Photo Online Backup

[robertgd]

I posted this in Backup sub forum, but as it's more geared towards backing up my pictures, I thought it might be good here.

I'll list my current setup. Macbook + FreeNAS (using a share for Apple Time Machine). This is fine for storing my backups locally (I also store music, and movies on it) and I have redundancy in place. The media isn't overly critical (I can't imagine my Macbook and NAS dying at the same time (unless of fire/theft). But it's the pictures that are most important.

I will be heading overseas in January for almost 2 months and I imagine I'll be taking *plenty* of photos. I have all of my photos stored on my Macbook using an Aperture library. What I want, is an online backup where Aperture will synchronise (like what Time Machine does). I can't afford having all of my holiday photos on my Macbook solely (in case it gets stolen, then I'm screwed).

There are a number of storage solutions available. There are one's that are dedicated for photos (smugmug, flickr, snapixel) or there are just plain old online storage (dropbox, google, skydrive). I like the idea of the photo storage, where I'm able to access them as albums as well. But I feel as though a standard online drive will be more versatile, in the sense that I can backup raw data to it as well (documents, the Aperture library file).

I'm okay to pay for premium services, as a lot of them are pretty affordable ($30 a year) but I just want something that's going to be seamless and integrate the best with my current setup (Mac OSX with Aperture).

I'm not a professional photographer, but my photos are very important to me.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

[Deftone2k]

Crash Plan looks the goods or Carbonite.

Zenfolio or Smugmug also look ok.

You can try something like Instaproofs as well.

When I travelled heaps I just kept multiple cards, at different points on my trip I mailed them home and I had an external drive back up that was kept seperate to my netbook.

Did the trick.

[robertgd]

Originally Posted by Deftone2k

Crash Plan looks the goods or Carbonite.

Zenfolio or Smugmug also look ok.

You can try something like Instaproofs as well.

When I travelled heaps I just kept multiple cards, at different points on my trip I mailed them home and I had an external drive back up that was kept seperate to my netbook.

Did the trick.

I'll be bringing an external drive for Time Machine backups. But I just feel uneasy about everything being physically on me. Posting sounds good, but even then I wouldn't trust the postal service. Also, sounds pretty pricey to buy a bunch of SD cards just to send them home.

Smugmug actually looks good. I'm also leaning towards a pro Flickr account (unlimited storage and no compression), just for the ease of sharing/social aspect. My only concern is having to sign up with Yahoo! (do not want).

[The_Shadow]

Originally Posted by robertgd

Smugmug actually looks good. I'm also leaning towards a pro Flickr account (unlimited storage and no compression), just for the ease of sharing/social aspect. My only concern is having to sign up with Yahoo! (do not want).

You don't have to sign up with Yahoo, you can use a Gmail/Google account as well.

[phreeky82]

Perhaps not suitable for everyone but I have a VPS account and can sync stuff to it with rsync (i.e. schedule a script if you want). If you're willing then you can point some gallery software to it too.

[robertgd]

Originally Posted by The_Shadow

You don't have to sign up with Yahoo, you can use a Gmail/Google account as well.

I don't use that, either. :\

Sadly I use iCloud.

[MickybD]

Remember if you are going to use an online solution then you will need to have access to the internet at each location you are going to and sufficient bandwidth to upload the potentially large amount of data (lots of photos x RAW format = lots of MB/GB to upload!).

[olie]

As mentioned above, getting 4+ gb of photos every couple of days to an online account is the main issue.

I travelled for 5 months last year, moving cities every few days to a week; and I tell you what, even staying in awesome accomodation, getting a reliable upload speed was damn near impossible.

Originally I was uploading to my home NAS, but the speeds were killing me. So I switched to a drop box premium, with the idea that I could pull the files off via remote screenshare.

Still had the issues of:
- Over blowing my allowable upload datat at the hotel
- 70% of the time the speed was capping out at 20-40k/s

[bass87]

I am planning to add the particularly good photos to a Lightroom publish folder that drops them into a Dropbox folder or something similar. This way I minimise the amount of bandwidth required by not backing up junk pictures. Then use hard drives as the local backup to capture everything.

[Jackolow]

i had this dilemma - ended up uploading all my jpegs (perhaps 200gb) to smugmug now.... reevaulating what i need to do with RAWs in the meantime.

Already backing up to 3 hard drives but if they all get lost, its better to have jpegs than nothing at all.

[Andres]

SD Cards / USB drive or burn DVDs and post them home.

As mentioned above, how are you going to upload even 1gb of photos easily /regularly? Don't want to spend your holiday in the corner of a Starbucks or in your hotel room editing/sorting photos!!!

Post them once a week, and worst cast, you lose a weeks worth of photos. Which (as sacrilegious as it sounds) isn't the end of the world.

[Azrael]

Originally Posted by phreeky82

Perhaps not suitable for everyone but I have a VPS account and can sync stuff to it with rsync (i.e. schedule a script if you want). If you're willing then you can point some gallery software to it too.

This is what i do, good setup.

Originally Posted by MickybD

Remember if you are going to use an online solution then you will need to have access to the internet at each location you are going to and sufficient bandwidth to upload the potentially large amount of data (lots of photos x RAW format = lots of MB/GB to upload!).

This is also a big problem. We just got home after 6 weeks away with 145gb of photos, absolutely nowhere on the trip had internet good enough to upload that.

We had a USB hdd, plus my wifes Macbook Air.

[spectral]

I use Crashplan Pro... but it has some limitations that it won't do networked drives. However a bit of trickery with a script that runs on startup fools it and it works flawlessly.

[Renza]

i'm using crashplan... it's a slow start (gonna take a couple of months to upload everything) but i have other backups and this is a last resort thing so the timeframe doesnt bother me so much

[hlokk]

Originally Posted by robertgd

Posting sounds good, but even then I wouldn't trust the postal service. Also, sounds pretty pricey to buy a bunch of SD cards just to send them home.

I think the point is to send a copy home each time. Its not like you're trusting your photos to a single SD and the postage service. You'll still have copies on your laptop and on your backup drive.

You can get SD's pretty cheap. E.g. $10 for 8gb, $20 for 16gb. No reason it has to be SD's if you have a way of transferring it. You can get 16gb USB's for $9. Alternately, you could also burn dvds or blurays and mail them back.

You could also use dvds or blurays to burn to and keep elsewhere. You can also use a large format rugged USB drive that you keep on you at all times with the best photos you have (attach it via a splitring so its secure perhaps).


As mentioned, an upload service may be good if you have good internet service. But that can be a mighty big if.