Online Storage/Cloud - What's Good?

[beckstoy]

I've been kicking around the idea of using the many online storage or cloud options.  I've noticed that some are for ALL kinds of files, but being a photographer, is there one which you all use that works well for us photographers?  The idea of being able to show clients files anywhere/any time is very appealing.  However, all the services probably aren't created equal.  I'd want to be able to back up RAW/TIFF/JPEGS, etc.  Videos not as important.

What do you use?  What do you like about it?

Thanks in advance...

[pwp]

Online storage for the volumes that most photographers generate isn't there yet in most places on the planet. If you want to backup meaningful amounts of data (RAW or TIFF in particular) then issues like your upload speed, cost charged by your isp per Mb of upload need to be calculated. Then there is the annual cost of storage. Dropbox charges $99 per year for just 100Gb. You might need that much every month. If you don't want to trust having your valuable data committed to just one cloud destination, then at least duplicating/syncing to two destinations will be a must for many photographers.

Places worth checking out would be Adobe Creative Cloud which offers free storage (not sure of the max amount before you need to pull out your Visa card). There are plenty of other paid & free cloud destinations...a Google search will reveal them quickly for you. Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive are the first to come to mind. There are plenty of others.

If the need to access your files from anywhere is your prime motivator, what I have done may be relevant. We have a 15Tb NAS which sits on the network. It's in a very secure room with power backup UPS and two very strong levels of surge protection. It's a Synology system. Look 'em up. This is top-shelf stuff, very configurable.

If you have a static IP you can set up your own local cloud. Not only can you sync your current projects in real time to the NAS, you can set it up to be able to login to it from anywhere. Less and less now do I deliver clients their jobs on DVD/CD. We have set up a password protected share folder on the NAS and just email clients the URL to their project. Once they have downloaded their stuff and confirmed it's OK, you can take it down or leave it up for an agreed period. For a lot of smaller projects, we deliver now using https://www.wetransfer.com/

Uploading to the NAS happens at very fast LAN speeds, orders of magnitude faster than any ADSL upload, and faster than cable. If you're lucky enough to live somewhere with latest tech fiber-optic then lucky you. ADSL download speeds are always much much faster than upload speeds, so your client can pull down a 2Gb job pretty quickly.

HTH...

-PW

[Mt Spokane Photography]

Generally, online storage is just that, its not friendly for viewing huge raw files, they must be downloaded or converted to a viewable format first.
 
Online sites like Flickr, Zenfolio, Smugmug, etc store jpeg copies of your images that can be viewed from anywhere.  Smugmug will also store your original RAW images using Amazons S3 servers, but large amounts of online storage tends to be very expensive.  Checkout the price per month to store a TB of online data.

[dgatwood]

Places worth checking out would be Adobe Creative Cloud which offers free storage (not sure of the max amount before you need to pull out your Visa card).

2 GB.  I wouldn't bother with Creative Cloud unless you're using it for small collaboration projects across a small creative team.  I have single Photoshop files that will barely fit in the storage that Adobe provides.

For photo viewing, use Flickr.  Their free accounts hold up to a terabyte.

If you care about serving your RAW files to other people, get a real ISP account with someone like DreamHost.  They provide unlimited storage for any files that are actually part of your public web tree.  They also let you store up to 50 GB of private backup files outside the web tree on a separate server, but for backup purposes, IMO you're better off with a fireproof hard drive attached to a NAS.

[SDPhotography]

Zenfolio is good at the $120 level. They say "unlimited" for storage space. There are various plug-ins available, TIFF and JPEG supported along with video. I don't think it is designed for mass cloud backup though, more of a website hosting site.

Cheers

[nonac]

I don't have online storage, but rather online or off-site backup through Carbonite. I can then access any of my files from another computer and even my iPhone or ipad.  Very cheap insurance for l of your files. I think it is around $60 a year.

[Kernuak]

I'm paying $29.99/month for a website, which includes 100GB storage and the ability to sell my products with Photoshelter. I only upload the finished JPEGs, so am nowhere near my limit, even after a few years. It would be adifferent story however, if I uploaded all of my images, for that, I have until recently been using a range of external drives for backup, but recently bought a Synology NAS system. In the end, I went for a 12 TB system, as well as a new 4 TB internal drive for my main storage. The Synololgy system was easy to set up, although I haven't set it up for remote access, only for my local network. The other advantage, is that it has a USB 3 port, allowing it to act as a print server.

