Your thoughts on cloud storage?

[S.Horton]

I use BOX.NET for files during the normal course of business. My company uses rsync.net for high speed high security high volume encrypted archive.

[tonylong]

Originally Posted by jra

It has a ways to go from what I've seen. A while back, I bought a one year subscription to Carbonite and the upload speeds were awful. The service could not keep up with my pace (meaning that I was taking photos faster than it was uploading) and by the time the subscription ran out, it was months behind on backing up my data. As far as I know, upload speeds still aren't up to par for a reasonably priced product.

Originally Posted by alann

I tried to use carbonite as well. Uploading they drove me absolutely crazy and 8 up and ate up bandwidth the point it really slowed down my other internet activities. Just using external drives.

Hmm, scary, I have at least 1TB I would need to upload at the minimum, besides day-to-day shooting however many GB each time!

[mike_d]

Originally Posted by jra

It has a ways to go from what I've seen. A while back, I bought a one year subscription to Carbonite and the upload speeds were awful. The service could not keep up with my pace (meaning that I was taking photos faster than it was uploading) and by the time the subscription ran out, it was months behind on backing up my data. As far as I know, upload speeds still aren't up to par for a reasonably priced product.

Are you saying your uploads to Carbonite were slower than your Internet connection's measured upload speed? I use Crashplan and they'll take it as quickly as I can send it, about 2 Mb/sec in my case. Of course, if your Internet connection has a slow upload, any online backup is going to be slow.

[arentol]

Just FYI... part of the TOS for Google Drive is to give them the right to pretty much do ANYTHING with your content. So if you are going to use Google Drive you will want to separately 256-bit AES encrypt your images before you upload them.

[JakAHearts]

I just signed up for Backblaze. I havent tried to retrieve anything yet but the upload speeds are pretty good.

[Amamba]

There's no easy solution that I know of to regularly back up hundreds of gigs of data (including photos) that doesn't cost $$$$.

All of these services are great for random stuff like documents, books, and occasional photos. Just use encryption (which is extremely easy, just zip everything using any free archiving software supporting AES, don't even have to actually compress the data).

I used Dropbox, Google, Box.net, Sugarsync, all of them have advantages and disadvantages. All are more or less the same.

[Willie]

Originally Posted by tonylong

Hmm, scary, I have at least 1TB I would need to upload at the minimum, besides day-to-day shooting however many GB each time!

Using my case as the example, I am limited to 250 GB/month on Comcast. So that would be 4 months to upload that much data doing nothing else. No download at all.

If you lost the drive you would need to retrieve it. How would you do that? When I had Mozy they only held the data for a month if anything changed. So if they don't see your data on your now defunct HD they will erase what they have in one month. How are you going to download 1TB of data if Comcast has a 250GB cap?

At the time I looked into it Mozy charged $0.50/GB plus some fee plus about $79 shipping. You're looking at over $500 to get your data back.

A couple of 1TB hard drives is much cheaper.

[mike_d]

Originally Posted by Willie

Using my case as the example, I am limited to 250 GB/month on Comcast. So that would be 4 months to upload that much data doing nothing else. No download at all.

If you lost the drive you would need to retrieve it. How would you do that? When I had Mozy they only held the data for a month if anything changed. So if they don't see your data on your now defunct HD they will erase what they have in one month. How are you going to download 1TB of data if Comcast has a 250GB cap?

At the time I looked into it Mozy charged $0.50/GB plus some fee plus about $79 shipping. You're looking at over $500 to get your data back.

A couple of 1TB hard drives is much cheaper.

Mozy is overpriced. Crashplan doesn't charge by the GB and can send you a hard drive to which you do your initial backup and ship back to them. They'll also ship your data back to you on a drive should you need to do a massive restore. They don't delete your files either. Of course I still do my own backups to hard drives, but Crashplan is a good backup to my backups. I have about 300 GB on there now.

[jra]

Originally Posted by mike_d

Are you saying your uploads to Carbonite were slower than your Internet connection's measured upload speed? I use Crashplan and they'll take it as quickly as I can send it, about 2 Mb/sec in my case. Of course, if your Internet connection has a slow upload, any online backup is going to be slow.

Carbonite throttles down your upload speeds to a crawl after the first few days of service (they allow faster upload speeds the first few days because that's generally enough to back up most peoples systems). They may have increased speeds since I've used it (it's been about 6 months since my subscription lapsed).

[number six]

Originally Posted by Foodguy

I did read somewhere that some cloud services will supply portable hd's to put the images on and then send back to them to save the upload time involved.

That's priceless! We're back to sneakernet!

[mike_d]

Originally Posted by number six

That's priceless! We're back to sneakernet!

Its for the initial backup and can save a lot of time. Most people have tons of stuff that doesn't change day to day. If their upload speed isn't that great or if they have a large amount of data, doing the initial backup locally and shipping it off makes sense.

[JersFocus]

Originally Posted by joeblack2022

Did you sign up for a brand new account? They are still letting existing users upgrade to 25GB before they cut it back to 7GB. You have to opt-in to get the 25GB.

I'd think you qualify as an existing user if you had a hotmail account from before.

Wow thanks, it worked. 25GB free upgrade!

[Wilt]

What is wrong with Cloud storage: The storage company can find itself insolvent, and suddenly go out of business, leaving users unnotified, and not necessarily taking any precautions to first send client data to a backup storage company. Multiple cloud storage companies have closed their cloud storage businesses, and not all of them have done it with the client welfare in mind.

What is wrong with Cloud storage: Even if a company is not insolvent, other reasons can cause all data stored at that company to no longer be accessible to its clients. The US Dept of Justice seized the servers belonging to one company (Megaupload) in early 2012.

BOTH have actually occurred!

[AZGeorge]

With years in the business I'm aware of thousands of ways remote storage can go bad but use it all the time because it is so cheap and convenient. I also do two levels of local backup.

[Kronie]

I dont trust cloud storage for large files. Its fine for random small miscellaneous stuff and I love it for contacts and such but that is where I draw the line. My upload speed is so low that it would take F-O-R-E-V-E-R to upload even one 5D2 RAW file.