Cloudy backup

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mid_gen

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Does anyone use a cloud service for backing up their photos?

I know there are various offering around such as DropBox which I use for documents, but I'm wary of their T&C changes.

I could do with 100GB of storage, and don't mind paying. I figure it's safer than any backup solution I can put in place.
 
I use windows skydrive, I have 25GB of storage free, so what I did was to convert all my high res tiff 'keepers' to JPG at around 4mb each image (instead of 50-100mb tiffs), the upload isn't the quickest, but you can batch upload and forget about it while the images are uploading.

So the high res tiffs reside on a couple of external drives, with jpg's on the cloud.
 
So relying on someone elses systems is what you consider safer?
I don't think all the cloud users that permanently lost their data when Amazons system fell over would agree. (was a few months ago).
2 terabyte drives are really cheap, should be able to buy 2 for £100 and it would be a lot quicker than uploading via the net.
 
my first question when considering the cloud is always what is your internet connection like? goto www.speedtest.net and look at your down and up speeds.

personally id just stick to a harddrive or two that you rotate off site to your parents/friends/work. its a 2 hour roundtrip to deliver/recover my data, how long will take to upload/download your data?
 
mid_gen said:
I could do with 100GB of storage, and don't mind paying. I figure it's safer than any backup solution I can put in place.
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Really? Safer than having three backups on hard drive, one of which is stored off-site? What happens when your chosen cloud goes bankrupt? What happens when you need to restore from the cloud (how long to download 100GB)?

The cloud is great for access to your data from anywhere. But relying on it to keep your data safe is as sensible as a very silly thing.
 
I used to use Mozy as my secondary back up, but it just got to the point where I was always syncing with it, I've now gone to a second set of external drives which I keep off site.

I still have all my processed jpegs on my Photoshelter account too, however I think with Flickr pro you can do the same thing.
 
Check a previous thread about the danger of dropbox with their new T&C's
 
Online backups are a valid off site option but for the amount of data most would use it becomes less efficient. Using it as only source of backup is asking for trouble.

We have some business customers who back 15-50gb of data and this works well as incremental data backups done over night.
 
gramps said:
Check a previous thread about the danger of dropbox with their new T&C's
Click to expand...

Most similar services require similar T&Cs otherwise they wouldn't be able to provide the service they do. Dropbox can hardly allow you access your data from multiple devices if you didn't grant them the ability to transmit your data.

Basically, it's a case of the technically ill-informed spreading FUD.

Here are their policies explained.

http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=867
 
Surprised so many people are recommending a HDD-based backup strategy, versus using a managed data centre that already has several layers of backup redundancy in place. Not seeing the logic there! HDDs are a data deathtrap, always have been, always will be.

I do have an external HDD that I back up onto regularly.....I can't be bothered taking a HDD over to a friend's house and collecting it to update all the time. They aren't exactly renowned for travelling well.

I have a 100MB line, which tested at 97MB down, 60MB up last time if I remember right. Bandwidth isn't an issue.
 
JungleDisk - using Rackspace storage is working out at 18USD a month for 100GB which isn't too bad....still looking though..
 
mid_gen said:
Surprised so many people are recommending a HDD-based backup strategy, versus using a managed data centre that already has several layers of backup redundancy in place. Not seeing the logic there! HDDs are a data deathtrap, always have been, always will be.

I do have an external HDD that I back up onto regularly.....I can't be bothered taking a HDD over to a friend's house and collecting it to update all the time. They aren't exactly renowned for travelling well.

I have a 100MB line, which tested at 97MB down, 60MB up last time if I remember right. Bandwidth isn't an issue.
Click to expand...

It's great if you have a 100MB/s connection, but I don't think that is realistic for everyone. I've never managed to get more than 1MB/s upload, which is the fastest available where I am. So uploading raw files to the cloud is a never ending process.
 
mid_gen said:
Surprised so many people are recommending a HDD-based backup strategy, versus using a managed data centre that already has several layers of backup redundancy in place. Not seeing the logic there! HDDs are a data deathtrap, always have been, always will be.

I do have an external HDD that I back up onto regularly.....I can't be bothered taking a HDD over to a friend's house and collecting it to update all the time. They aren't exactly renowned for travelling well.

