Cloud Storage Recommendations

Hello all,
Does anyone have any recommendations for cloud storage? I just discovered a couple of my external backup hard drives don’t work anymore so I think its probably time I get cloud storage for peace of mind. I’m leaning towards IDrive but want to know if anyone has experience using their service or if there another company I should look at?
Thank you

Here’s a recent discussion -

Personally I wouldn’t store my photos on the cloud as the primary location. The upload/download times for large raw files would be really frustrating. I do use Backblaze for cloud backup services and have had a great experience so far. After the initial backup of all drives that took months, it has been reliably working in the background for years without issues. When I’ve had drive failures I can download my backups to a new drive (also takes awhile) or have an external drive with my files shipped to me for an added cost. Personally the piece of mind I get from knowing everything is backed up without having to do anything manually since initial setup has been worth every penny, and honestly the cost for unlimited storage is reasonable. Main point regardless of which service though, is use fast external drives for working your files and the cloud only as backup.

Thanks Patrick! I didn’t know about backblaze, their pricing looks very reasonable. I’ll definitely continue to use external drive for working on my files and the cloud only for backup. I just got pretty worried once I found my external backups didn’t work anymore. Losing all my files if my main drive failed would be devastating. Thanks for commenting on your experience with backblaze, this helps a lot.

Thanks Kristen! Lots of good info in that discussion.

I have been using Backblaze for years and really enjoy it. As @P.Brendan.Lantz mentioned, Backblaze works in the background and makes it all very easy. Set-up was easy, but it can be lengthy depending on how many files you have.

When it comes to backups, I strongly recommend redundancy. In addition to a cloud service, please do consider hard drives at home and off-site. Furthermore, if you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you may be aware they offer unlimited photo storage as part of your Prime cost. If you want to include videos, they do have an option for that for an additional cost.

Thanks @Egídio, I’ll probably go with backblaze based on this feedback and what I read on a previous post Kristen linked. I didn’t know about Amazons cloud service, I might use that as well. I’m definitely going to continue using external drives for home and offsite.

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Personally, I had my storage split between Dropbox (general storage) and Backblaze B2 (photos). I recently decided to move everything to Google Drive (even though I do favor Dropbox). This was mainly because:

  • No limitation for the number of PCs or HDDs I can back up / upload from / access from.
  • It’s accessible from everywhere as a regular drive, whereas Backblaze B2 wasn’t.
  • Its plans offer huge storage, which weren’t available on Dropbox.
  • If you own an Android phone, you probably already have storage there. This allows using the same storage for everything, and choose whether you want your phone photos to be backed up through Photos, or through regular backup after uploading them to the HDD (same storage anyway).
  • From a certain amount of storage, it allows sharing it between family members which saves duplicate payments.
  • Cost-wise - it was just a bit more expensive than BB B2.
  • Works with my favorite backup software (GoodSync).

Last but not least - it’s a well-known service that will (hopefully) not experience issues younger service might, and will probably keep a steady price.

Hope it helps.

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Thanks Tom! I appreciate all the info you have shared. I’m going to give backblaze a try, I think it will work well for me and I like the price. I did think about dropbox but I wanted more storage than what they offer. Google drive also looks pretty good, I might use it in the future.

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A good backup solution would be to have your files all backed up to the cloud. I use Backblaze.

I may be the odd one out but I don’t care for cloud storage. First of all I don’t like the idea of subscriptions and second, I feel more comfortable when I’m in control of my files. It takes a really long time to upload everything to the “cloud” (aka someone else’s computer) and if something were to happen to the hosting company or if they raised their prices to something outrageous and I’d want to go elsewhere I’d need to spend another x number of weeks uploading everything again. No, thank you.

My backup strategy is simple. I have a main drive that automatically backs up to a second drive every night. I then have a portable drive that I keep off site that I make another copy to every so often. This works well enough for me and if the worst came to be and I somehow lost all 3 hard drives then so be it. There are worse things in life and I’d take it as a sign that it was simply meant to be.

I’ve only ever one hard drive fail on me where I lost all of my files. This was a while back and, in all honesty, I don’t miss anything because I don’t remember for the life of me what I even lost. I’ve had a couple drives that I stopped using because they were going bad and started making clicking noises but I didn’t loose anything. In fact, the only time I’ve ever lost images was because I mistakenly deleted them. I’m the weakest link. I didn’t realize this at the time and this “deletion” cascaded through my backups so by the time I noticed that my files were missing – several months later, they were truly gone. The only way this could have been avoided was if I had set my back up to never delete and only add new files but this would make the back up grow larger and larger and I don’t think that’s really worth it.

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I have felt similar about cloud storage for a long time. Didn’t want to pay for the subscription when I can buy a new external drive every few years and just back up my files a few times per year. I have lost most of my files before from a hard drive failure before and don’t want to go through it again. With both of my backup drives not working anymore I think its time for cloud storage and the price for backblaze is worth it for me.