Quote:
Originally Posted by magnumdan
I want to start archiving my photography collection online just in case my hard drive crashes. I don't know where to begin. I used to use PBase a long time ago but I'm sure my stuff is gone from there. I don't know where to turn? What do you guys use, Google Drive, Flickr, Google Drive, Google Photos? I guess I want something two fold that I can use as a storage archive, and an archive that family can access if they want to see pics of my kids or vacation pics. Any suggestions are appreciated.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by diableri
My answer will be lousy advice for someone that gets paid for their photography but I simply have two external hard dives that I rotate. I upload all the "junk" for family, friends and shares etc to Flickr because I've had an account there forever. I don't curate it all. It is literally a photo dump that I use for my family. My Lightroom catalogs, raws and dngs are backed up locally then replicated to my external hard drives.
I bring HD1 home from work with me whenever I have a big photo dump to process as I don't usually shoot more than occasions and vacations. Once the newest files are backed up to HD1, it goes back to work and the process repeats over and over again with HD1 and HD2.
I don't online back up at all really. Just use Flickr for sharing purposes and to keep them all in one place.
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What I've learned from other pros and use myself is still offline, due to the volume of my catalog.
The theory is that anything you want archived should be on three separate drives. Someone once told me that there's a slim chance that two drives can fail at the same time (5% was the number, but what does that represent?), but it diminishes to nearly nothing that three would fail at once. Since drives will eventually expire, you need to plan for their demise. To take it one step further, one of those three drives should be in an offsite location. Then, if something happens to the building in which they're stored, you're still likely to have everything on one working drive.
I buy my hard drives in groups of three, and rotate the two backups between being at my house and offsite with a friend.
Some other very smart shooters I know make high-res jpegs of all of their selects and store them online, since that takes up way less space, but still keeps most of what you'd want in the event of an accident.
There are large-volume online storage solutions, but it just doesn't seem to be a very elegant system yet. I'd take me months of continuous high-speed upload to get everything online, and then it would need to push massive amounts of data every time I get home from a shoot.
Check out CrashPlan or something like it if you want to back up RAW files. Otherwise, Google Drive or Dropbox or something might suffice.