Offsite photo backup suggestions?

[robr]

I know there are lots of photo happy people here, perhaps you already have a good solution for this.

My wife has thousands of digital pictures, at last count probably around 7,000. I used to periodically dump them to DVD, make several copies, put one in a safety deposit box and then delete them off her PC. This is no longer working for her as she wants to be able to easily find and use these older pictures from time to time. It's also no longer working for me as the volume has grown too large anyway. I'm also concerned about the longevity of the DVDs.

Then I started using Amazon's S3 service to sync with her PC to backup photos. This also didn't work as a) she moves files around so it creates a confusing mess as far as syncing and b) there's no way for her to easily browse and restore files from Amazon.

Does anyone have a good solution to this issue? Preferably free, but if not, then extremely cheap .

Thanks!

 

[Sarge]

Get a couple hard drives put the photos on there, or put them on photobucket, thats free but would certainly take some time. Personally Id do both, but I already do both. at least if a hard drive crashes you have the other and the online site keeping them safe.

 

[robr]

Get a couple hard drives put the photos on there, or put them on photobucket, thats free but would certainly take some time. Personally Id do both, but I already do both. at least if a hard drive crashes you have the other and the online site keeping them safe.

Thanks for the suggestions but I want to go with something offsite so I don't have to worry about dealing with the hardware and also something that offers a synchronization client. It needs to be automatic or there's no point, my wife is not technical and will not bother with anything time consuming.

Windows Live Mesh beta has potential, but it's really not designed for this at the moment and has limited offsite storage options.

 

[tosugrad]

Id like to revive this thread to see what else anyone has found.

I see I can get 50GB online free here:

http://www.adrive.com/plans

 

[robr]

Good timing, my wife is down to 3GB free and I spent last night trying to figure out a methodology to archive stuff.

I think it's going to work like this.
All new camera downloads go to her PC. When she's done with them, she will move them to an 'archive' directory that lives on a NAS.

The archive directory is backed up to Amazon S3 regularly. Once in the archive directory she just needs to know not to move anything around. If it's not in the archive directory, it's not being backed up.

 

[passline]

A couple of Free Agent hard drives w/dual firewire. These things are in the terabyte range now. How many more photos do you want to keep? It will take a lifetime just to look at them.

 

[tosugrad]

In my case, I am afraid of theft and would like something backed up not sitting on my desk to be taken with the computer

 

[robr]

In my case, I am afraid of theft and would like something backed up not sitting on my desk to be taken with the computer

Check out Amazon S3. There are Windows based backup programs that will backup directly to S3.

more (completely out of date) info - but a good start for looking for further info
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000808.html

Q: How much does Amazon S3 cost?

Amazon S3 lets developers pay only for what they consume and there is no minimum fee. Developers pay $0.150 per GB for the first 50TB, $0.140 per GB for the next 50TB, $0.130 per GB for the next 400TB, and $0.120 per GB for all remaining storage per month in our U.S. datacenters. Storage costs are higher where our costs are higher and so the costs in Europe are $0.180 per GB for the first 50TB, $0.170 per GB for the next 50TB, $0.160 per GB for the next 400TB, and $0.150 per GB for all remaining storage per month in our European datacenters. Data transfer is priced the same in the U.S. and in Europe. Data transferred into Amazon S3 costs $0.10 per GB. Developers pay $0.170 per GB data transfer out for the first 10 TB, $0.130 per GB for the next 40 TB, $0.110 per GB for the next 50 TB, and $0.100 for all remaining data transferred out of Amazon S3 in a month. For data transferred via COPY requests between the U.S. and Europe, the source bucket owner is charged at the regular rates for data transferred out of the source bucket location; the destination bucket owner is charged at regular rates for data transferred into the source bucket location. Usage is totaled and charged separately in the U.S. and Europe. There is also a small per-request charge that depends on the operation and the location of the servers you are accessing. PUT, COPY (the destination bucket owner pays the per request COPY charge), POST and LIST operations cost $0.01 per 1,000 requests, while all other operations cost $0.01 per 10,000 requests for buckets located in the U.S. PUT, COPY, POST and LIST operations cost $0.012 per 1,000 requests, while all other operations cost $0.012 per 10,000 requests for buckets located in Europe. We do not charge you for DELETE requests or for requests that fail due to an internal error. Your usage is measured to the nearest byte, and charges are rounded up to the nearest cent.
Amazon S3’s pay-as-you-go pricing gives developers access to Amazon’s storage benefits immediately and with no up-front financial investment.

 

[Acura NsX Pilot]

I keep a set on external harddrives one set online which I pay for and pray one will always be there. I have heard that seagate drives suck and fail alot....ask me how I know....I had one go down and all they did was replace the drive if you want them to try and retrieve your data that will be a $125 and there is no guarantee they will retrieve everything ... ohh and that porn video you made has now been seen and copied by all the techs there.

 

[sahtt]

I don't see how you are going to be able to store it for free in a non time consuming manner. I'd just get a portable device to hold them all and stick it in a safe deposit box or something. Not exactly new tech but it works.

 

[xsn]

Q: How much does Amazon S3 cost?

Wow that was a lot to read through. Can you put in layman's terms roughly how many gigs of pictures you are storing and how much it costs using this type of service?

