Photo backup / archiving

[MR92]

Hey guys,

Just wondering what others do to back up their photos?

My current solution is a seldomly-updated external drive held at my parents' house.


Started looking into web-based backup options a few months ago and began uploading to Crashplan, but ended up cancelling due to impractically-slow upload speeds (around 1MB/sec which is okay, but not going to shift terabytes of RAW files very quickly).

Seeing the recent announcement that Amazon Prime customers will now get unlimited photo storage (including RAW) made me want to give it another go, but of course my upload speeds haven't changed at all so no closer to successfully realising a cloud backup.

No providers seem to offer affordable seeded backups to UK customers (where you would send them a drive with the initial backup), and even if they did I doubt I would be able to keep it up to date with current internet speeds and so it would be a waste of money.


Also considered:
- Investing in a decent RAID DAS/NAS which would protect against drive failure, but be very expensive and not against theft/fire.
- Buying a few more cheap external HDDs and leaving more backups scattered at various houses, but then these would not be consistently updated
- Keeping an external HDD in a storage locker (but holy crap, even the smallest self-storage locker is around £30/month!)

So does anyone else have any solutions, fancy or low tech?


Thanks

 

[neil_g]

as long as you have at least 2 copies with preferably 1 off site (which you have at your parents) then that should be fine.

no need to go too mad unless you have to.

 

[Fla5h]

I keep 2 copies, one at home on NAS drive and 2nd on portable HDD which I tend to leave at work.

 

[redfan]

Something I have been thinking about. My current plan is to keep an offsite backup - which I aim to update regularly (weekly if possible) but in reality is probably up to a couple of months out of date. What I need to look into is how long it would take to upload say 16GB (about 500 photos) when my current internet upload is 1Mb (and isnt going to change unless we move). If this is workable I could then take an offsite backup on day 1, and then just upload changed and new files to the cloud going forward.

 

[Chappers]

Something I have been thinking about. My current plan is to keep an offsite backup - which I aim to update regularly (weekly if possible) but in reality is probably up to a couple of months out of date. What I need to look into is how long it would take to upload say 16GB (about 500 photos) when my current internet upload is 1Mb (and isnt going to change unless we move). If this is workable I could then take an offsite backup on day 1, and then just upload changed and new files to the cloud going forward.

.

You could look at BT's cloud storage which as far as I know offers sequential backups. The software , installed on your computer regularly scans designated folders for updated files. I used it for a while but for some reason couldn't get on with it. Have a look yourself and see what you think. After the initial upload, it shouldn't put to much strain on your internet connection. I use Dropbox as a cloud storage system , but this is mainly for deliverables. However for a simple backup service it could work well, plus the prices are extremely competitive. I pay under £7.00 a month for 1TB of storage