Off site data storage

[Compostella]

Hi

All our photos that we have of our son are on the laptop and I've bought an external hard drive to back them up and keep them off site.

However, as another back up I want an off site internet storage program.

I have tried dropbox.com but they only have 2GB free and I have 4GB.

Can anyone recommend something?

Thanks in advance

[VHG]

If you have 4Gb of photos then they will all fit on one DVD.

So why not create 3 or 4 copies of the same DVD, and then give one each to few relatives or friends and ask them to keep them safe at their house.

A laptop or external hard disk can easily crash, or get stolen, so is not really a safe backup.

And any online storage company can go bankrupt and you could lose everything.

A copy of all your photos on a DVD is about a safe as you can get (particularly if you have a few copies in different places)

[ChuckFickens]

To add to above, do you have any idea how long it would take to upload 4gb to an online backup service, you'd be looking at around about 1 to 1.5 days

[Compostella]

Thanks guys

I uploaded 2GB upto dropbox yesterday and it took about 15 mins.

Is burning an image onto a DVD as easy as it is burning it to a CD? Do I just "copy" it over?

[rojash]

If you uploaded 2Gb in 15 minutes that would imply you achieved a speed of around 17-18 Mbs. Assuming you have ADLS, that would seem to imply you have a connection of around 36-66 Mbs.

[fo3nix]

You certainly didn't upload 2GB in 15mins! 2 MB is more like it.

Recommendations:

- Pay for Dropbox Pro. Their service is good, and you don't want to muck about with backups.

- JungleDisk, on Amazon S3. Probably cheaper than DropBox, and does decent encryption, with unlimited storage (you only pay for what you use).

- DVD backups, as suggested above. Or multiple DVDs once you have enough photos.

- Buy another external hard drive, and arrange to store it at a friend's house. Every few weeks swap your external drive you keep at home with the one you keep at your friend's, and backup to both drives.

[Compostella]

Thanks for info.

I copied 982 photos into dropbox yesterday and it was no more than 15 mins. Whether or not that is uploading 2GB is another matter but they give me 2Gb and it is now full so I assumeI uploaded 2GB.

I'll do the DVD thing though

[ugly_bob]

50GB free

www.adrive.com

not used it, but looks fairly generous

[fo3nix]

That sounds like you have uploaded thumbnails, not the actual photos.

There is no home internet connection in the UK capable of those kind of speeds.

Beware of one thing though: privacy.

Make sure that your data is protected by encrypting it; if storing on a DVD, or a drive at your friend's house, this isn't as important, but it is if you're storing it on untrusted systems somewhere else in the world. You also want to make sure the connection is encrypted too.

[fo3nix]

One final thing I forgot to add.

Have you tried a photo storage service, such as Flickr? All these examples above are for general data storage. Flickr is a very good (and free for limited number of photos, or cheap per year), photo sharing website.

The great thing about it is that you can make some or all of your photos private, so only you or close friends can see them. This acts as a photo storage service, and it's backed by Yahoo's servers, so you're getting good reliability.