What is a good but affordable cloud storage choice for photos and or video?

[Ian_abaco]

My google drive is full at the free 15 gigs, how and where do you store your media? Thank you.

 

[cnyphotoguy]

I subscribe to OneDrive via a family Office 365 plan. 5 accounts with 1tb each and minimal costs to add (only to the primary subscriber account). all for ~100usd a year.

Buy Microsoft 365 Family (Formerly Office 365) - Microsoft Store

 

[tdbmd]

I use the basic Smugmug plan and have been happy with it.

 

[Autonerd]

My google drive is full at the free 15 gigs, how and where do you store your media? Thank you.

I'm very happy with Dropbox. 2 TB and I think I'm paying $10/month. Maybe $12, I can't remember. Makes backup very easy -- everything in the Dropbox folder on the main PC goes into the cloud. I installed Dropbox on a second computer and all I have to do is turn it on, let it run for a while, and it downloads. Bam, three copies -- two on two different computers and one in the cloud.

Aaron

 

[Ellinor William]

I f you are storing your data to Google Drive, then I would suggest keep using that drive only. Because all your data will be safe and at one place.

Google Drive paid plans are reasonable and it offers, 100 GB for $1.99 per month, 200 GB for $2.99 per month, and 2TB for $9.99 per month. Your data will be safe and secure with Google, and you can easily access it anywhere.

If you are looking for more cheaper options then I would suggest for a Hard Drive of 1TB or 2TB. It will be cheap and you can save the data for life.

 

[ZapperVT]

I have both a Microsoft family Office 365 and a Dropbox. Office 365 gives 1TB per person (up to 5 I think) of OneDrive storage. The Dropbox is a paid 2TB account. I've been using Dropbox for several years for photo storage and have recently been experimenting with OneDrive to see if I could drop the Dropbox and just use OneDrive, since I've got a lot of storage that I'm not using on that account.

I just did a quick test of uploading and downloading a 4GB folder of photos from each. Dropbox was phenomenally faster than OneDrive - almost 10x faster on the upload speeds. Dropbox was also much faster in figuring out what files had changed and starting the sync process. I'll have to repeat that test to see if it was a fluke - maybe OneDrive is having a bad day. But as it stands right now I'm keeping Dropbox because OneDrive is too slow.

 

[tkbslc]

My google drive is full at the free 15 gigs, how and where do you store your media? Thank you.

Google is good and affordable. You can jump to 100gb for only $2 a month. Then you don’t even need to move your photos, just pay a couple bucks.

 

[noahwc]

If you already have Amazon Prime unlimited photo storage is included with that. Backblaze is another good option if you're only really looking for a backup solution. At $7/month it's a bit cheaper than the usual suspects (Google, Dropbox etc.).

 

[HappyMartin]

I’m using AWS via a Synology. It is uploaded to S3 and then is transitioned automatically after a day to Glacier Deep Archive.



I guess I have about 10TB in the cloud. A bit of a learning curve

 

[a_c_skinner]

I don't use commercial cloud storage but will contribute three observations:

1. You need good, local, backups as well. Restoring big volumes of data if you need a full restore is very, very time consuming even if you have unlimted data and a fast connection.

2. My off site backup is cheap because I have found someone who will host a Synology appliance for me, so for about £200 spent and £30 worth of electricity a year the rest is free. Yes, I know this backup isn't backed up but there is a limit.

3. Just occasionally Cloud providers cease to trade and they will again.

 

[Guy Parsons]

I don't use commercial cloud storage but will contribute three observations:

1. You need good, local, backups as well. Restoring big volumes of data if you need a full restore is very, very time consuming even if you have unlimted data and a fast connection.

2. My off site backup is cheap because I have found someone who will host a Synology appliance for me, so for about £200 spent and £30 worth of electricity a year the rest is free. Yes, I know this backup isn't backed up but there is a limit.

