Canon has announced that Canon Irista will stop

YuengLinger

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Dec 20, 2012
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A home NAS is not an offsite backup solution. Ideally, you want both.

Still, I don't remember hearing about Irista before, so it must be not a very popular resource.
Any reliable friend or relative with a house or apartment can offer an offsite backup solution. So can a safe-deposit box in a bank. For a hurricane, I think a good home safe and waterproof bags would do the trick. Now, if we are talking about tsunami zones, hmm...

Backing up to clouds is for the birds.
 
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Sharlin

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Any reliable friend or relative with a house or apartment can offer an offsite backup solution. So can a safe-deposit box in a bank.

Friend or relative maybe, but you're not going to be able to transmit incrementals to a safe-deposit box in a bank… Backups are nigh useless if they're months or years out of date.
 
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YuengLinger

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Friend or relative maybe, but you're not going to be able to transmit incrementals to a safe-deposit box in a bank… Backups are nigh useless if they're months or years out of date.

For financial records, medical databases in a hospital or clinic, ok, you are right, such data benefits from real-time backup. But I thought that we were talking about photographers. In that case, any time you have a new batch of photos, and then when you do your edits, ok...For most photographers, a good home-safe would do the trick for frequent backups. Take a trip to the bank or next-door neighbor or relative in the same town as needed.

I prefer knowing my data is exactly as I left it, in the hands of somebody I know personally, and not going to be affected by bankruptcies, connectivity problems, corporate mergers, my credit-card expiring, etc. Of course if I had a data-intensive business or worked for a government agency, an offsite server would be my go-to solution.

What scenarios do you fear as a photographer that would require constant offsite backing up? The only one I can imagine is backing-up images while away from home.
 
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Apr 25, 2011
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Any reliable friend or relative with a house or apartment can offer an offsite backup solution. So can a safe-deposit box in a bank. For a hurricane, I think a good home safe and waterproof bags would do the trick. Now, if we are talking about tsunami zones, hmm...

Backing up to clouds is for the birds.
With any backup, the enforcement of a regular schedule is important, and offsite backups are not an exception. My NAS is set up to back up my photos to my Amazon account automatically.
 
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YuengLinger

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With any backup, the enforcement of a regular schedule is important, and offsite backups are not an exception. My NAS is set up to back up my photos to my Amazon account automatically.
It certainly offers peace of mind!

Admittedly, it is not realistic to expect most people to backup manually to an external device on a regular basis. Just doesn't happen. I floss my teeth every night, brush two or three times a day. I can't say I'm that consistent with anything else.
 
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Any reliable friend or relative with a house or apartment can offer an offsite backup solution. So can a safe-deposit box in a bank.

Never heard of banks that offer safe deposit boxes with Internet connectivity.

For a time I extended my gym membership to include a locker, and kept a backup in it. The option to switch HDDs more than once a week kept the backup fresh enough.
 
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OneSnark

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Aug 20, 2019
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Cloud backups?

I am going to trust my stuff to someone that has a *profit motive* and *fiduciary responsibility to someone else*?
Umm. . . no.

What. . .put terrabytes of data in the cloud. . .where the price can change without warning? (or the system can just disappear?)
Umm. . .no.

My method:
1) Data on external drive #1 that goes with me everywhere.
2) Backup on NAS at home routinely (say. . . weekly)
3) Offsite backup (simple external drive #2). Updated once or twice per year.
4) My external drive #1 is retired annually and put in a draw as *archive*.

When travelling; photos are copied to HDD nightly; and data stays on the cards until I get home and update on the NAS. HDD does not travel in the same bags as the memory cards.
 
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SteveC

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I'm in the midst of moving to a NAS, myself, and this is where I'm trying to go:

1) Keep the primary copy on the NAS.
2) Make a secondary and tertiary copy on the NAS, on two separate disks.
3) Take one of those disks to work (20 miles away) and keep it in a drawer in my desk.
4) Rotate that backup.
5) In addition backup to a USB drive attached to the NAS. On short notice (e.g., wildfire evac) I can grab it and go.

At some point in the future I might drop either the rotating internal disk backup or the USB backup. But it's nice to have both options.
 
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LDS

Sep 14, 2012
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Yet another 'free' cloud service bites the dust. How much is a home NAS now $200?

I didn't use it as a cloud backup - I used it to share some selected photos with others, Irista leaves to you the full rights on images, and lets you share only what you want to share. You can also create and print books.

Without the hassle of useless "social network" features. But that's probably why users didn't use it.
 
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Jan 29, 2011
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I didn't use it as a cloud backup - I used it to share some selected photos with others, Irista leaves to you the full rights on images, and lets you share only what you want to share. You can also create and print books.

Without the hassle of useless "social network" features. But that's probably why users didn't use it.
How is that not a cloud service?
 
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LDS

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How is that not a cloud service?

"Cloud service" may mean many different things. For me it wasn't a cloud storage or backup - so it wasn't comparable to a NAS (which I already use anyway) - it was a no-frills way to display and optionally share photos with selected people only, something which is less simple to run from a local NAS.
 
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He said it wasn't a cloud backup. He wasn't using it for backups, he was using it as a way to share photos.
I never said anything about backup. I said it was a cloud service, which it is/was, he then said he didn't use it as a cloud backup, maybe not but it was a cloud service.

"Cloud service" may mean many different things. For me it wasn't a cloud storage or backup - so it wasn't comparable to a NAS (which I already use anyway) - it was a no-frills way to display and optionally share photos with selected people only, something which is less simple to run from a local NAS.
Indeed it may, and I understand that. Although it is funny I use my NAS for deliverables now so use it exactly as you say you were using the Canon service, copying a QNAP link and sending it to the people you want to be able to see the images is as easy as copying a Canon link to send to people the people you want to be able to see the images, no social media aspect, no 'backup,' just a way to view and share I mages via the WWW.

I will agree that few NAS's come with nicely interactive image display frontends.
 
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LDS

Sep 14, 2012
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Indeed it may, and I understand that. Although it is funny I use my NAS for deliverables now so use it exactly as you say you were using the Canon service, copying a QNAP link and sending it to the people you want to be able to see the images is as easy as copying a Canon link to send to people the people you want to be able to see the images, no social media aspect, no 'backup,' just a way to view and share I mages via the WWW.

Actually, I can't serve images from my network because my upload speeds are too slow until fibre is deployed. Nor I'd wish to serve images outside from my primary NAS for security reasons. I would need to setup a secondary dedicated system with just the 'public' images.

I did use Menalto Gallery and later Piwigo to serve images from a 'cloud hosted' machine, but the former is no longer developed and the latter struggle to keep up with times, and need anyway maintenance. I could upload to Irista directly from Lightroom once and then share a link, and the UI was simple but IMHO in the past year it became pretty good.

But obviously the efforts weren't repaid by enough revenues.
 
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