Cloud vs external drive

posiview

posiview

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Andy
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I have two external drive and one has expired.

Considering cloud based storage, but the price, and I know this isn't the only consideration, but Dropbox is £7.99 PM for 100GB, £15.99 PM for 200GB and £39.00 PM for 500GB, seems a lot.

I can buy a G-Technology G-DRIVE Mobile USB 3.0 1 TB External Drive - Special Edition for £59.95 (random drive off Apple site).

I suspect I could quite easily trim the photographs I save and really should do, so 100 BG might be surface.

I've read the pros and cons off each, but would welcome any thoughts on each storage method.

Cheers.
 
Cloud storage can be very useful. But it isn't cheap. OK if you've only got a relatively small number of JPEG images, but when you start storing RAW images it very quickly eats up that storage space. Plus the price/Gb is not cheap. £39/month for 500Gb . 2 Months and you've bought a very good external hard drive, with twice the capacity. OK if you are paranoid about data loss due to theft or fire, buy a second drive and store it somewhere else. 4 months and you're quids in. Also you need a fairly nifty connection to be able to transfer data too and from in a timely matter.. Even with a small amount of images, you would be financially better off with an external hard drive.

More and more companies are pushing cloud storage. It's a good revenue stream. Automatic uploads such as those offered on Apple devices , plus the connectivity between devices make it an attractive proposition for a of of people. But if you have a lot of data external hard drives make a better option I would say.
 
I use a combination of cloud, internal HDD and External. My important stuff is on all methods and everything else is on the internal and External HDDs of which 2 are in my parents and In-Laws house.

Oh and the stuff I want to access regularly is also on my 2 drive NAS mirrored. :D
 
I use NAS, external storage and cloud.
OneDrive is a good cheap option £24pa gives you 100gb (15gb free) & OneDrive for business gives £15.60pa for 1TB with extra Features.
Dropbox is also a great option with its versioning control.

WD have great mirror drives at cheap prices too and are very fast (I use firewire as PC doesn't have USB3).
 
Different tools for different tasks.

Cloud storage is great for making data available anywhere. PDF instruction manuals, admin documents for my archery club, shopping lists, small copies of my favourite photos - all that kind of stuff. But I rarely feel the need to access most of my thousands of images while away from my computer, and I definitely wouldn't want to access the raw files.

So, I suppose the only reason I might want to store my images in the cloud is for disaster-recovery. But I have a NAS for daily backups and dockable hard drives for weekly (stored next door) and monthly (stored several miles away) backups. If I needed to recover my data after a disaster it would take at most one day. If I had to recover it from the cloud then it would take much, much longer. At around 12.5 Mb/s it would take over a week to download everything. (And, following up on Neil's comment, almost a month to upload it all).
 
What for? All the documents and most important (but not sensitive!) files can live on a cloud and won't take much storage to cost anything.

Photos - probably external HDD and additional backup (and another stored off-site). It is more cost effective and won't require enormous amount of uploading.
 
posiview said:
I've read the pros and cons off each, but would welcome any thoughts on each storage method.
Click to expand...
For what? Backup? Access anywhere? Something else?

That and upload speed will dictate what you get (I have online backup at £60/yr unlimited storage to UK sites so I can use 100% of my 18Mbit uplink)
 
Thanks for the comments.

It''ll be for photographs/movies.

Upload speed is 1.65MBS.

I'm erring towards external drive.

Cheers.
 
I would not want to upload movies on a 1.65mb connection.

That said, I use Amazon Glacier which is by far the cheapest option at the moment. My NAS silenty syncs my photos up to glacier, I don't much mind if it takes a while.
 
simonblue said:
Does anybody use the WD cloud,is it any good seem quite a good price :)
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I had a 3tb one that was trouble from day one. I did get it to work for 1 week, but in the end I sent it back and bought an Icy box dual USB3 enclosure.

I have a 2tb and 1tb installed with no problems and use SyncBackFree to backup my files and photos.
 
Personally always go for External drives as I like to know where my images are not they on some cloud somewhere, If I'am away from base I may upload some RAW files to Dropbox to edit when I'am away...
 
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Weldingblues said:
I had a 3tb one that was trouble from day one. I did get it to work for 1 week, but in the end I sent it back and bought an Icy box dual USB3 enclosure.

I have a 2tb and 1tb installed with no problems and use SyncBackFree to backup my files and photos.
Click to expand...

Thanks heard a quite few bad things about getting them to work :(
 
Also check out Carbonite.com - if you are less than about 250GB and have a good internet connection it may be worth while
 
Metal God said:
Just a little heads up for MPA members, you get free and unlimited cloud backup with Livedrive.
Click to expand...


Does that allow NAS backup. A lot of the free offers with livedrive don't. Although the paid for service does
 
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