Cloud photo storage

4 watchers

lammo Oct 2018 3:17pm, 17 Oct 2018 9,372 posts	0 lammo I really need to get this in place before we have a calamity and lose a load of precious memories. What does the fetch massive use? Can you recommend anybody? Thanks
Fitz Oct 2018 3:26pm, 17 Oct 2018 1,939 posts	0 Fitz I have the photos on my laptop backed up onto a NAS drive but as they're both in the same room it's not a solution in case of total disaster (i.e. fire or theft). So additionally I have them backed up on to a Google Drive account. I've not yet tested a restore from GD to laptop, it's on my to-do-but-boring-so-won't-get-done list
lammo Oct 2018 3:36pm, 17 Oct 2018 9,373 posts	0 lammo Cheers Fitz, i have laptop and NAS but it makes me nervous when i could do something else Previously i have copied everything onto a USB stick and left it at my parents, not the most sophisticated option
larkim Oct 2018 3:36pm, 17 Oct 2018 5,858 posts	0 larkim I like Google Photos on the basis that I use android phones anyway, so every snap I take gets backed up. Theoretically free if you're OK to default to their standard resolution - I've not done this on the basis of "no going back" but I understand that unless you're a real pro photographer there's no noticeable difference. The key though is having all of your photos properly tagged with dates etc, otherwise they might all end up as being taken on 1st January 1900 or similar. I think I've got all of mine properly tagged! Unless you're on fibre, remember uploading will take a while, especially if you have 10s of GBs of photos (as I appear to have!) when you upload for the first time.
um Oct 2018 4:00pm, 17 Oct 2018 561 posts	0 um Lammo - it depends what level you want to back up. I have 75k photos consuming 350GB - I stick with 3 x external hard drives, backing up (manually) on a monthly basis and keeping one of the disks in the car. I reckon if a 747 gets the house and car, it will get me as well. (simply filed by year & month). I also have a reduced set (approx 10% of the above) of 'shareable' quality photos (filed by year and event/location). I replicate these as above and use Snapfish to store. (free, other than you do have to purchase something every year - in my case an annual calendar). I have yet to find a cloud storage (other than Snapfish) that easily maps my folder system/albums to theur cloud automatically - without having to do the whole thing twice. Although (just now) G-photos does seem to let me load album by album, so it may just be a start up pain.
Fitz Oct 2018 4:01pm, 17 Oct 2018 1,940 posts	0 Fitz Nothing wrong with the USB stick stored off-site approach, lammo. Keeps it simple.
Jambomo Oct 2018 4:10pm, 17 Oct 2018 6,716 posts	0 Jambomo The problem with USB sticks is that they are very insecure - easily lost and prone to breaking which equals lost photos. Some of the sites Um mentioned are good places to start looking at. I use a site called photobucket myself, its been good. The only things to look out for are the security of the site and also it is best to keep a back-up somewhere, not all cloud providers have back-up solutions if they decide to close the service and may not pledge to move the photos elsewhere. Its still possible to lose them, even on a cloud service.
StuH Oct 2018 4:33pm, 17 Oct 2018 2,622 posts	0 StuH Stored on one NAS, backed up to another (in the same room so still a risk). All our phone taken photo's are also on Google Photo's/Drive.
um Oct 2018 4:54pm, 17 Oct 2018 562 posts	0 um A few findings (and reminders to me) of Google Photos - mainly focuses on limitations rather than the good bits ... (and noting I mainly take photos with cameras) - 16MB 'free' limit is 99% (for me) fine for .jpg, but RAW images are well above that (not that I keep many) - no easy way to map my pc file structure to g-photos, other than loading folder by folder (not a pain once set, but I have 160 folders going back 15 years) - no sub folder ability (and as yet I can't see a way to sort albums? I've loaded 5 so far, not going to bother with 160, unless I can sort them)
FergusG Oct 2018 8:37pm, 17 Oct 2018 2,806 posts	0 FergusG I still use my old Flickr account. I think new free accounts come with 1TB of storage and 200MB per image?