Cloud storage - thoughts on

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Relatively straightforward (as far as using it goes) setup here:

- Auto backup to a (Synology) NAS sitting on my home network.
- Every night said NAS does an incremental backup to both a second NAS sitting in a different physical location as well as to the cloud (Google in this case).
- Manual (incremental) backup on external harddisk whenever I remember (once a week or so).

Internet connectivity is quite good/fast here, so that's not an issue. If it is for you, just a regular backup to external drives (and potentially storing one offsite) will be just as good, be it a little more manual effort. It doesn't have to be complicated and expensive.
 
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I don't like to depend on the internet and avoid it where ever possible.

My Mac Por towers are cheap and only a isolated storage device and are NEVER connected to the internet.

I send up a 20 mb file and receiving it back it comes back as a 19.1 or 18.3 mb file.........so ???

Also here in areas there are drop outs, poor connections, we have this 16 billion $ NBN system that was obsolete before it was installed nationally and so many people complain about it being intermittent and slow by world standards.
I also avoid anything that's networked or wireless.
No I am not against new technology, I just use the KISS principal, Less is more and NO COST what so ever.

Oz Down under
 
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Woody Meristem said:
Although I use a cloud file sharing service I would never store my images on the cloud but use external hard drives instead. Once an image is on the cloud you lose control over it -- if there's a fire at the server farm, or sabotage, or ... there go your photographs.
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YEP spot on, hence I do what I do. The World is in a massive cyber war phase getting more intense going forward........
Cloud storage is great and convenient for many, but its a business for harvesting and selling your information and selling you storage, its making hard drives as we know them obsolete for other than operating systems for now, they are using the creep method migrating us to total dependency as generations come and go, soon your full operating system will be in the cloud and all you have in your computer is a modem to connect to the cloud, OH $ subscriptions to access your data ! that will never happen what sort of a twisted world do we think we live in...........LOL
In OZ the average family of 4 pays $400 pm for connectivity to Telco's...phones and streaming we are not a cheap country to live in.........

Oz down Under.
 
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ccirelli said:
I have 1TB with Adobe, I absolutely love it. Easily expandable. Backup that instantly works in the background is important to me.

I always shoot JPG + RAW, and I'm ruthless when it comes to culling RAW images in LR - this approach helps to not tax my cloud storage space. That said, my RAW workflow has a caveat - before I even import RAW images into LR to start culling, I copy the entire session's images to an external hard drive, dedicated only to archiving RAW images that I might want to pull later (and frequently do). In LR I end up keeping more JPG's (casual family snapshots & similar) than RAW.

I also back up my LR catalog weekly (or immediately after an important shoot) on multiple hard drives, rotated in multiple locations.

It sounds like a lot of work here in writing, but honestly it's a really simple process that has me well-covered.
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Better to put in the effort than lose everything even once...
 
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Cloud means simply one or more external servers at a remote location. These have gone out of business with no warning for users and are best as a third form of backup of data that you do not mind sharing with the universe.

I use a NAS for daily data storage and once a month I back it up to another NAS. When traveling the backup NAS goes to a friend's house for safekeeping. If the primary NAS experiences a failure of the power supply or motherboard then I can boot the backup NAS in minutes. In the event of a home fire I would grab the two NAS which are side by side in my office along with a couple laptops and able to work remotely for however long was necessary.

At a bare minimum I would want a primary and a secondary NAS that each had a mirrored two-drive setup so all the data written to the first drive in the enclosure is automatically written to the second drive.
 
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Calson said:
Cloud means simply one or more external servers at a remote location. These have gone out of business with no warning for users and are best as a third form of backup of data that you do not mind sharing with the universe.

I use a NAS for daily data storage and once a month I back it up to another NAS. When traveling the backup NAS goes to a friend's house for safekeeping. If the primary NAS experiences a failure of the power supply or motherboard then I can boot the backup NAS in minutes. In the event of a home fire I would grab the two NAS which are side by side in my office along with a couple laptops and able to work remotely for however long was necessary.

