Anybody using online backup?

[Frank Petronio]

Yeah Photo Shelter is still around, they are a membership site that allows photographers to send in a hard drive and keep high-res PSDs and TIFs online as well as providing web galleries and organization. I think they are solid these days but when I joined up I did it because they also offered stock photo sales. So I spent weeks keywording, only to have them shut down the stock side of the business with two weeks notice. Left a bad taste in my mouth and I told them to go to Hades.

I probably should do some cloud back-up. What I do is haul a cheap drive over to my Mother-in-law's closet every month or so and exchange it with the one already there. Thanks for reminding me.

It's not ideal but if we get nuked it doesn't matter does it?

[Marko]

No backup method should be the only one - there should be at least two copies, one on site and the other off site (physically).

Up until now, storing a copy off-site was either too expensive or too fiddly for most individuals and small businesses so very few actually did it. The cloud provides cheap yet realistic solution for the off-site backup.

Again, off-site backup should not be THE backup, it should be a backup of the backup.

[Frank Petronio]

Well I also keep two back-up drives here on site as well.

And I post my pictures online. Which isn't a bad back-up plan considering that the need for prints is less and less these days. In the almost worst case scenario, I could recreate an online portfolio very easily, and that would be sufficient to get work, albeit I couldn't make nice prints from 1000-pixel jpgs ;-p

Perhaps throwing 200 large jpgs up on Flickr isn't such a bad idea though....

[Scott Walker]

I have a second hard drive installed in my computer and I use external drives.
I keep only current year and the prior year files on the main drive. I keep a backup copy of current year and the prior 4 years files on the second drive. this gives me quick easy access to the files and makes for simple weekly backup of the main files. I use an external drive to back up the current year as well on a monthly basis. Once full I start a new external drive so I have external drives with a few years data labeled and stored elsewhere. The backup drive on my main computer is replaced once it contains 5 years worth of data. This drive is also stored off site. I have been using this method for 7 years now and although a bit more expensive than many alternatives it works for me.

[no1photog]

These online services are definitely a good way to have an offsite backup, but you must have a local backup too especially with large files because it might take several hours or days to recover your data in case of a hard drive crash. I did some research and I found this service Backup Freedom online backup and online storage. They come on-site to do a custom setup and if I have a crash they can deliver a hard drive with the offsite backup so I don't have to wait days to recover.

[domaz]

On UNIX or UNIX-like systems `rsync' has always been your friend. It only copies data that has changed and is fast and efficient. I'm sure it, or something like it, must be available for Macs and Windows.

Robocopy can keep a directory in sync on Windows in a similar manner.

[Greg Miller]

Consumer type cloud backups like Mozy and Carbonite are feasible only for small amounts of data. If using a consumer grade internet provider, most people are lucky to get sustained upload speeds approaching 1 mbps. (this is mega bits per second, not mega bytes per second).

So best case scenario if you have 100 GB of data is 9 days to execute an initial upload of all data (also assuming your internet connectivity does not drop or your computer does not crash in the middle). 1 TB becomes an impossible 90+ days to upload. Your 500 GB would take at least 45 days (during which time you could not reboot your computer), and then you would have to catch up on all the new and changed data that occurred during those 45 days.

In my business, I have business class cloud backup partners where the initial data seed can be physically sent on portable storage devices. And if a recovery is required, portable storage can be overnighted back to the client. The incremental data feeds are generally small enough to not be a problem. But the cost per GB for this type of service is more expensive than most photographers can stomach.

Another problem with consumer grade cloud backup is that nobody monitors the backups and nobody tests them. Most people turn them on and don't think about them until they need to recover. Then they find out it hasn't been running or it has been encountering errors. Or it has been running but they still cannot restore and the help desks are impossible to work with (do a little Googling on Carbonite or Mozy). This is all tolerable if losing some data is bad but tolerable. But it is not good if you really need to be able to get your data back. I know several IT service providers who know what they are doing but still lost data with Mozy or Carbonite.

Bottom line is to have several backup copies both on site and off site. On site copies provide the quick and easy recovery 98% of the time. Off site copies protect against fire, theft, lightning strike, water pipe burst,...

[Greg Miller]

These online services are definitely a good way to have an offsite backup, but you must have a local backup too especially with large files because it might take several hours or days to recover your data in case of a hard drive crash. I did some research and I found this service Backup Freedom online backup and online storage. They come on-site to do a custom setup and if I have a crash they can deliver a hard drive with the offsite backup so I don't have to wait days to recover.

Uh oh. I think we have been spammed.

[Ken Lee]

On the Mac, RoboCopy is very nice.

None of my photos reside on the computer hard drive. They are all on an external drive which gets backed up X times a day to a second drive via RoboCopy. I schedule things to occur in the middle of the night when the computer is otherwise idle: RoboCopy can wake the Mac from sleep, run the tasks, and put it back to sleep again.

For my web site, I use iCal to schedule Transmit to download only the changes, X times a day, and those get backed up via TimeMachine.