[pwp]

Places worth checking out would be Adobe Creative Cloud which offers free storage (not sure of the max amount before you need to pull out your Visa card).

2 GB....

2Gb! That's hardly worth getting out of bed for! If you subscribe to CC then there is an automatic 20Gb offered...still not really practical for imaging professionals for anything more than project collaboration.

From Adobe CC FAQ: http://www.adobe.com/au/products/creativecloud/faq.html
Q:  Can I buy additional Creative Cloud storage?
A:  Additional storage will be available for purchase later in 2013. If you have reached your storage limit,  contact Adobe Customer Service.

-PW

[Zv]

I don't have online storage, but rather online or off-site backup through Carbonite. I can then access any of my files from another computer and even my iPhone or ipad.  Very cheap insurance for l of your files. I think it is around $60 a year.

I use Crashplan which is similar but online storage. Unlimited storage and no file size limit with remote access via iPhone or iPad. It can also back up to and from external drives for you. I went with the 4 yr plan for $180. Works out pretty cheap for a year. Ideal if back up is all you want. Only downside is upload speed can be slow if you have a bad connection. They do offer a service where they send you a hard drive at an additional cost and you back it up and send it to them for the initial back up (lets say you have 1Tb it could take weeks to upload). My initial back up of 250Gb took several days. But after that it works in the background, you wont notice it doing incremental uploads. Very easy to use. I highly recommend it.

Compare that price with Dropbox. $99 for just 100Gb. Or $499 for 500Gb. I have Tbytes of data so that would be an expensive back up option.

You should also couple this with on site and off site drives so you have data in triplicate or more. I sometimes go through old pictures and delete some of the garbage to create space. This is where online is great because if I accidently delete something on my PC it wont delete online and I can always recover it. In fact even if you delete from Crashplan itself it doesn't actually delete it. They save multiple versions so you can always recover a file.

[dgatwood]

I use Crashplan which is similar but online storage.

The only problem with Crashplan is that it's an unholy Java app that is constantly doing file I/O and has a significant detrimental impact on the performance of your computer, or at least that has been my experience.  YMMV.

[luoto]

I've been very, very pleased with Jottacloud and have ca. 23tb stored there. Very fast upload speeds (regularly 50-80 Mbit/s and have observed higher).

It has been quite stable on OSX and there are IOS clients etc too. Even ability to share a file (to 100 people) from the cloud should you need that.

I don't get any referral fees from them.
http://www.jottacloud.com

[zim]

+1 for Crashplan

I also use Skydrive to automatically backs everything on my phone when in range of free wifi, usefull for phone snaps on holiday. It's also good for simple secure sharing of final images on a per folder basis.

Don't think that either are geared up for photography use, certainly not Skydrive but Crashplan is excellent value and I like their T&Cs

[kyamon]

Have a look at AeroFS. You set up your own cloud in a way, and that gives you as much storage as you want. All you need is a pc and hard drives. If you put that in a safe place (home vs. office, a friends basement, whatever), it is as good as any cloud service. But you pay less, you have no storage limitations, and your files stay yours.

[Zv]

I use Crashplan which is similar but online storage.

The only problem with Crashplan is that it's an unholy Java app that is constantly doing file I/O and has a significant detrimental impact on the performance of your computer, or at least that has been my experience.  YMMV.

You can configure it to only back up when you want it to. I haven't noticed any slowing down in performance since installing it. I have 8Gb RAM and even with Photoshop and LR and Chrome running at the same time it doesn't slow down.

Q: what's wrong with Java apps?

[joshmurrah]

+1 for Crashplan, big fan here...

Regarding the java app, it's totally fine, just customize your settings so that it rescans, then later does backups, all during the night when you're not using it... actually that's just common sense, you don't want your backups eating up your horsepower/IO/bandwidth during your work day... I have enough gripes with Time Machine without worrying about the online storage part.

Roughly $5 a month for unlimited offsite storage, coupled with Time Machine for any immediate local recoveries, is in my mind a very solid backup system.

Crashplan can also be used in a pinch from any web browser, to grab data to present to clients... there's a web-based restore, as well as iDevice apps, however it's not really meant for cloud sharing/availability... that's where something like Flickr or Smugmug would be better.