Cloud Storage

[garyyyyt]

Hi everyone. Recently I had the worse experience of discovering that the storage drive where I kept all my previous photos and videos was corrupted. Thankfully it can be recovered but at a hefty cost.

I think something missing from my workflow is backing up to a cloud. I'm here to ask what is the service that you are using for yourself.

I'm thinking of Smugmug. They provide cloud storage for unlimited amount of photos and videos and at the original resolution. It is also reasonably priced. What do y'all think?

 

[Octarine]

You need to clearly define what exactly you need:
1) A convenient place to showcase your pictures (and maybe sell), or
2) A dedicated backup / long term storage facility.
Both have different purpose and different costs. Do also pay attention to the fine prints (copyrights, right of usage).
Based on your hard drive scenario, it sounds as of you just want a safe offsite storage where you rather upload new pictures and then you leave them there. For that, you can get the usual cloud providers and integrate them into your workflow (or your home NAS).
Smugmug has a different focus and therefore has different T&C and different pricing.

Define your needs.

 

[garyyyyt]

You need to clearly define what exactly you need:
1) A convenient place to showcase your pictures (and maybe sell), or
2) A dedicated backup / long term storage facility.
Both have different purpose and different costs. Do also pay attention to the fine prints (copyrights, right of usage).
Based on your hard drive scenario, it sounds as of you just want a safe offsite storage where you rather upload new pictures and then you leave them there. For that, you can get the usual cloud providers and integrate them into your workflow (or your home NAS).
Smugmug has a different focus and therefore has different T&C and different pricing.

Define your needs.

Thanks for replying! Yes, so my needs are exactly what you pointed out. I do photography as a side hustle thus having a gallery is convenient for me.

The 2nd point about the storage facility also applies to me as well. Usual cloud providers have storage limits, I gravitated to Smugmug is because of the unlimited storage. What kind of T&Cs should I be aware of?

Do you use any usual cloud providers yourself?

 

[mphotoman]

SmugMug is a popular option for website builders for people who just start their company or want to expand. In the other side, SmugMug falls short next to Wix and Squarespace.

 

[e69087]

What will be the recommended cloud storage (preferably at a lower cost, unlimited storage of photos in jpg/raw format, safe & reliable) where one just wants another storage besides the normal hard disk storage?

 

[Octarine]

Recommended is what serves your purpose and use case. So do define the case how you upload your files (frequency, volume, quantity of files), how much space you need and in which cases (or from where) you would need to access and download files. If worldwide access and 24/7 data availability is what you need then cloud storage can't be skipped. If that's not on your list, just have another bunch of hard disks somewhere in a safe place in your house.
With that, you can check the big cloud players for their offerings. 'Unlimited' does not exist, it comes with trade offs / costs in other areas. - there's no charity out there. From the general offering, I would think that Object Storage (or Archive Storage) is what you are looking for.
Three options here:
MS Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/
Amazon AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=4
Google Cloud: https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing
Important factors to consider: Upload and download can cause additional costs, depending on the provider. Redundancy can be added (see details in each offering) to have a geo-redundant storage option. Again, shifting of data is data traffic and could be chargeable. It is recommended to use the beginners guide to create simple storage volumes and how to secure them. Unsecured volumes create headlines every month.
Do the Maths with the given cost structure and use case and see whether it fits your budget (or business model).

 

[e69087]

Thanks for the information.

 

[BBTM]

I brought a NAS recently as my old one is filling up. My 3X 4TB, 2 of them is same copies of photos but got 1 is video. I almost done transferring all the video to the NAS, next are the photos. It's belong to my NZ trip back in 2018, which I went for a month. Since I am having NAS now (4x 8TB, 24TB under SHR1), I might be going to transfer all the old DV tapes once I got time to do so. No like last time, hard copy taking up a lot space, now only just spend a bit more for our future to view