Online Backups

[Peter Blake]

Following on from my catastrophic cockup with an errant external drive, who is using 'cloud storage' as a secondary or perhaps even tertiary storage location?

What's good/ overpriced/ crap? Currently looking at 1.5Tb to stash somewhere but inevitably this will grow.

At the moment the files are the content of my Aperture library but I'll have to start using LR or suffer the consequences (I really like Aperture but….)

 

[Pete Askew]

I'm not using a Cloud-based system. in Germany it would be Ok but in theUK, both the work and hoe location have slow upload speeds and it is not likely to improve in the short to medium-term. I am also rather old-fashioned in wanting my data where I know where it is and there's a bit of trust issue with Cloud providers - I suspect their promises might be as the morning mist if they went bust!

I backup the main systems onto RAID NAS and this is duplicated to a second RAID NAS in a separate building in Germany and off-site on tape in the UK. My laptop has a Time-Machine (TM) backup to a WD Passport drive and others automatically back up to one of the NAS units when they are on the network (the Mac Pro has an internal dedicated TM drive for OS etc; images are elsewhere). Image files are imported into LR (or CaptureOne) onto the static machines and mirrored to the NAS. On my laptop they are mirrored to a Passport Pro and later copied onto one of the NAS units depending on where I am. I also merge the LR libraries so that there is a master library in Germany and the UK although they are not completely identical (but they are secured and backed up) - some UK generated work is only in the UK and likewise for Germany. I keep thinking about synchronising them but there is little real point and only certain images need be on both.

 

[John Holland]

I don't use the external cloud either (the cost, plus like Pete, I wonder about the long term viability of the cloud company). So I use external hard drives. Backed up each day after the editing. One copy stays on the desk and one copy goes to a separate external drive that is stored in a safe (not quite off-site). I am in the process of putting a multi-drive RAID NAS stoage on my network, but that is not up and running yet. For software, I use SyncToy by Microsoft. It's free, but it is a manual process to initiate each time after the day's editing.