Online photo storage????

[Hazel Grant]

Maybe I'm starting to get paranoid, but I am wondering where to store photos I cherish and don't want to lose. Are there reliable online storage sites? I see several names floating around at times but am not sure of their soundness. right now I have storage in my computer but also on memory sticks. My son just lost his hard drive and a lot of photos, so I put mine on a memory stick. Can you tell I'm not "geeky"???

[Axel Hildebrandt]

Do you want to store jpgs or RAW files? For the original RAW files I use 2TB external Firewire 800 hard drives that I only plug in if necessary. For jpgs you could go to one of the image hosting websites such as pbase, smugmug, zenfolio, etc.

[Hazel Grant]

Most are in jpgs but I am now learning to use raw. Again, paranoid that I seem to be, and since I recently lived in forest-burning California, I got to thinking that if I depended on external drives, what if there was a fire? Hence, my wondering about online storage. Any thoughts that way?

[Axel Hildebrandt]

That might take a while to upload and could be quite expensive if we talk terabytes. I know some people who make two copies of the RAW files and have them on separate external hard drives, one at home, the other one at a different location, such as the office or so.

[john crookes]

If you store them off line what happens when the company closes and only gives you 24 hours to download your files back to another site.
Ask people who had Digital Railroad and see if any of them would ever store off-line again


There are fireproof and waterproof hard drives available.
They are expensive but i keep my catologue in them I have 4 500 gb drives built that way and when you think about it it is cheap insurance.
My freind uses a safe deposit box to store copies of his catologue and updates it each week by bringing in a new hard drive and swapping out the old ones for updates

most banks have fireproof safes for their safety deposit customers

John

[Hazel Grant]

Thanks. Hadn't thought about the download time (see, I'm not computer literate!) so your suggestion might be my best option.

[Jackie Schuknecht]

Hi Hazel, I have heard of a good online storage site called Back Blaze. www.backblaze.com. Pretty cheap with unlimtied storage.

[Chris Ober]

If you store them off line what happens when the company closes and only gives you 24 hours to download your files back to another site.
Ask people who had Digital Railroad and see if any of them would ever store off-line again

John

Use them in case of catastrophic failure when your working set and local backups fail, not as the only backup location. If a company goes under, you still have your working set and local to re-populate another off site location.

Would also come in handy if you're away and need to access a file for some reason and don't have a copy with you.

[LouBuonomo]

What Chris said

[Ian McHenry]

There are lots of compact USB drives available @ electronic stores.
I have a Free Agent 120 Gb drive but would probably go for something with more memory.
Suggest you watch for specials.
Cheers: Ian Mc

[john crookes]

Thats fine chris but these companies come and go faster than a new england summer.

A safety deposit box at my credit union cost about 100 dollars a year and can hold 4 drives for that price

a quick visit every so often and you swap out the backups

Much safer than any on line

as far as for travel when i do travel I bring my portfolio with me on two seperate 500 gb drives that sell for about 100 dollars each now

very easy and a lot faster than trying to work on a image from a online site

John

[Roger Clark]

"500 gb drives that sell for about 100 dollars each now"

Hmm. I'm seeing 1.5 terabyte drives for $130 locally here in Denver (seagates with 5 year warranties).

Roger

[Mike Tracy]

I'm seeing 1.5 terabyte drives for $130 locally here in Denver (seagates with 5 year warranties).

Roger

Maybe it's my bad luck but I have had 3 new Seagates fail within the last year. Luckily they weren't the only drives I had backed up to.

[Dennis "Curly" Buchner]

I had the same trouble with Seagates went back to western