Online storage for photos/videos

[curiousgeorge]

This need of having some TBs allocated in some cloud to be accessible from anything and anywhere... I have problem to imagine why one may want to use it at any practical frequency, or is this just for a backup?

Of course backup alone is a reason, though I do have a raid-array NAS at home for ultra-redundancy.

But in terms of "practical frequency"...I would say during my waking hours, at least every 30 minutes is my estimate, for me.

I use OneNote across my PC, tablet, laptop and phone for starters. Any notes, voice clips, web clips, photos or whatever related to my projects is captured in OneNote and instantly available on all my other devices so I can pick up where I left off when I move from phone to PC or tablet to laptop. I use different devices in different situations, sometimes something happens on the fly so I can grab it on my phone and have it there on my desktop when I get back to the office.
If I am travelling with my laptop, anything I do is again, there on my desktop when I get back.
If I am surfing on my tablet on the sofa of an evening and a work email comes in, I can access all my docs without having to boot up the laptop and respond without having to hunt for the latest version.
I can beam my presentation from my tablet to the meeting room projector, edit it based on comments and have the final result waiting on my office PC when I get back.

A photo I take with my phone is instantly available when I sit down at my PC to edit it.
An email I responded to on my desktop is there on my phone when I get a question about it in a meeting.
The video I downloaded and was watching on my TV is there on my tablet when I want to continue watching in bed

I dunno, these are just examples of cross-device cloud integration that I use all the time. I am sure other people have other needs, and there are certainly many services that offer the same features.
For me, I haven't found a sharing/collaboration/storage/backup/cloudsync suite that comes close to the power and versatility of MS Office and OneDrive.

[x9200]

~USD7/1TB is a very tempting option, but I am mostly interested to store my photo/video stuff. I have multiple backups but they are all at single location. The only problem, 1TB is for me already not good enough so maybe (and I know it's going to sound funny) a harddrive hooked up to a raspberry pi at my FiL's in Europe will be a better option.

[nakatago]

1TB is for me already not good enough

What kind of photos and videos do you take? I'm a photographer and I haven't even filled 500 GB.

Or are those videos what I think they are .

[Nihility]

OP, be aware that the big players namely: Dropbox, Apple and Microsoft and are on the public record as stating they will go through your files if alerted by authorities you (may) have copyrighted/illegal material. Food for thought.

[x9200]

1TB is for me already not good enough

What kind of photos and videos do you take? I'm a photographer and I haven't even filled 500 GB.

Or are those videos what I think they are .

- all my (and my wife's) digital photos (and I have a habit not erasing any) since 2001, some raw, uncompressed,
- most of my analogue photos starting from mid 70's, scanned, uncompressed
It is basically over 100k digitized, hi-res, low compression photos (~1TB)

Now, photos are the easy part but I also do videos and I always archive them in a raw format. For example, a typical DV tape holds ~13GB of data (1h). I have ~90 tapes like this, plus few hundred GBs of digital camera movies.

To make things even worse I also do BD and DVD authoring. Leaving aside the project files ( typically taking more space than the resulting disk), it is also good to have a copy of the final work (2-47GB per disk).

Now add all of them up.

[midlet2013]

Here is what I do.

I have my own NAS. It cost me 500$ for 4TB. I have Synology. Much better than Ext hdd.

Things one can do:

Remotely access files through web or ios/android apps. I can see photos or ebooks on my NAS from my phone or laptop.

Stream data from NAS to other devices like Mac or DLNA enabled tv.

Download big files on NAS without keeping the laptop on. The NAS has linux type os to which u can telnet or ssh and start download via wget.

NAS has download center where u can get bittorrent files. Keep downloading while u r away.

Share photos/content with family members.

It is much better than External HDD and much faster than web based cloud services.

Hey guys,

I haven't really been good at backing up photos/videos etc. I have them all in different hard drives. I have just looked at Microsoft One Drive, since it integrates well with my windows phone and laptop, but it gives only 30GB of free storage, which seems pretty tight. Also the process of uploading is very very slow. It like 1 hr per GB. Also I am wondering in the long term, whether they will start charging us. Once I have like 30GB there, its going to be hard to download all of that and move somewhere else.

Any ideas?

