Backing up photos online.....

[pw75]

Just wondered how many of you are doing it? Backups are unbelieveably important to me as I've got 10 years of digital photos, music, video and racing on my PC. Had a couple of close scares so its definitely bolt and braces stuff in my house.

I use Mozy, $5 a month unlimited account and now got 0.5tb up there. Really just a tip as I was thinking what incredible value it is.

Anyway if this helps great....

[sjg]

Flickr Pro. Lots of stuff I take photos of I want to share with other people anyway, and should the worst happen they're quite straightforward to get back.

[furtive]

I use Mozy as well. It just works

[Simpo Two]

Frankly the idea of 'backing-up' priceless data in Nowheresville aka Cyberspace bothers me - but maybe I'm just being old fashioned.

[andy-xr]

Some ISP's are known to throttle, which if you're just trickling data upstream overnight wouldnt bother me too much. I've gone with 2 x 1.5TB drives and an internal 1TB with incremental updating on each. It's not going to be fireproof but to be fair I'd be more interested in dragging myself out of the house first if that was the case

[14-7]

Sort of confused why someone would pay £5 a month for backups when you can buy a 1TB external hard drive for £65.

[fergusd]

14-7 said:

Sort of confused why someone would pay £5 a month for backups when you can buy a 1TB external hard drive for £65.

What happens if some scrote breaks into your gaff and pinches said hard drive and your PC ?

Fd

[Silver993tt]

fergusd said:

14-7 said:

Sort of confused why someone would pay £5 a month for backups when you can buy a 1TB external hard drive for £65.

What happens if some scrote breaks into your gaff and pinches said hard drive and your PC ?

Fd

What if internet backup company goes bust or starts to charge you £50 a month or even sells some of your photos (you're never really likey to know)?

Edited by Silver993tt on Tuesday 15th September 06:55

[Fordo]

This is why big companies have several disaster management plans in place and often several off site backups.


I backup everything locally to a huge HD, so if my computer goes bang I have everything, and I also archive really important things to DVDs, that i keep 'off site' and another persons house. By really important, its mostly my photos! I can replace programs and pther things, but photos can never be taken again.

So even if my house burns down, I still have my memories

[ThatPhilBrettGuy]

Silver993tt said:

fergusd said:

14-7 said:

Sort of confused why someone would pay £5 a month for backups when you can buy a 1TB external hard drive for £65.

What happens if some scrote breaks into your gaff and pinches said hard drive and your PC ?

Fd

What if internet backup company goes bust or starts to charge you £50 a month or even sells some of your photos (you're never really likey to know)?

Edited by Silver993tt on Tuesday 15th September 06:55

All the files on Mozy are encrypted (with my own key in my case) so they can't decode them.

[furtive]

14-7 said:

Sort of confused why someone would pay £5 a month for backups when you can buy a 1TB external hard drive for £65.

I do both. Backup to external hard drive and to Mozy

/belt&braces

[fergusd]

Silver993tt said:

What if internet backup company goes bust

Then I will find another, in the meantime the online backup is only one of a number I make

Silver993tt said:

or starts to charge you £50 a month

Then my credit card company will give me my money back and take them to court

Silver993tt said:

or even sells some of your photos (you're never really likey to know)?

Everything stored is encrypted so only I can access the files

Anyway . . . back to my original question . . . any answers . . . ? . . . here's one . . . You . . . Lose . . . Everything . . .

Now given the regular tales of woe on this and other forums from people who just haven't thought about it losing stuff that is valuable to them, perhaps it pays to think about how you do your backups and the worst case scenareos rather than living in ignorance until it happens to you . . .

It is common practice and common sense to keep at least one full backup physically seperate from where you live/work so if you do use the USB disk approach, splash out on two of them, keep one at home and regularly copy the entire contents of it onto the other one and keep it somewhere else . . . It is also common practice and common sense to retain at least 2 full backups . . . cheapo USB disks DO fail, they cannot be relied on.

Fd

[stigmundfreud]

furtive said:

I use Mozy as well. It just works

no, it doesnt, not if by work you mean archive. Once you remove a file from your local system Mozy deltes it a few days later from your backup set. If you use any disk that is not permanently connected to your PC during operation it can see them as deleted and remove them.

I also recently got stung, I had not used the service in over 2 years but all of a sudden my account is debited 69 quid to a card that was replaced 18 months ago.

[oobster]

I back up all music & photos to an external hard drive every month and I also upload all the important ones onto my pro flickr account.

[EINSIGN]

I was using Mozy but found it slow and a pain to use. now use www.smugmug.com absolutely brilliant, makes flickr etc look crap.

[pw75]

answers to a few comments....

1) My data isn't encypted up to mozy but if they started selling anyones data it would end their company in minutes.
2) If you backup at home it banks on you A) doing it B) it working C) you storing it off site.
3) If Mozy (or other) goes pop you would be the worlds most unlucky man for you to have a theft or failure on the same day, and the assets would still be intact at mozy so you can get them back.


Just an additional level of. I run external raid disks at home so I've got one element of backup straight away, mozy is my second, but now I'm thinking of getting another 1TB external disk just to be safe.

What program do you guys automate backups with?