I have a 100MB line, which tested at 97MB down, 60MB up last time if I remember right. Bandwidth isn't an issue.
Click to expand...

is it surprising though? cloud based backups are slow and costly for most. as a photographer i have too much data for an online solution to a) be cost effective compared to hard drives and b) have a reasonable time window to backup/restore. as an IT professional (can i get a title drop..) for a national retailer again its a cost vs time issue. for the amount of data we have and the times expected to have that data back the cloud is not feasible. which is why we back up to a 2nd layer of HD then to tape.

what i recommend is exactly what you say the cloud based companys have, multiple levels of redundancy.

hard drives arent that unreliable, providing you have multiple devices what are the chances of each device failing at the same time? probably about the same as winning the lottery. and for the record they can travel well with some common sense, ive been carrying around some usb hard drives for 2 years and theyre still going strong. and if youre going to a building on a daily basis (i.e. work) its not a huge hassle to chuck a disk/bluray in your bag is it?

fact is if you have a reasonable amount of data (TBs) even with a 100mbps line you have to factor in probably at least a day to get your data back, you just have to work out if that is feasible for you.
 
mid_gen said:
Surprised so many people are recommending a HDD-based backup strategy, versus using a managed data centre that already has several layers of backup redundancy in place.
Click to expand...

What happens when they go broke? Their internet connection is disabled, staff are told to go home, contracts no longer apply, receivers only care about your data if they can get extra cash if they let you have it - more likely they'll just look at how much they can get for the storage hardware - wiped clean of course.

How good is their internal security? Who has access to your data? Have they been vetted? Properly? Will the company let you see the reports from an external security validation company? How often do they get themselves looked at by a good team of penetration testers? Will they let you see the reports?
 
i sometimes use amazon aws for backups and file downloads
 
hollis_f said:
What happens when they go broke? Their internet connection is disabled, staff are told to go home, contracts no longer apply, receivers only care about your data if they can get extra cash if they let you have it - more likely they'll just look at how much they can get for the storage hardware - wiped clean of course.

How good is their internal security? Who has access to your data? Have they been vetted? Properly? Will the company let you see the reports from an external security validation company? How often do they get themselves looked at by a good team of penetration testers? Will they let you see the reports?
Click to expand...

I'm pretty happy betting that the chances of Amazon or Rackspace going tits up is several orders of magnitude lower than a consumer HDD packing up. Security is not a major concern for me, and again, I am willing to take it as read that the major players all have these controls in place. I can pull 100GB down in less than 3 hours on my line.

I don't want to lose any of my photos....and unless I load up an external HDD every time I take pictures and then physically take it round somewhere there's always the risk of something catastrophic losing it all, on top of it being a pain in the arse. It may be a reflection on my friends and relatives, but not matter how nicely I ask them to keep a HDD in a safe place and not move it, some ****er will spill something on it/drop it/plug it in and use it :P
 
if i did keep an offsite copy i would encript the contence
 
mid_gen said:
I'm pretty happy betting that the chances of Amazon or Rackspace going tits up is several orders of magnitude lower than a consumer HDD packing up. Security is not a major concern for me, and again, I am willing to take it as read that the major players all have these controls in place. I can pull 100GB down in less than 3 hours on my line.

I don't want to lose any of my photos....and unless I load up an external HDD every time I take pictures and then physically take it round somewhere there's always the risk of something catastrophic losing it all, on top of it being a pain in the arse. It may be a reflection on my friends and relatives, but not matter how nicely I ask them to keep a HDD in a safe place and not move it, some ****er will spill something on it/drop it/plug it in and use it :P
Click to expand...

Dunno about that. My back-up solution has gone down a lot less than Amazon's S3.

Off-site back-up is great, but how fast can you upload your data?

Have you considered using friends and family computers for off-site backup? Give them hard drives with all of your important data (in encrypted format, of course) and then use the Internet to upload incremental changes.
 
DigitalRelish said:
Dunno about that. My back-up solution has gone down a lot less than Amazon's S3.

Off-site back-up is great, but how fast can you upload your data?

Have you considered using friends and family computers for off-site backup? Give them hard drives with all of your important data (in encrypted format, of course) and then use the Internet to upload incremental changes.
Click to expand...

It's really not clever to compare your own personal experience of backup failures as an accurate indicator of risk....we're talking small percentages.

As said, I can upload data plenty fast enough. 100MB line.

Crashplan looks good though, although I'm a little suspicious of a company that offers unlimited space for 5USD a month....will do some more investigating.
 
mid_gen said:
Does anyone use a cloud service for backing up their photos?

