Cloud storage?

[ScottyP]

Hi,

I have all my photos on portable hard drives, but I am starting to worry what would happen if these die or get stolen, etc. Can anyone recommend a good cloud storage provider for a couple terabytes of RAW files with Lightroom sidecar files? Price is obviously an issue but not the only one. I will pay a bit more for a good one. It needs to be easy to use, and not some flyby night company that might disappear someday.

Thanks!

[fyigmo63]

Therein lies the key to your question when you said, "...not some fly-by-night company that might disappear someday." I don't trust anything that isn't in my hot little hand, which is why I still receive paper receipts and don't rely on companies to keep electronic records.  Also, people always used to ridicule me for not purchasing extended warranties at Circuit City as they typically said, "...they'll be around forever...," when I questioned the longevity of those warranty guarantees.  Enough said.

I'd recommend sticking with your own hard drive backups, only do it a little differently.  I keep one set of backups immediately handy on an external drive for home use, while another I keep in a fireproof safe, and a third drive I keep at my sister's house so that it's geographically separated from the other drives.  I keep her backup drive as well.  The odds of something happening to all three of those drives must be 100 octillion to one, so in other words my pics are safe.  Just food for thought, but IMO don't trust in the cloud.

[ScottyP]

Thats a good point. I have considered and am still considering local, physical backup. I don't have a fireproof safe and we have no family in this state, but I could get a safety deposit box. It's a lot of copying and swapping etc, but it really does have a lot going for it.

A few years back we had what was surely the biggest, safest, oldest cloud photo storage in the world. Kodak's storage service. Well, Kodak went belly-up. And just before they did, they decided to clear up some memory space by shrinking the size of all our image files, reducing permanently how large we can print from them.