can do versioning, and deduplication.

Then if you have other family or a close friend willing to share some NAS space, sync some of the data so that you act as each other's off-site backup without monthly fees.

Some NAS devices such as Synology simplify functions like that.
 
Last edited:
For $9 a month, you get 1T of cloud storage with Adobe Lightroom. It works fine, as a "safety" but I have a 2T Seagate external drive I back everything up on locally. It was like, $70.
 
PhotoFactor said:
Razor512 said:
If you are looking for data security, and want to minimize costs, there are a few options that does not require cloud storage.

If you are not in a location that is prone to massive natural disasters, then consider doing a RAID 1 or RAID 5 setup in your PC, and then use a NAS (you can build or purchase a NAS (building will be cheaper).

Then if you need offsite backups, consider using some of the syncing functions and see if you can get any other extended family to also set up a NAS, then simply share the storage (you can encrypt the backups if needed).

One issue with paid cloud storage, is when you need to store lots of video and raw files, the monthly fees quickly become a horrible value, this is why I avoid it. For the price of a cloud service, I can literally gradually tile the walls of my house with WD red hard drives.

The issue with cloud services is when you need to backup 15-25+TB of data, cloud storage gets expensive.

Furthermore since most of the cloud services that focus on the consumer market, also have data limits, a large scale backup or restore can take months. Many will wither cut you off or throttle you significantly after a few hundred GB.

While building up local redundant storage has a higher up front cost, in the long run given the lifespan of modern drives, it will easily pay for itself compared to a cloud service within a few years. Furthermore, the local storage route will have more functionality. For example, My NAS build is connected via 2.5GbE, while not as good s internal storage. the mapped network drive to the NAS is fast enough to edit photos and video over the LAN. I can mount a system image and even launch a PC game over the NAS and it runs decently. If there is no DRM, and all modified data is stored in a local folder (such as the app data or saved games folder), them multiple systems can access a single game install from the NAS at the same time.
The flexibility is unmatched compared to cloud storage.

Beyond that, I share the storage with a remote NAS, thus off-site backup with my brother, thus each NAS acts as offsite storage of the other.
Click to expand...
RAID isn't backup. It's to protect against disk failures in real time.
Click to expand...
The big companies move away from raid a long time ago. Raid is more or less obsolete in the age of big drives. It can take a week or to restore a disk failure in raid.

If you're going to use raid do it with 1tb or smaller drives.
 
Indeed, but the key thing remains several copies, done obsessively. Painstakingly. And it is a chore.
 
That is why some level of automation and fault tolerance is needed. The only backups that you should need to manually intervene in, is when you do cold backups (bare drive in a hard drive dock, where you manually copy your most important files (encrypted), and then place that drive in a fire/ water resistant safe).

While there are many solutions other than RAID that are fault tolerant, for example the redundancy in the ZFS file system (but that requires a lot of RAM, roughly 1GB per TB of storage to maintain performance and avoid reliability issues.

The reason why I recommended RAID at multiple levels, is for redundancy and fault tolerance. Since backups are often not done instantly and are not done in real time, depending on how much work you are doing, having to restore a backup that is a day or so old can cost time and money (often more than the cost of a single hard drive.

By having multiple copies locally with the final local stage focusing on versioning, is to deal with major issues, e.g., malware encrypting data where the encryption is propagated to your backups, versioning prevents that be maintaining a version history.

Functions such as deduplication helps to keep the file size down while you version and do other tasks.

The fault tolerance of RAID is to ensure that a large storage array has a better chance at achieving a proper backup to your NAS.

Your NAS will then use RAID or any other similar technology to handle faults. JBOD is not safe as it is not fault tolerant. A single drive failing in a JBOD means permanent loss of a bunch of your data.

Some are apprehensive to redundancy since you are literally buying an extra 8+ TB hard drive and not gaming a single kilobyte of additional storage space, when nothing has failed, you essentially increased your upfront cost by like $150.

It is a good value when you consider the cost of cloud storage, especially as your archive and backup needs grow. With some regular video and photo production work, even with culling, you can easily end up with 30TB of data within a few years, and for your NAS you will need at least twice the storage you are actively using to have some level of versioning.

You will then want some of your most important data also backed up off-site, thus the need for some backup infrastructure at a friend's or other family location where you have a quota for at least one storage pool that will be synced, thus allowing you both to benefit from an off-site backup without the steep monthly fees. In the long run it will all easily pay for itself.
 
Last edited:
An impressive setup. It is the cold backups that I'm keen to have and of course you only get the benefit of your sort of arrangement if you are prepared to carry the risk of the gap between making off line backups or bridge it with cloud backups.

Some random observations:

The OP seemed to be asking a pretty basic question for/as a user with modest expertise.

Very few people on here would suffer more than remorse from data loss

Everything I've lost (not much, and I've other versions of the images concerned) has been stuff I deleted

Backup is a balance of what trouble you are prepared to go to, how assiduously you manage whatever system, how much you are prepared to lose, how much you are prepared to spend.
 
SteveinLouisville said:
For $9 a month, you get 1T of cloud storage with Adobe Lightroom. It works fine, as a "safety" but I have a 2T Seagate external drive I back everything up on locally. It was like, $70.
Click to expand...
Backblaze is $60/year for unlimited backup. I have that in addition to 2 hard drive backups (one is a clone).
 
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