I know there are various offering around such as DropBox which I use for documents, but I'm wary of their T&C changes.

I could do with 100GB of storage, and don't mind paying. I figure it's safer than any backup solution I can put in place.
Click to expand...

Get 4 hotmail A/Cs accounts and you have 100Gb of FREE SkyDrive space with Microsoft.

I have recently uploaded all my pics to Sky Drive and that was just with a 10MB/sec upload speed.

It's just a matter of organisation.

You can upload a maximum of 200 files at any one time and no file can be bigger than 100MB.

So a simple matter to create various folders on Skydrive then upload using their upload tool.

But they are also archived on DVDs and a HD as an added precaution.

Hoever for all those recomending HD storage I recently had a 1TB Western Digital HD go bad with some loss of data - fortunately ALL backed up onto DVDs and the cloud.
 
Zovo is another option. The amount of data you can back up is unlimited but it does cost £19.99 per annum.
 
mid_gen said:
It's really not clever to compare your own personal experience of backup failures as an accurate indicator of risk....we're talking small percentages.

As said, I can upload data plenty fast enough. 100MB line.

Crashplan looks good though, although I'm a little suspicious of a company that offers unlimited space for 5USD a month....will do some more investigating.
Click to expand...

Well, you referred to consumer hard drives and I'm a consumer who uses consumer hard drives. Who else's experience can I provide you with?

You said,
I can pull 100GB down in less than 3 hours on my line.
Click to expand...
You did not mention your upload speeds. In the UK, upload speeds tend to be paltry compared to download speeds.

Finally, I wasn't suggesting using Crash Plan's servers, I was suggesting you use the free option of using their software and storage located at friends and family's homes. It's online, remote back-up, but with potentially more accessibility.
 
DigitalRelish said:
Well, you referred to consumer hard drives and I'm a consumer who uses consumer hard drives. Who else's experience can I provide you with?
Click to expand...

Failure rates are in the single digit percentages. Using a sample size of 1 to draw any kind of conclusion about failure rates is nonsense. I did mention earlier that upload and download speeds, about 96/60 last time I checked.

There's a Google paper on HDD failures you can download....the crux of it is the annualised failure rates :

3 Months - 3%
6 Months - 2%
1 Year - 2%
2 Years - 8%
3 Years - 8.5%
4 Years - 6%

This is for drives that are kept in a data centre, you can probably double them for external drives that are physically moved on a semi-regular basis.

I must have had at least 15 HDDs spontaneously fail over the years, albeit 4 of them went in one go when a PSU popped and fried everything connected to it. A couple at least were IBM Deathstars as well.

Point of the matter is that I do not consider any purely HDD based backup solution to be resilient enough to guarantee safety of my data. HDD + cloud will give you all the resiliency you would ever need. You would have to be incredibly unlucky to suffer a permanent data loss from your cloud provider at the same time as your HDD solution failed.
 
I agree with using the cloud as a secondary backup i.e. A backup that you never want to use, as that means you've lost both your data & main backup.

However, unless you have a super fast connection, it isn't really workable, so I've moved back to a second set of hard drives.
 
If bandwidth wasn't a bottleneck then I'd consider a cloud based solution as an additional layer of redundancy, but it would not replace a local HDD solution featuring both on-site and off-site storage.

I used Mozy's unlimited service as an additional layer for a period, but the desktop application had bugs which meant that it wasn't backing up properly.

Given the relatively low cost of HDDs, using them as part of highly available back-up solution with redundancy to cope with hardware failures makes good sense to me. If it's not to your liking then that's your choice. From an IT industry perspective, cloud based storage still has many creases to iron out.
 
mid_gen said:
This is for drives that are kept in a data centre, you can probably double them for external drives that are physically moved on a semi-regular basis.

I must have had at least 15 HDDs spontaneously fail over the years, albeit 4 of them went in one go when a PSU popped and fried everything connected to it. A couple at least were IBM Deathstars as well.
Click to expand...

like i say, apply common sense and transporting HDs for years can be fine.

Point of the matter is that I do not consider any purely HDD based backup solution to be resilient enough to guarantee safety of my data. HDD + cloud will give you all the resiliency you would ever need. You would have to be incredibly unlucky to suffer a permanent data loss from your cloud provider at the same time as your HDD solution failed.
Click to expand...

it doesnt matter whether the storage solution is purely HD based as long as you have multiple copies. and youd have to be extremely unlucky for all of your hard drive copies to fail at the same time.
 