3. Just occasionally Cloud providers cease to trade and they will again.

I'm also all for home storage, with backups. A Synology DS420J NAS for me plus other backups on hard drives. The NAS does not run all the time, only on a few times or so per week to gather stuff. Local USB drives have full backups as well. Not set up for Internet wide access of my NAS, it's purely home network access.

I did it for convenience and to get away from the vagaries of any cloud service and its ultimate reliability and accessibility, and speeds of access for huge backups or restores.

One thing to figure with cloud services is how long do you intend to run with it, 5, 10, 20 25, 50 years? and try to figure what the total cost over that time might be.

As in item 3. above, will your chosen cloud service always be there, will it get taken over, will the fees change unexpectedly, there's too many unknown variables for me. If the Internet collapses completely for some unknown and unexpected reason for even a short period of time, then the home NAS makes heaps of sense as it's always there.

 

[ZapperVT]

the home NAS makes heaps of sense as it's always there.

Until your house burns down, goes up in a tornado, etc.

 

[liopleurodon]

Amazon will store unlimited photos (including raw) at full resolution if you have a Prime subscription.

 

[a_c_skinner]

Hard disk at a friend's house? Swap it from time to time? Save files to a small cloud repository between off site swaps?

The catch with cloud is the time a full restore takes. Some services will send you a hard disk I think. Very unusually my ISP offers 10Gbit/s, but even so...

 

[tkbslc]

The catch with cloud is the time a full restore takes. Some services will send you a hard disk I think. Very unusually my ISP offers 10Gbit/s, but even so...

100Mbit is pretty normal. That's 1 day per Terabyte. Not exactly forever. And a lot of people have 150-300Mbit now. A few in urban areas may have 1Gbit, which is under 3 hours per Terabyte.

Plus you probably would only need a small set of files on day 1, so you could recover those rapidly and then take a few days to trickle down the rest. It's not like very many people use entire library every day.

The real issue with cloud is backup, not restore. because most people have very slow upload speeds. They might have 200Mb downloads, but only 20Mbit uploads. That would take nearly a week (>5 days) for 1TB upload.

 

[LeicaEye]

They are all pretty good, the only thing is as you store more & taking into account the larger files, you may well end up paying more than you budgeted .. L

 

[Guy Parsons]

the home NAS makes heaps of sense as it's always there.

Until your house burns down, goes up in a tornado, etc.

Or theft etc.

No worries, where I live is rated as extreme bushfire risk and the plan is to take those backup disks when fire approaches (or when we leave home for holidays, visits to relatives etc).

Fire threat has happened only once in 51 years here, pack the car with "valuables" and ready to move out. An old report that really needs freshening up of that fire, did this on the fire day and only a couple of days after getting my first digital camera http://homepages.ihug.com.au/~parsog/fire/index.html displays strangely as it was in the days when everyone had smaller monitors.

Tornado? They do happen in Australia but exceptionally rare and low risk in Sydney. In the event of an unexpected house flattening then the multi scattered backups in the house will help restore some semblance of normality.

In the final washup, the fact is that nothing matters.

When we fall off the twig I know for certain that all the disks will get junked, nobody wants my (possibly by then) terabytes of our images on those old clunky hard drives. Images that are important to kids and grandkids have already been sent to them.

 

[jimhughes]

Don't put all your faith in a NAS - they can be targets too:

Protect your photos with an AIR GAP – Jim Hughes

jimhphoto.com

 

[a_c_skinner]

The last time I made a full backup to a USB3 disk it was about 1Tb a day which is at several Gbits/s. Is your timing real life, measured or arithmetically arrived at? Testing my 1Gb connection here I'd manage a bit less than 1Tb a day from a server with little load. I've just tried it. Have you managed to download big data as quickly as you say in real life?

 

[All Bushs Fault]

Amazon will store unlimited photos (including raw) at full resolution if you have a Prime subscription.

This includes tiff, xmp, etc.