[AggieDad]

For me, my criteria include company size and age, and how key and integral the company is to the technology world. I also want a service for which I pay a fair price with no "deals." Finally I do not want a provider that specializes or limits their business to photographs or images.

When I pay a fair price to a major company that provides storage for the whole gamut of users and file types, I minimize my risk.

My cloud storage providers of choice are Apple iCloud and Dropbox. They could easily be Microsoft, Google or Amazon.

[BarryE]

From a career in IT it was always hammered into me that you should think of all possible ways that data could be lost and mitigate against it. Examples that come to mind are ransomware, hard drive failure, disk drive controller failure (that can take out both disks in a RAID configuration), power surge, theft, fire, obsolescence etc - each individual will have their own risks and assessment of that risk

Identify the data that's most critical and next consider data that could be re-built. Plan backup accordingly. Cloud storage is part of this, but a small part, especially for critical data as control is lost imo.

[RGlasel]

I don't trust these companies

It isn't just for online storage and it isn't just companies that aren't Microsoft or part of FAANG that shouldn't be trusted. My wife upgraded her iPhone 6 to an iPhone 8 yesterday and she lost some of her critical data because as soon as the technician at the cell phone store tried to transfer all the data and settings from her old phone to the new one, her old phone was automatically updated to iOS 13, which has known issues of deleting data. The only solution is to quit putting trust in online companies, regardless of how huge and sexy they are, and take responsibility for managing all of our personal information ourselves. It is impossible to be too paranoid.

[vonBaloney]

You shouldn't trust anybody, no. That doesn't mean doesn't use any service, just always have multiple copies multiple places, and then if one of them goes away or becomes untenable, then go get a different one. If lose one copy of your backups, it shouldn't be a big deal because you have multiple backups in multiple places, so the only trust you have to extend to anybody is that they will keep your stuff away from hackers, etc (which if you encrypt on your end first you don't have to worry about either). I would never in a million years have the only copy of my images in the cloud somewhere with only one company. (Or "only in the cloud" period. But I wouldn't have only physical backups either unless they were in multiple locations.)

[vinni]

I have zero faith in any online storage companies. Several years back I had issues with winkflash.. Lost access to the photos of my Sons Birth. Eventually I was able to gain access again but it was an eye openner for me. I may use online storage but I dont rely on them. I always store images locally as well and at multiple locations.

I fully agree - multiple locations is the key, My setup:
- a Synology DiskStation with 2 drives that are fully replicated;
- a nightly back-up to a storage in the cloud;
- a physical copy of all photos that I update regularly and store at a family member;
- create prints of the pictures that I cherish the most.

That ought to do it

[kiwi_jono]

Personally, while I do have some photos in Flickr, it is not my main store of photos (as I don't trust it that much!).
I have a NAS (network storage) that is shared with the family, and backed up to Backblaze currently.

[BruceBanner]

I received an email imploring me to upgrade to Flickr Pro. The rate seems reasonable enough, but I recall what Photobucket did to us a few years back, basically holding our photos hostage for a high fee. Why trust Smug Mug / Flickr, now that the Photobucket precedent has been set? What stops them from jacking prices year over year?

What philosophy works best for an amateur looking to go towards retirement with something like a 645z who would like to occasionally share with friends and family? Any regrets if you are already ‘locked in’ to a particular methodology?

I’m having fun with a 67 / The Darkroom scans / Flickr basic right now, but I have to start making decisions pretty soon, as I’ll either push further into my own film scanning and / or go full digital.

Thanks for your insights; hope this doesn’t seem too fundamental a question, coming from an old schooler.

I have faith in them, but I can't afford them, nor is our internet infrastructure capable of keeping up to date with my workflow.

I'm a professional shooter, I pay for flickr pro. Flickr isn't a backup resource for me, I treat it as a bit of a dumping ground, a place to share images, embed images in forum posts like here at PF, but most of all I find the ability to upload private albums for clients and share with them the work as we finalise the project to being really useful.

Backing up Jpgs isn't something I care that much about, I need my RAWs backed up, LR Catalogs and such, they matter way more as I can then go back to the RAW file, either reset the image or steer it in another direction or tweak the existing edit and then export as a jpg. Flickr Pro doesn't allow for storage of RAWs.

I bought a 2tb Extreme Sandisk SSD, it is so light and small and I basically work from that, I backup the contents to it frequently to home HDD and always take the SSD with me when out and about, effectively I am the cloud. You must have your data in two separate places as much as possible, the only time I have my data all under one roof is when I am under that same roof, as soon as I leave the house it comes with me, even on short trips. It's like "keys, wallet, ssd"

If you can afford to support Flickr, then do so, I got that same email and they really have improved things since buying flickr, I'd like to support that and the community, they will continue to have my services.