[bgd]

There are lots of approaches to managing the storage of data and probably no single approach the suits all. Common wisdom dictates you should have at least 3 copies, 1 on the computer, 1 external and 1 offsite. That provides sufficient redundancy to protect your data in most scenarios.

I have evolved a data storage approach mainly due to an unreliable Mac Pro. The basic premise is that it has to be seamless, provide adequate redundancy and allow access across multiple devices. Working so far but haven’t had to cope with a major meltdown.

I store all my data on a NAS which is mirrored (Raid 1). The NAS is backed up each night to an external drive. In addition I use CrashPlan for offsite backup. I also use Evernote and DropBox (free plans) for some data. The Apple machines use TimeMachine and backup to the NAS.

In addition to the above I have been using SmugMug for photos. Provides unlimited storage and allows you to display to the world, if you want. This is all at a cost, which, with the USD going up, is getting a bit high. I’ll likely discontinue this at some stage.

[nakatago]

1TB is for me already not good enough

What kind of photos and videos do you take? I'm a photographer and I haven't even filled 500 GB.

Or are those videos what I think they are .

- all my (and my wife's) digital photos (and I have a habit not erasing any) since 2001, some raw, uncompressed,
- most of my analogue photos starting from mid 70's, scanned, uncompressed
It is basically over 100k digitized, hi-res, low compression photos (~1TB)

Now, photos are the easy part but I also do videos and I always archive them in a raw format. For example, a typical DV tape holds ~13GB of data (1h). I have ~90 tapes like this, plus few hundred GBs of digital camera movies.

To make things even worse I also do BD and DVD authoring. Leaving aside the project files ( typically taking more space than the resulting disk), it is also good to have a copy of the final work (2-47GB per disk).

Now add all of them up.

[zzm9980]

This need of having some TBs allocated in some cloud to be accessible from anything and anywhere... I have problem to imagine why one may want to use it at any practical frequency, or is this just for a backup?

I keep *all* of my data there. Pretty much any content I'd want on a new device if I were to go buy a new laptop. Even an installable copy of the applications which aren't easy to download for free.

Since I primarily use Macs, anything I consider slightly sensitive (personal photos, documents, backups/scans of whatever, financials, etc) sit inside an encrypted sparse bundle. This is essentially a virtual volume I can mount on any Mac. Since the volume is stored in 8MB stripes (the 'sparse bundle' part), it syncs very nicely to the cloud.

[Brah]

I don't own any Apple kit but by all accounts theirs seems to be easier to set up for things like redundancy, backup and recovery. It's really unfortunate that there isn't a Time Machine for Windows.

[ssylow]

google drivehas 30 GB of storage. TRY IT

[the lynx]

google drivehas 30 GB of storage. TRY IT

You obviously did not read the thread, did you?

One-liners.

[Strong Eagle]

Amazon is offering unlimited cloud storage for USD 60 per year. Unlike Prime membership and free photo storage, I don't believe you need to be US based for this offer. https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/unlim ... _unlimited

[sundaymorningstaple]

google drivehas 30 GB of storage. TRY IT

You obviously did not read the thread, did you?

One-liners.

She's posted nothing but one-liners since she joined. I'm just waiting for her to put her advert in her signature block. When that happens, we now have a button the will automatically delete ALL her posts at one time instead of us having to delete them one at a time like the old forum software.

You know me....

tic...toc...tic...toc...

moderator

[Wd40]

Microsoft had announced in Nov, that is cutting back on the onedrive space usage for free users from the current 30GB to 5GB! We are allowed for 1 year to access all our files.

http://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft ... ge-options

Now, they have announced, that they will reverse that move.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9890 ... ee-storage

But this is not automatic and you need to opt-in using this link:
https://preview.onedrive.com/bonus/

As it is Microsoft is struggling with its Lumia phones. The OneDrive feature, was one of its positives. If they cut back on that, they can say goodbye to whatever little fan base they have left.

I have just sold off my Lumia 820 after using for a little more than a year and bought a Redmi Note 2. The Lumia was nice, but the lack of apps on Windows was a slight negative and the awesome value for money of the Redmi Note 2 was big positive that tilted to its favor.

The phone comes with free 15GB Mi cloud back up which I am using for my phone photos and other phone related back ups.