Easy cloud storage

[Karrde]

My wife is a photographer and has a nice side line in wedding photography.

With the death of her second pc in the last few years and a repeat of Operation "Why do you never back anything up properly, quick shove everything onto anything that has hard drive space" I'm getting bored of having the same conversations around storage.

She has 10 hard drives scattered around the house and probably needs about 5-6TB of storage to back up what she has from 6 years worth of weddings and then her own stuff too.

Needs to be simple, accessible anywhere and expandable.

Any good ideas, suggestions or alternatives?

[TeaLeaf]

Amazon Glacier is highly recommended by Smilodon.   It is very low cost indeed and ideal for those chunks of data that you want stored long term, but will hardly ever need access to again.

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

[Jamoe]

+1 glacier, we use it at work to archive mailboxes. It can take about 5 hours to retrieve stuff.

I go to an AWS meetups in Hull. The next time the AWS evangelist attends I'll try and nab a £50 AWS voucher card for you.

[smilodon]

For terabytes of data Glacier might not be the best option though. There is no unlimited plan so if you're storing six terabytes of data then you'll spend about $0.01 (£0.008) per Gb per month, which would work out at forty odd quid. There is an online calculator here http://blender.ca/aws-glacier-calculator/

There are plenty of unlimited storage services that would be cheaper, although they probably work on the idea that their typical user will use a lot less that six terabytes. Crashplan is about £8.80 per month for unlimited storage.

As I added more data the cost benefit (which is huge at lower levels of storage) shrunk using Glacier. Also uploading gigabytes of data across a 2.5 meg upload Virgin Media pipe was a complete pain. So now I just back up to pairs of hard drives and hope the house doesn't burn down. Currently I have several WD passport and My Book USB HDD. I don't need crazy read/write speed as they just sit in bubble wrap in a box with lots of those little silicon paper bags to keep the moisture out. At fifty quid each it's a no brainer for me. I just make sure I have a decent logging system so I know which images are where.

[Penfold]

I've drive quite a few from OneDrive through to Cubby, Crashplan and Dropbox.

Dropbox has just dropped their price to £.799 per month for 1TB which is what i@m currently using. I've not found another interface I prefer.

[TeaLeaf]

Dropbox has just dropped their price to £.799 per month for 1TB which is what i@m currently using. I've not found another interface I prefer.

Aye I'm using the same for business at the moment, but for the large volume longterm storage stuff I reckon Glacier is better and is certainly cheaper!

[Jamoe]

I use crashplan at home, currently backing up about 200G of images/video is going to take me over 30 days (longer as I don't keep my PC on these days). Needs baring in mind, probably except-able if you have some redundancy at home.

(unless someone knows how to reduce this? edit: maybe this would help me - http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Troubleshooting/Speeding_Up_Your_Backup)

[smilodon]

I believe you can send disc drives directly to Amazon and they will upload your stuff themselves, for a fee. Might be a deal maker for a massive upload. The other thing I like about Glacier is that it's not a live system so when I import several gigs of images onto my PC I am not suddenly swallowing up bandwidth. I know some plans can be scheduled but Dropbox, Google are live systems so importing four or five gigs of image files might be a problem. Google are about £6.25 a terabyte a month which might be an option as well?

It's just that disc drives are so cheap now they are becoming a serious option as a storage facility. 1Tb backed up onto two drives costs  Â£100. Even if I by two a year that's only £8.30 a month and every year after that is free. Plus I have no upload issues. It's as quick as USB three 600mb/sec +

The rick is having a robust cataloging system though, which I do through Lightroom.

[suicidal_monkey]

We just use a raid-ed nas drive (one of the hp micro servers) at home, and then occasionally back stuff up to external drives, which live in relatively secure "offsite" locations ...ie in a drawer or locker at work :-)

[TeaLeaf]

I use crashplan at home

That's the solution I use for home stuff too.

[Karrde]

Thanks all for the input.

She has all these internal and external drives around and after years of not sorting it out I think I'm just going to step in as this latest crash is just annoying to listen to...