online digital storage (free?)

Can someone recommend an inexpensive online digital storage solution?
Maybe free on a decent photo printing service site?

Given all of those fires in California, my wife and I are considering using an online storage service to hold all of our digital photos ... just in case.

We are searching for your experiences with the service, so please share your comments.

Thanks.

Well, free and good are two different things. I have everything on shutterfly, however, you can not download full res pictures after you have uploaded them. You can BUY CD's or DVD's.

I have stuff in the house on DVD's, second hard drive on main computer, second hard drive on secondary computer and a external USB hard drive. I also have DVD's offsite too.

I also have everything backed up via Carbonite, which is not a bad deal for less than $50 a year for unlimited backup.

There is also gmail. If you don't have a lot of RAW files, you can backup a lot of JPEG files on the 5 gigs there. Not enough? Get a few more accounts. Like I said, free, but not the best way to do things.

Hope it helps.

You could get a subdomain with DreamHost and store all your photos via FTP. They give you 500 gigs of space, and since its just for storage you wouldn't have to worry about bandwidth.

You could also look into any webhost that offers FTP. FTP storage in my opinion is what you are looking for.

You could also try out xDrive, you get 5 gigs of space free. Also check out https://www.mediamax.c​om, 25 gigs free and you can upgrade to some nice pricing plans as well.

These guys are pretty good (and they're free)

http://www.humyo.com …_Your_Online_St​orage.html

PB

Are there more photo-centric sites? We're not exactly looking for an online backup solution.

Shutterfly would be great if they allowed you to download your own original digitals.

My wife and I would prefer a site where we can upload the photos (all of them) and print whatever we need, as well as use that site to be our online photo storage where we can download the full size images when needed. That would be ideal.
Are our wishes too far fetched?

Go to your local computer store and get an external drive. Copy all you pictures to it. Copy new folders when they are added. You will always have a high speed recovery option.

I don't think I would be comfortable to use some online photo printing or even backup company for all of my photos. Who knows how long these companies will be around.

I would recommend backing up to an external hard disk and keeping it in a safety deposit box. Cheap solution and works very well.

EnronRocks wrote in post #4392560
You could get a subdomain with DreamHost and store all your photos via FTP. They give you 500 gigs of space

That's what I use. The only issue is that the upload bandwidth on most people's home (or even work) Internet connections is generally not enough to upload large amounts of photos in a reasonable amount of time. I started to at work, then sat down and calculated about how long it'd take and the answer was around a month and a half (uploading continuously, and completely saturating our Internet connection in the process).

Artdime wrote in post #4393869
I don't think I would be comfortable to use some online photo printing or even backup company for all of my photos. Who knows how long these companies will be around.
I would recommend backing up to an external hard disk

I do that also. The online storage is more for long-term backups, in case of the house burning down or similar.

PBest78 wrote in post #4392671
These guys are pretty good (and they're free)

http://www.humyo.com …_Your_Online_St​orage.html

PB

thanks for this. i've never heard of them before and have just checked them out. 25gig free is really good.
just not sure how reliable their own system is.... i need to move that much off my laptop to free up space...until i get an external storage.
i might try them anyway and see.

smugmug is about $25 a year and if you use "flickr", I believe it will halve your first year rate.

Well you have to consider some things.

Are you interested in just plain storage, do you need storage with the ability to recover stuff if they go down?
Since you seem to want some sort of long term archival storage, there are plenty of options out there...

http://www.xdrive.com/

http://www.carbonite.c​om/

Another option is to just get a couple gmail accounts and create folders and store pictures there.

Riff Raff wrote in post #4394204
That's what I use. The only issue is that the upload bandwidth on most people's home (or even work) Internet connections is generally not enough to upload large amounts of photos in a reasonable amount of time. I started to at work, then sat down and calculated about how long it'd take and the answer was around a month and a half (uploading continuously, and completely saturating our Internet connection in the process).

I do that also. The online storage is more for long-term backups, in case of the house burning down or similar.

I have FiOS with a 5mbps upstream. I've heard that Optimum Online is also matching FiOS now. So with that bandwidth, it shouldn't be too unbearable to backup to an online service. Right now, I find that many online services (mostly online photo printers) rate limit the upload speed so it is their side not mine that has the bandwidth restricted.

I too am looking for an online backup solution solely for the purpose of what if the house burns down. I currently do backup to multiple copies using DVDs. I know, DVDs supposedly don't last forever, but neither does data writing onto a HD platter.

Signup with a bunch of google mail accounts and attached all your pics and send them to yourself

Picasa is also free. Google is coming out with a free online storage soon.

Not Free... but very cheap

Take a look at Amazon's S3 Services, while not free, it is dirt dirt cheap... rarely over a $1.50 a month for many many gigabytes a month. It uses Amazon's backbone, so you know its going to be around.

Be aware, this is online storage not a Flickr, Smugmug type site. You can backup anything, not just pictures.

I am using JungleDisk which makes my Amazon S3 Drive look like a Network Drive on my iMac so I can drag and drop from Finder. I use JungelDisk's built-in backup client, however you can use any backup client that allows you to backup to a network drive. JungleDisk is available in Mac, Windows and Linux.

I use it and recommend it!

Here are the rates:

United States

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Europe

Storage
$0.18 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Requests
$0.012 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.012 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

4x4rock wrote in post #4413786
Signup with a bunch of google mail accounts and attached all your pics and send them to yourself

Picasa is also free. Google is coming out with a free online storage soon.

Please tell me you are kidding about the Google GMAIL accounts. Attaching many GBs worth of images is just not a viable option. And each GMAIL account is limited to 4GB.

Picasa is only free for a very limited amount of photos, 1GB. After that you have to buy storage space. 400GB is $500/year.