DigitalRelish said:
If bandwidth wasn't a bottleneck then I'd consider a cloud based solution as an additional layer of redundancy, but it would not replace a local HDD solution featuring both on-site and off-site storage.

I used Mozy's unlimited service as an additional layer for a period, but the desktop application had bugs which meant that it wasn't backing up properly.

Given the relatively low cost of HDDs, using them as part of highly available back-up solution with redundancy to cope with hardware failures makes good sense to me. If it's not to your liking then that's your choice. From an IT industry perspective, cloud based storage still has many creases to iron out.
Click to expand...

I am intimately acquainted with the IT industry, andfinding the right solution to a given problem.

I want off-site backup.
I have a fast internet connection.
I don't want to expend any time or effort maintaining backups.
Restoration of backup is not time-critical for me.
I am happy to pay a reasonable amount for a solution.

Given these constraints, a local HDD backup, supplemented with an online cloud-based automatic backup, ticks all the boxes. I have better things to do with my life than transporting disk drives around.
 
I don't doubt it is right for you. But it isn't right for everyone, certainly those with a normal up to 8Mbs broadband connection.
 
DigitalRelish said:
Most similar services require similar T&Cs otherwise they wouldn't be able to provide the service they do. Dropbox can hardly allow you access your data from multiple devices if you didn't grant them the ability to transmit your data.

Basically, it's a case of the technically ill-informed spreading FUD.

Here are their policies explained.

http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=867
Click to expand...

As above, I still use dropbox (and thanks to a few careful tricks I have 15gb of free space) and am not worried about the T&C's changes

I use a mixture of a NAS with two HDD's mirrored and Dropbox and I think I have it all safe
 
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theboss said:
i sometimes use amazon aws for backups and file downloads
Click to expand...

mid_gen said:
I'm pretty happy betting that the chances of Amazon or Rackspace going tits up is several orders of magnitude lower than a consumer HDD packing up. Security is not a major concern for me, and again, I am willing to take it as read that the major players all have these controls in place. I can pull 100GB down in less than 3 hours on my line.

I don't want to lose any of my photos....and unless I load up an external HDD every time I take pictures and then physically take it round somewhere there's always the risk of something catastrophic losing it all, on top of it being a pain in the arse. It may be a reflection on my friends and relatives, but not matter how nicely I ask them to keep a HDD in a safe place and not move it, some ****er will spill something on it/drop it/plug it in and use it :P
Click to expand...

As I said in post 3 if you are happy to run the risk of losing your data when Amazon crashes (like a few months ago) then fine. I'm sure at some point it will get hacked as well.

I have terabytes of images and it is not worth me using cloud. I have 4 backups of my data now, 2 onsite and 2 off. the HDD are sealed in protective layers and are not used or touched when offsite.
 
mid_gen said:
I am intimately acquainted with the IT industry, andfinding the right solution to a given problem.

I want off-site backup.
I have a fast internet connection.
I don't want to expend any time or effort maintaining backups.
Restoration of backup is not time-critical for me.
I am happy to pay a reasonable amount for a solution.

Given these constraints, a local HDD backup, supplemented with an online cloud-based automatic backup, ticks all the boxes. I have better things to do with my life than transporting disk drives around.
Click to expand...

With your own Crash Plan solution, you'd only have to transport the drives once and there's no ongoing cost.
 
PsiFox said:
As I said in post 3 if you are happy to run the risk of losing your data when Amazon crashes (like a few months ago) then fine. I'm sure at some point it will get hacked as well.

I have terabytes of images and it is not worth me using cloud. I have 4 backups of my data now, 2 onsite and 2 off. the HDD are sealed in protective layers and are not used or touched when offsite.
Click to expand...

As I've said....chances of a permanent data loss from Amazon/Rackspace or the like is much, much smaller than the chance of a single HDD based backup failing.

Not keen on the Crash Plan solution as it means I'm piping loads of traffic through someone else's internet connection.
 
mid_gen said:
As I've said....chances of a permanent data loss from Amazon/Rackspace or the like is much, much smaller than the chance of a single HDD based backup failing.

Not keen on the Crash Plan solution as it means I'm piping loads of traffic through someone else's internet connection.
Click to expand...

So far this year cloud has failed twice. Not one of my drives have failed in the past 2 years.
 
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