What is a good and cheap solution for online backup of over 100Gb, probably growing to 200+ in about a year, and then no doubt more after that.
I am looking for something that can work in the background on a mac. I am using Aperture 3. The cost is the limiting factor. I have thought about an external HDD, but I want my data in another place to keep it safe.
There are quite a few different online backup options, such as:
One of the better options given your information is an unlimited plan, these are getting harder to find, but Carbonite is one of the sites that does still offer this option.
not the answer you want, but I don't consider online backup to be cost effective yet. Costs are going down, but I find the annual cost is still more than it'd cost to buy a good firewire drive, copy the data, and store it in a drawer at a friend's house or some other offsite location.
And think about this. How long will it take to archive 100Gb of data onto an online service? I know when I experimented with this, a 50Gb set of data took weeks to get fully backed up online. And if you ever need to recover that data, how long will it take to download it again and get it back where it's available? Again, weeks. The cost of storing the data is one cost. The cost of the time needed to make the bakcup, and even more important, the cost of the time lost waiting to rebuild the archive off of the cloud, is a killer for me.
For relatively small, temporary backups I'll use dropbox. But for a permanent solution, it's multiple copies in multiple locations on multiple hard drives.
There are several services available.
There's a few reviews of these here:
It's worth also checking if your broadband upload speed is fast enough. Using this calculator, for a 512kbps upload speed 150Gb would take just over a month.
Another check is that you don't get charged extra for large amounts of uploading, especially if you have a limit to the total "downloading" (also includes uploading!) you do each month on your broadband tariff.
I've tried several of these services - Backblaze, CrashPlan, mozy, carbonite. However, I've recently commited to CrashPlan for several reasons:
For photographers, CrashPlan + the seed service is the way to go.
For photos only, check out Snap Haven (out of business as of 2020). It's $99 for an unlimited plan with images at full-resolution.
The membership supports the non-profit Foundation for Data Permanence, which is meant to protect your data in the event that SnapHaven goes out of business.
I know it's not an answer to the question as asked, but I too would go with a set of external drives kept off-site. Also, look at rsnapshot. It's a rsync front-end, and I don't know how well it works on Windows, but on Linux and with file systems that support that, it uses hard links to minimize data duplication while allowing you to access old revisions of files by keeping a configurable number of backups around (rotating them automatically once the limit has been reached). Takes a little fiddling to set up but is pretty much set-and-forget, and you can copy any backup to another drive and be back where you were when that backup was taken.
Storage is easy, and there are thousands of options. What I believe is critical is what else you need beyond storage.
What kind of files?..JPEG, JPEG+RAW, RAW only.
What kind of viewing?... confirm image files are stored, view photos, sort/view/share photos.
What other types of files?...psd, tiff, dng, library backup.
Considerations:
Storage only: Amazon S3, Crashplan, Mozy, Backblaze. These solutions are backup/storage services, where you can view the files online, but not photos. In other words, you can confirm a list of image files uploaded, but not view the images themselves. Amazon S3 has APIs, all others use their own client interfaces. These have the benefit of being able to store not only images, but also any other file type, including LR or Aperture library files, psd, tiff, dng files.
Storage and viewing. Again, thousands of solutions. Some like Dropbox, provide real-time access and replication, others, like Smugmug, store your JPEG files for sharing and viewing, and via integrated Amazon S3, can also store your associated RAW files.
Viewing and sharing. Thousands of options again. Services such as Flickr, Picasa, 500px, focus on sharing of JPEGs only, though of course are a sort of 'backup', since these files live in the 'cloud'. Typically, bulk download can be much more troublesome than solutions in #2 above.
Another one is Mosaic (out of business as of 2020), but is only for Mac users.
From web site of Mosaic
When starting with Mosaic or after a big shoot,
Mosaic can mail an external hard drive to get your
photos backed up quickly and securely.
Αnother is the new Project1709 (later renamed to Irista, no longer in service as of 31-01-2020). Which is still in Beta but looks very promising. The most important is that it accepts raw files. But as i said before it is too early to make any comparisons as it is in BETA.
This may be helpful although I already posted this as reply to another question:
Google Photos (google.com/photos) offers 15GB free space for "Original quality" uncompressed photos. If you need more space you can always upgrade to a paid plan. Google One offers huge storage capacities for a relatively fair price (one.google.com/about#upgrade).
If you own a Google Pixel you have unlimited free space for "Original quality" photos
I am using a combination of JungleDisk and SmugMug to backup my data. My photographic data is backed up to SmugMug (unlimited storage for a flat fee starting at US$40/year). I have almost 12GB of data up there, admittedly it could take a while for your 100GB to upload. However being that one can use a web browser to upload images you can use a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th computer to upload. I am using JungleDisk for my data backup. It does a block copy instead of each individual files which makes it faster and taking less bandwidth.
I like these services for the data durability as they both use Amazon S3 which has reliability that is almost unimaginable.
So services are starting to drop unlimited storage and costs for a lot of storage are still prohibitive, yet mailing disks off to a remote site takes a lot of work and means you could lose months of works since it's not something done regularly.
Perhaps a combo approach is best. You could keep a few offsite hard drives around, with stuff that is a year older or more. For anything newer than the archive drives, you use one of the services to back up through the year (or for a few months, depending on your image volume). Then you update the offsite stores again, and wipe everything from the remote backup.
It's still more risky but it could be the only practical way to ensure you have time-machine like regularity to backup without breaking the bank.
I used to use Mozy for online backups, but a combination of them upping their prices/cancelling the unlimited plan and the sheer amount of time that it takes to upload data meant I switched to a hard drive base solution.
However, I also use Photoshelter to back up my processed jpegs (although they do accept raws/DNGs/PSDs etc) and run my website. It can get costly to store that much data, but you only have to upload once, or you can mail them a hard drive to get the initial upload sorted out without it taking a few weeks!
I use MyPCBackup, it's fully automated after initial back up, it has unlimited storage, you can share files and sync multiple computers, also the convenience of being able to access your files and photos from anywhere. Most importantly it's encrypted and fully secure, it's pretty cheap too so it does the job for me:)