I read it as 15 cents per gigabyte up to 50,000 gigabytes. Let's say I have 250 gigabytes of pictures, that is $37/month. Am I understanding this correctly? If so, that adds up fast.. I could buy a couple external hard drives and store them somewhere else for a lot less than one year of this service would cost. And while the cost per gig may come down, the amount of picture data I have will probably go up at least as quickly.

 

[robr]

Wow that was a lot to read through. Can you put in layman's terms roughly how many gigs of pictures you are storing and how much it costs using this type of service?

I read it as 15 cents per gigabyte up to 50,000 gigabytes. Let's say I have 250 gigabytes of pictures, that is $37/month. Am I understanding this correctly? If so, that adds up fast.. I could buy a couple external hard drives and store them somewhere else for a lot less than one year of this service would cost. And while the cost per gig may come down, the amount of picture data I have will probably go up at least as quickly.

if youre at 250gb it might not be good for you, im at about 40gb (after running software to locate duplicates within the archive and weeding them out). so $6 a month for me is much more palatable. I already store the pictures on external harddrives (western digital NAS) but it can fail. i want these pictures to be around in 30 years. will the hard drive work? will i even be able to plug it into anything that exists in 30 years? amazon may not be around in 30 years either, but I like to know that i have my bases covered. i had been burning them to DVD, making 3 copies and putting 2 in a safe deposit box. but it's too work intensive and DVD media is known to fail after a time period.

there are other solutions that offer you "unlimited" store at a fixed price, but i haven't investigated any of those. most of those companies are "who???" anyway. Some of the larger ones have already failed. Another one was hacked and lost the data of 10,000 people.

 

[docjohn]

If you burned them to cd what is your concearn about the longevity of that storage? If properly protected these should last.

 

[robr]

If you burned them to cd what is your concearn about the longevity of that storage? If properly protected these should last.

CD-Rs are not good for long term archival. Here's an excerpt from wikipedia on the subject. DVD-Rs are worse.

Expected lifespan

Real-life (not accelerated aging) tests have revealed that some CD-Rs degrade quickly even if stored normally.[5][6] The quality of a CD-R disc has a large and direct influence on longevity -- cheap discs shouldn't be expected to last very long. Unfortunately, branding isn't a reliable guide to quality, because many brands (major as well as no name) do not actually manufacture their own discs. Instead they are sourced from different manufacturers of varying quality. For best results, the actual manufacturer and material components should be verified of each batch of discs.
An example of a CD-R burned in 2000 showing dye degradation in 2008. Part of the data on it has been lost.

Burned CD-Rs suffer from material degradation, just like most writable media. CD-R media have an internal layer of dye used to store data. In a CD-RW disc, the recording layer is made of an alloy of silver and other metals — indium, antimony, and tellurium.[7] In CD-R media, the dye itself can degrade causing data to become unreadable.

As well as degradation of the dye, failure of a CD-R can be due to the reflective surface. While silver is less expensive and more widely used, it is more prone to oxidation resulting in a non-reflecting surface. Gold on the other hand, although more expensive and no longer widely used, is an inactive material and so, gold-based CD-Rs do not suffer from this problem.

Paper paste-on labels for CD-Rs have been linked to degradation of the recording surface, although the issue is not without controversy [8]. Permanent markers are commonly used to mark the label side of CD-Rs and DVDs. This practice has been discouraged because it is believed xylene and toluene, common substances in permanent marker ink, can cause surface deterioration.[citation needed] Additionally, volatile organic compounds may be released which will remain inside the enclosed atmosphere of a CD-R's storage box, causing harm.

DVD-R excerpt:
Longevity

See also: Optical_disc_recording_technologies#Longevity

According to a study published in 2008 by the Preservation Research and Testing Division of the U.S. Library of Congress, most recordable CD products have a higher probability of greater longevity compared to recordable DVD products.[2]

 

[xsn]

if youre at 250gb it might not be good for you, im at about 40gb (after running software to locate duplicates within the archive and weeding them out). so $6 a month for me is much more palatable. I already store the pictures on external harddrives (western digital NAS) but it can fail. i want these pictures to be around in 30 years. will the hard drive work? will i even be able to plug it into anything that exists in 30 years? amazon may not be around in 30 years either, but I like to know that i have my bases covered. i had been burning them to DVD, making 3 copies and putting 2 in a safe deposit box. but it's too work intensive and DVD media is known to fail after a time period.

there are other solutions that offer you "unlimited" store at a fixed price, but i haven't investigated any of those. most of those companies are "who???" anyway. Some of the larger ones have already failed. Another one was hacked and lost the data of 10,000 people.

Thanks for the additional info. I may actually be over 250GB these days. Haven't checked lately. I agree DVD is a pain. The capacity is far too small to be useful for anyone who shoots a lot with the size of digital photos these days.

For now I think I'll stick with a couple external hard drives in rotation.

Odds of any data loss (simultaneous failure of the hard drive in my main computer and the most recently used external drive, or my house burning down or being burglarized while I have one of the external drives here) are very small.

Odds of complete data loss (failure on my main computer and both of those drives at the same time, or simultaneous destruction or theft of both my house and the place I store the drives off site) have to be approaching zero.

 

[Cozmo]

My grandfather and his neighbor actually have a pretty good system. They bought 2 large external hard drives, and each of them backed up their photos to one of them, then they traded. Every once in a while they update their photos and trade drives again.. This way there's 2 copies floating around not including the one on the PC, plus one of them is offsite.