[Kmier]

Bruce - makes perfect sense to me; I just signed up for Flickr Pro. I respect your portability approach, with hard drive redundancy:

“effectively, I am the cloud”

👍

[hypermodern]

This has reminded me I was planning to give my brother a hard drive of the baby photos. Seems more reliable than online.

[PJ1]

What I don't have on the system is stored on two HDDs at separate sites. Not that I would have as much as many people. I would not trust any third party to store my images because my images mean nothing to them.

[nicolpa47]

I use Flickr, but not for storage, mainly for sharing, interaction with photographers, etc. I keep my own multiple copies of images both on and off-site, a system I used for client data before retirement. Flickr though, might provide a backup of last resort if I were to be affected by a regional catastrophe.

About 18 months ago I think it was, Flickr had a problem with at least one of its database "shards". I was affected and initially appeared to lose access to a number of images. In the end, the linkages were rebuilt almost completely, but not quite. Since then I have kept copies of all uploads until my next album download. I do this on an album by album basis so as to make a rebuild easier if it were ever to be necessary. Backing up is a two way street if you wish to be able to rebuild your online presence without too much hassle.

This demonstrated that online storage is not free from possible loss but, knowing that backing up is something people put off, I was not surprised that some seemed to be regarding Flickr as their long-term, and sole, storage.

[Digitalis]

Google will be around for a longtime

An upper atmospheric EMP cascade can change that. I'd wager existing silver gelatin prints under proper storage will outlast many online storage services.

nor is our internet infrastructure capable of keeping up to date with my workflow.

This is the major sticking point for me as well - as fast as my internet connection is, the sheer number files I work with and the amount of hard drive real estate they occupy makes cloud internet storage completely impractical. The only work related thing I keep online are invoices/accounts which are stored all under an encrypt that would keep a quantum computer tied up for a month*. I rebuilt the network infrastructure in my house to support10GbE, this was inspired when I did some work in a Sydney photography studio which just made the switch themselves. The Jump from 1 GbE > 10 GbE is impressive -Though the limitations of SATA platter based hard drives is showing at these speeds and solid state memory is pretty much mandatory to get optimal use out of the network. The NAS devices I use have native support for 10GbE and M.2 solid state drives, and to solve the issue of bandwidth bottlenecks they have clever software that uses the M.2 drives as a network traffic receiving buffer which removes the bottleneck of the platter based drives** and it also stores frequently accessed data on the M.2 drives to reduce latency - all of this makes for optimal use of a 10GbE network.

With my off site backups I have to rely on the internet for file transfers to another NAS device I maintain, I set these backup tasks to be transmitted at night time to my sisters house about 20km away which is a trivial distance for electrons to travel so latency is very low.


I remember the old days when large files were best transferred over a sneaker-net and never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded with hard drives.


* in theory. Allegedly AES 256 is expected to be quantum proof, but this is modeled upon a brute force attack. No standard computer would have a chance in hell of breaking quantum encryption.

** providing the M.2 drives you use have enough capacity, thankfully the NAS designers thought of this and you can simply RAID two or more M.2 drives as your demands increase.

[Roaming]

If i had this dilemma, especial professional work for third parties i would be:
PC Hard Drive
Local External Drive Copy
Cloud
And potentially VPN to remote storage at trusted family member.

But then im the sort of personal who has rotating daily, weekly , monthly backups for work.

[WorksAsIntended]

To put the initial question down simple:
The only way data are save is when the are stored georedundant, redundant in provider, and there is push into it only bucket (cold storage) with versionized backups.
Be aware that statistically speaking a third of data lost are lost due human error (thats why you need to versionize backups) and another third due to crypto attacks. This mea ns there should not be a single system with access to all data and backups, because if this system gets compromised everything is lost.

---------- Post added 12-23-19 at 02:43 AM ----------

Oh, and by the way, things being sold now as "virtual private networks" aren't, really. A real VPN means you have an end-to-end "virtual connection" between your own assets on one side and your own assets on the other side; it's a way of essentially creating a local area network using a public communications channel. The fake VPN's being sold now are really no different from using HTTPS, because the stuff is only "private" in between your machine and the company's server. So it used to be that a virtual private network was a virtual network that was private - now it's a public network that's virtually (but not really) private. Any time you're using HTTPS, you have the effect of a private network between your machine and the web server you're accessing.

Technically speaking this is not true. VPN is a protocoll used to get a connection into the same layer 3 network (even layer 2 possible) from a different network. Https encrypts data for transmission, but it still is visible to everyone with whom you are connected (everyone with physical access to the packages send, man in the middle, or in broadcast mediums like wifi everyone).
VPN as commercially promoted is used to get a connection to a server acting as a nat. Without rather complex tracking externals cannottrack the connection through the track.
In both cases https and vpn the data transmitzed are hidden, but thanks to nat it is hidden which web service behind the vpn server you use.

[EssJayEff]

I suggest you (and others) explore the offerings and sustainability model at the nonprofit organization The Permanent Legacy Foundation.