Online storage & backup

[KarenAylwood]

I recently started taking a photography class but have been shooting digital since 2006. Needless to say I have TONS of pictures in the short 2+ years I've owned digital cameras and plan on shooting a LOT more. I have an external 180GB hard drive, and have blank DVDs for burning but would like some sort of online storage as another backup.

I use snapfish for sharing with friends and family, but it isn't good for actual storage. I also just tried to upload my first portfolio (saved in TIFF format) and quickly found out that I can use only jpegs for snapfish.

I have seen that some use smugmug.com. This is $40/year which is not a lot of money considering that it's a very valuable backup method, but I was wondering what opinions you all had.

Is smugmug a good option? Are there other reputable sites out there? Could I upload in any format (ie TIFF, JPG, RAW, etc)?

TIA!

 

[mom2janda]

I recently started taking a photography class but have been shooting digital since 2006. Needless to say I have TONS of pictures in the short 2+ years I've owned digital cameras and plan on shooting a LOT more. I have an external 180GB hard drive, and have blank DVDs for burning but would like some sort of online storage as another backup.

I use snapfish for sharing with friends and family, but it isn't good for actual storage. I also just tried to upload my first portfolio (saved in TIFF format) and quickly found out that I can use only jpegs for snapfish.

I have seen that some use smugmug.com. This is $40/year which is not a lot of money considering that it's a very valuable backup method, but I was wondering what opinions you all had.

Is smugmug a good option? Are there other reputable sites out there? Could I upload in any format (ie TIFF, JPG, RAW, etc)?

TIA!

I'd like to know this too.

 

[Miss Kelly]

I just recently started using an online backup - SmugMug. I just didn't feel covered with DVDS and external hard drive backups.

Ps. Use the code "yahoo" for 50% off your first year.

 

[Master Mason]

I have been using smugmug for a couple of years now. I have been more than happy with them.

the other that most often gets mentioned here is Zenfolio.

 

[dr_zero]

I recently started taking a photography class but have been shooting digital since 2006. Needless to say I have TONS of pictures in the short 2+ years I've owned digital cameras and plan on shooting a LOT more. I have an external 180GB hard drive, and have blank DVDs for burning but would like some sort of online storage as another backup.

I use snapfish for sharing with friends and family, but it isn't good for actual storage. I also just tried to upload my first portfolio (saved in TIFF format) and quickly found out that I can use only jpegs for snapfish.

I have seen that some use smugmug.com. This is $40/year which is not a lot of money considering that it's a very valuable backup method, but I was wondering what opinions you all had.

Is smugmug a good option? Are there other reputable sites out there? Could I upload in any format (ie TIFF, JPG, RAW, etc)?

TIA!

A regular webhost offers the best storage deal IMO.

Lunarpages has plans from $5 a month with unlimited storage and bandwith and comes with 3 different Photo Gallery software packages you can choose from and other features included free.
If you dont like the gallery software they offer you can use many others and just upload them. I like jalbum it has some cool skins and is real easy to use.

http://www.lunarpages.com/solutions.php
Basic Hosting

1 FREE Domain Name UNLIMITED Storage! UNLIMITED Data Transfer! Bonus Programs $775 Included 24/7 Award Winning Support! Unlimited Databases/Email/FTP Accounts Blog, Forum & Photo Gallery Fantastico (Over 35 Scripts) JSP/ASP Available Spam Protection- IMAP Support Microsoft® Frontpage® Compatible Dreamweaver Compatible Unlimited Add-on Domains Included FREE! Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL MySQL 4+, PHP 4+ MySQL 5 & PHP 5.2+ Available! Free Web Design Templates Webmail (Horde and Squirrel)

Oh and I have done buisness with Lunarpages before they have hosted sites for me for years with no issues.

 

[KarenAylwood]

A regular webhost offers the best storage deal IMO.

Lunarpages has plans from $5 a month with unlimited storage and bandwith and comes with 3 different Photo Gallery software packages you can choose from and other features included free.
If you dont like the gallery software they offer you can use many others and just upload them. I like jalbum it has some cool skins and is real easy to use.

http://www.lunarpages.com/solutions.php
Basic Hosting

1 FREE Domain Name UNLIMITED Storage! UNLIMITED Data Transfer! Bonus Programs $775 Included 24/7 Award Winning Support! Unlimited Databases/Email/FTP Accounts Blog, Forum & Photo Gallery Fantastico (Over 35 Scripts) JSP/ASP Available Spam Protection- IMAP Support Microsoft® Frontpage® Compatible Dreamweaver Compatible Unlimited Add-on Domains Included FREE! Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL MySQL 4+, PHP 4+ MySQL 5 & PHP 5.2+ Available! Free Web Design Templates Webmail (Horde and Squirrel)

Oh and I have done buisness with Lunarpages before they have hosted sites for me for years with no issues.