At a bare minimum I would want a primary and a secondary NAS that each had a mirrored two-drive setup so all the data written to the first drive in the enclosure is automatically written to the second drive.
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Out of curiosity, do you take the NAS with you every time you leave the house? If not, what’s your plan if the house burns when you run errands? if the fire starts in the office, you may be out of luck.

Cloud storage is best as a third form of backup like you said, but it’s generally the easiest way to get offsite backup. Choosing a company like Amazon that cloud storage and computing is a big part of their business is Important for the idea of security and fear of going out of business.
 
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If your in business then YES, using a powerful reputable Cloud back up is a wise third option as long as you know they will go through your data without you knowing it.


If your Not dependent on your files for business then get a couple of good used cheap Towers Mac or PC xfat your drives and make several backups, its cheap and easy and safe.
I have been doing this for 12 years, to date no issues. No hacking No spam no down time NO COST.
Yes there are so many alternatives..........its what you want and can afford.........less is more when it comes to digital - internet.


My self I don't use cloud storage never had the need...........

Only an opinion

Oz down Under
 
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I use iCloud as part of my backup plan. My backup method includes both on-site and off site. On-site I have an external SSD as the main storage and working storage. I have time machine running backups through the day on an external hard drive. Weekly I create a clone of my working files to another external hard drive used only for this purpose. For off-site I have my library loaded to iCloud. I use OneDrive when I want to share large files or videos to others.
36 years in the IT industry with about 10 of those years being in support taught me the importance of multiple redundancy with backups. It would be rare indeed for multiple devices to all fail at the same time. The off-site storage helps protect against fire, flood, natural disasters.

(edited to correct "cell phone keyboard typing errors" aka misspellings..)
 
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I have 10 external hard drives on the shelf that are full. I work off of Western Digital 12TB hard drive. I have 2 WD 4TB and 2 WD 6TB internal with the last 6TB being a save to drive. The cloud has already been hacked. I'm not worried about fire or anything. When my Seagate 1TB computer drive failed last summer I didn't loose anything because I have it all saved external and I have my PS disk in the drawer.
 
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No Cloud for personal use.

The internet is creeping into our lives more and more with the objective of gaining control and dependency disguised as a service and benefit with the end game being cost to you and revenue to them.

That's a good thing or a bad thing, its up to you to decide as you have a choice only for a little while longer.

I personally don't use cloud while i still have a choice, and best of all never social media, nor do i allow any storage of passwords by Google Norton or who ever.

Travel, loose your phone or if the internet goes down for a while, not a good experience.

For business yes its handy but it will only become another form of cost, like Microsoft software for business is in cases very very expensive.

Then again it has its great benefits, its all a matter or attitude.

Only an opinion
 
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I do my processing of images on a high speed external enterprise level SSD. that offers blazing fast speed for image processing and scrolling through a large variety of thumbnails in Lightroom

I back up the ssd drive daily to a 4 bay OWC RAID drive using Carbon Copy. The RAID is directly attached through a Thunderbolt 4 port.

In addition my photo processing SSD is backed up to the cloud daily using Backblaze.
 
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to those who don't use cloud, that's great as long as you're keeping a copy of your files off-site somewhere. remember houses burn down.

and as others have said, have at least three copies, of which, at least one off-site

and raid only counts as one copy
 
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I have a menagerie of external drives, ext hard drives, and CDs. Finally bit the bullet and now use a Qnap 4 bay with RAID that's primary storage. I still copy new folders to said menagerie to have 2 copies before reformatting the CFE card. I prefer not to cloud anything. I'm very happy operating my own data server, but its slow, therefore new NEF files are copied to a local hard drive, imported into LR, then copy the folder to the NAS. I'm mid process adding 2.5 Gb to speed the copy process.
 
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