Storage revisited

[jorf]

Having had a breakdown of my WD drive I'm more and more concerned about storage of my photos when traveling later this year. I'll have a netbook with limited hard drive space and was planning on carrying a portable drive (was going to get WD....) and was thinking cloud but now I'm seriously thinking cloud.

In searching here I didn't find much about people using it. (Wrong search terms?) What are your experiences, with what company, etc, etc. I need to be able to store RAW, it ought to be fairly quick (since I'll be in areas with not great internet speeds), would like to be able to access it with my mac when I get home, hopefully not cost an arm and a leg....

Thanks for any input.

[jdepould]

Originally Posted by jorf

Having had a breakdown of my WD drive I'm more and more concerned about storage of my photos when traveling later this year. I'll have a netbook with limited hard drive space and was planning on carrying a portable drive (was going to get WD....) and was thinking cloud but now I'm seriously thinking cloud.

In searching here I didn't find much about people using it. (Wrong search terms?) What are your experiences, with what company, etc, etc. I need to be able to store RAW, it ought to be fairly quick (since I'll be in areas with not great internet speeds), would like to be able to access it with my mac when I get home, hopefully not cost an arm and a leg....

Thanks for any input.

A bit of an oxymoron for the cloud.

I wouldn't fret too much about having a hard drive failure. They all fail eventually, and there's nothing wrong with WD drives.

If you're traveling, just bring two drives and put the files on both drives.

[jorf]

I figured I was asking too much!

I guess I just got a problem - probably my own mistake somewhere - my WD is about 6 months old.... So, my trust factor is a bit low. You're right about just taking 2.

Thanks

[BigVinnie]

I have a device called PogoPlug. It plugs into my network at home and can be reached from anywhere.

On my laptop I run the supplied software and can mount it as a drive from anywhere that has wifi. Makes it real handy for transferring photos from a motel room back to the house.

[jorf]

That looks cool. I'll put it in my list of possibilities. Thanks.

[freybear3]

i always bring a laptop and dvd's to burn too

[RichardTaylor]

On significant vacations we, my wife & I, carry two Vosonic/Wolverine personal storage devices (one each) along with two battery chargers for each one.
I also have enough memory cards, to last the vacation, currently 80GB, and I do not delete the files on the cards after duplicating them up to the drives during the vacation. I only delete the files on the cards after we have got back home and they have been uploaded and backed up to my home PC.
We do not travel with a laptop and have never needed the backups on the Wolverine/Vosonic units, yet.

[ShantDotMe]

Portable Hard Disk Drives are not that "portable" actually, they might break pretty easily specially if they are subject to shocks, because of their mechanical structure. This includes the HDD in your laptop too.

CD / DVD / DVD9 should be a better, shock proof media, specially when traveling.

If you can afford, a SSD - Solid State Disk - should be a way better alternative than potable HDD.

The major problem with the cloud is the upload speed of the internet connection (if you are able to get internet to start with & uploading couple of GB of data on some parts of the world is not that an easy task & it might take ages.)

[jorf]

I guess it comes down to figuring out the cost of drives and/or cards and/or dvd's, etc.

Is anyone using Amazon S3?

Part of my problem is that the computer that will go on the trips is Windows (tho I may change it to Mac) and home computers are mac....

[Murtasma]

I say no to cloud storage for backing up pictures for the following reasons.

1. Upload Speed(if you shoot several gigs of raw files its going to take you a LONG time to upload that much data from home unless you have a large upload limit which you probably don't have since those increased data transfer plans are expensive)
2. Uploading all previous pictures (no way am I going to have the time or want to leave my computer on long enough to upload almost a terabyte of data)
3. Finding the right files once you have the uploaded if you need to recover them. You better have excellent organization or perhaps upload your light room database as well but I'm not sure if downloading that database on your computer after wipe on your computer is going to even be helpful. I haven't played around with light room much so I can say if this would be possible or not. Either way it will be a much slower process finding your files when they are out in the cloud somewhere. These storage clouds aren't going to have support to browse your RAW files through some web browser.
4. Cost (you will spend more over the long run using storage on the cloud)
5. Sudden change of Business Owners. Company gets bought out or goes under. What happens with your data? Will you have a week to get it off their servers. You will be competing with everyone to download all their files.... things will be slow
6. I don't like some random company having access to my images.
7. What if a client needs an image, or you need something that has been backed up but, their servers are down or your Internet connection is down. Now what?


I say go with dual HD's in a RAID-1 configuration using an external enclosure. Once you have your data backed up store the RAID enclosure in a Fireproof / Data Proof safe or store it in your safety deposit box at the bank if your super paranoid. This way you will always have instant access to the data when you need it and won't be at the mercy of the Internet or another company to retrieve and backup your data.


I would never backup data to those super portable drives however, they tend to fail more often since they are often thrown around and not cared for properly. If you need to backup something on the go that's fine but I would have that data on your laptop as well. Once you get home stick it on your external enclosure which you actually treat properly.

CD/DVDs don't last long enough for archival storage but if its just for a few months that would be fine as long as you intended to put those files on your RAID-1.