So, $5/month is $60/year. That's $20 more per year than I was planning on. What does lunar pages have that smug mug doesn't?

 

[Groucho]

What Lunarpages, or any complete web host, offers is everything for some... and nothing for others. You pretty much need your own domain name ($8/year or so from most places) and you can do anything with it - run your own forum, pick from many different galleries, run a blog, set up a storefront - pretty much anything you could want. (I would be wary of "unlimited" offers; realistically, you'll run into technical headaches fairly early on if you start anything big. I used BlueHost for a while, another one with huge storage limits, and as my gallery got pretty large, I started getting "cpu exceeded" errors very often, and I finally switched to a host that offers relatively little space but doesn't complain about my gallery.)

However, a web host is useless until you actually set up the gallery. That means picking which one you want, configuring it, setting up security, etc...

And really, we're talking about three different things here.

A web host gives you a web site, with all the flexibility and responsibility that entails.
SmugMug and other photo hosting sites let you share photos, maybe set up a customed page, but that's about it.
An online backup service will automatically back up your system with little to no input from you.

If you want a web site, get a web host.
If you want to share photos online, use a photo service.
If you want backup, use an online backup service. Mozy is generally considered the best, Carbonite is another. These offer unlimited storage (for personal accounts) for a flat fee. My company is a reseller for Mozy Pro, the business version, and it's very nice. I've never used the "personal" version but by nearly all accounts, it's the best out there. You go through a pretty basic wizard to choose what to backup, it does a huge initial backup, then backs up anything that changes as it changes. Either you can schedule it to run daily at a given time, or it'll run any time your PC is idle for a little while (all configurable.)

 

[pxlbarrel]

These online storage places.... can they handle all the raw images?

I've been backing up on multiple hard drives (filled two 500 gigs and now working on a terrabye hd). An online storage solution would mean I'd only have to back up to one hard drive. (I'm so paranoid, I have to have two copies on two separate drives before I delete it from the third drive.)

 

[Groucho]

Yeah, they can handle anything you can throw at them. Mozy gives you unlimited for $5/month - and I don't believe they'll give you a hard time if you store a lot of stuff, unlike the "unlimited" web hosts. You can get a free 2 gig account if you want to try it out. They can charge monthly ($5) or yearly ($55) or biyearly ($105). Carbonite charges on a per-year basis, $50/1 year, $90/2 years, or $135/3 years.

Mozy's free 2gig backup is probably a good idea for lots of people who don't store massive data on their PCs. I may set it up for my wife's laptop, which mainly has documents and other such small things. I may even end up going for a full Mozy account for my PC one of these days, it's certainly less headache than managing backups myself.

 

[dr_zero]

So, $5/month is $60/year. That's $20 more per year than I was planning on. What does lunar pages have that smug mug doesn't?

Groucho has some good points that you do have to setup whatever you want to use you can have a gallery and share photos and some will let others order prints if they want its up to you.
For storage you can setup a dir just like on your HD and put pic or any kind of file you want in there.

With a program like ws_ftp or freeftp you can pick the files you want to backup and drag and drop them from your pc to the offsite dir and they will upload them for you but is not automated. But you can get a program like AutoFTP that can upload preset DIR and the likes for you automatically.

I already had a website setup and had plenty of space and bandwith I never use so I setup my own gallery and the likes. I like that its mine and I have control over it all and there is no one taking pics out they dont like that has happened on some site.

Now this is not the option for someone who is not comfortable with computers the picture hosting sites make it pretty easy and you dont have to know much about computers and still make nice looking stuff.

 

[dr_zero]

Yeah, they can handle anything you can throw at them. Mozy gives you unlimited for $5/month - and I don't believe they'll give you a hard time if you store a lot of stuff, unlike the "unlimited" web hosts.

I take exception to that comment that "they'll give you a hard time if you store a lot of stuff, unlike the "unlimited" web hosts" I am a customer who has alot of data stored and have not had any issue and I know people who run forums with no issues about storage. Before they started the unlimited storage sale the limits were way more than most people would ever reach.

