Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Cheap photo storage/backup hint new Amazon announcement

  I am sure everyone has a backup plan. If not you should. Photography is my hobby, and I have about ~300GB of pictures, RAW and JPEG collected over the years.  I've been using crashplan since it has a linux client, but recently Amazon announced a great plan, just for photo's, at $12/year, it's dirt cheap for unlimited photo's. It also supports some RAW formats, my old CR2 (Canon RAW) format is supported, I have not tried my new Olympus RAW, or Panasonic RAW, so that test will be later. You also get 3 months free trial as well, and it has an iOS and an Android app, so I can upload my phone/table pictures, having a kid sometimes forces you to grab what's near by, and not necessarily your camera. 
  Currently Google Drive, and Photo's, which I guess is being moved into Drive, has one big drawback, that it can't give you a link to send or embed into a blog or webpage, except blogger. I use WordPress for my photoblog, and I also have a little gripe about posting from WordPress to facebook. If I upload the images to WordPress, and post using it's publicize post, the images get uploaded to Facebook. I want to keep the pictures in one spot. For that I use Smugmug, but this Amazon Cloud Drive can change all that, we'll see.
  Amazon's Cloud Drive has an unlimited plan for $59/year, which is almost what I pay for Crashplan, but 99% of what I backup are images, the rest, documents, and other random files are on my Google Drive, or OneDrive, or dropbox, as you can see I don't keep them in one place :)
  Since I'm using a Chromebook, which is basically a cloud laptop, this whole idea of not storing locally is becoming more convenient, and efficient.  If I ever upgrade/change my Chromebook to a Chrome Base, or a newer Chromebook, I don't have to worry about my content, it's all up there in the cloud, safe and sound.
  I remember in the past, you needed an external drive to backup all your content, so you can format your machine (when I used Windows) and then copy things back it was a pain and a long process. It looks like in the future you won't really need a hard drive or local storage, specially if prices keep dropping so fast. What's your storage/backup strategy?  

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