 

[wenrob]

I like that I can upload full res pics to smugmug but it takes forever so I put it off which kind of defeats the purpose. I'm also spoiled by Flock which allows me to drag and drop pics into a post using Flickr or Photobucket. I have to copy and paste the links from smugmug. But that's a picky, small thing. My family loves that if they like a particular pic I send they can download it right away to their computer and don't have to pay for it.

 

[Pooh_Girl]

How does Flock work Wenrob?

 

[KarenAylwood]

Ok.. now I'm really confused!

Thanks for all the great responses. I'm not very computer savvy but am willing to learn if that's what I need to do. I don't need to make an entire website or anything like that, but would like something that I can share my photos with others, and also have them online so that if something horrible happens and I lose my other backups, I have them online.

I'm getting a little confused about smug mug now. Would they actually be a backup, or are they just a place like snapfish that posts your pics for others to see?

 

[wenrob]

How does Flock work Wenrob?

Flock is a web browser that has an upload tool and picture bar on the top. You can upload your pics to Flickr, Photobucket and I think Picasa. Then you can just drag your pic right into your posts. It's very convenient and like I said spoils you, lol. I've been using it for a couple of years so I find copying and pasting links archaic.
http://www.flock.com/about

Karen-Smugmug is pretty much a photo sharing site w/the advantage of being able to upload full res pics. When you upload a picture you can be confident that's the picture you'll get back and be sharing. Photobucket though they claim you can upload full res destroys your pics in my experience. Plus they go through and delete pics they deem inappropriate. A friend had pics of her kids in diapers deleted!

 

[Groucho]

I take exception to that comment that "they'll give you a hard time if you store a lot of stuff, unlike the "unlimited" web hosts" I am a customer who has alot of data stored and have not had any issue and I know people who run forums with no issues about storage. Before they started the unlimited storage sale the limits were way more than most people would ever reach.

There's no reason to take offense - I'm talking about hosts, not you. Look, check around at webhostingtalk.com or another independent web host review site, and you'll hear many horror stories about nearly any web host that offers "unlimited" or outrageously large limits. You can probably get away with just dumping files there, but any kind of decent-sized dynamic web site will quickly run into errors, long before you'll get anywhere close to hitting your bandwidth allotment. That's because they oversell and cram way too many sites on not enough servers, which get overloaded. How else can they make money charging so little?

Otherwise, you'd see places like Disboards cheerfully running along on a $5/month server with no problem... basically, you can't get everything for nothing. I did my time on the big-storage-little-price-tag server and got tired of the problems with my not-particularly-big dynamic site.

If you're interested in backup, I think it makes more sense to go with a place that specializes in backup, and will have it totally automated, instead of you manually having to FTP new files. The online backup places can generally do block-level updates, too; which means that large files like your mail folders only have the changes uploaded, not the entire file.

 

[alan]

I started down this road using Mozy, but after a while it started suffering technical problems. So I moved to Carbonite, where I am currently backing up somwehere around 190GB of files (mostly pictures)

The bad part about it is the initial backup. This is where the system backs up everything you currently have. I had around 180GB to back up, and even with decent ADSL2+ broadband a 2Mbps uplink, it took a long time (abotu four weeks). It appears that Carbonite is restricting the uplink bandwidth to around 1Mbps, which is okay - it left a further 1Mbps for regular surfing during that time.

With that done, my files in Windows explorer now have a little coloured dot beside them. A Green dot means that it's backed up; amber means that it's in the queue. New files get backed up when they are closed and the internet connection is reasonably quiet. It seems to "just work", alothouh I've not tried restoring yet...

I've signed up for a three year period, and it makes me feel much happier to know that all my files are backed up on a remote server, without me needing to actively do anything to make it happen.

Should you want to try it, you might want to consider using this link: http://www.carbonite.com/raf/signup.aspx?RAFUSerUID=138947 That gives me an extra three months of service free, and if you sign up gives you an extra month of service free.

But I'd still recommend them even without the referrer benefit!

regards,
/alan

PS the only thing I'd say against them was that when I signed up, there was a marketing survey asking where I'd heard of them. They listed where they advertised, startign the list with Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Bill O'Reilly. Those are not people I'd want to associate with in any way, but so long as I ignored them the product itself was fine!