Anyone here use online data storage?

[The Money Monk]

 I have been pushing hard towards more minimalist living, but one thing I am having trouble figuring out is what to do with all my paperwork. I have about 3 drawers in a filing cabinet worth of all various printed materials.

"The Minimalists" always suggest scanning and going digital, and I think this would be great, but I don't think simply keeping it all on a hard drive in my house is the best idea, so I am looking into online data storage. However the prices are much higher than I expected for most of these type of services.

Any of you use these services? What has been your experience?

[JLee]

How much space do you need? Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive all offer some amount of free storage.

I use Dropbox for stuff I want to access from multiple computers and I use Crashplan Cloud ($60/year) for disaster recovery backup (hundreds of GB of photos/etc).

[damyst]

I find paper documents incredibly frustrating to deal with, and arguably more prone to loss than digital copies.
Yes, storing them on a single hard drive in your house is an insufficient level of protection for your primary records.
Depending on how large those 3 drawers are, you may be able to fit the scanned contents in a free Dropbox. Dropbox isn't a real backup solution, but now that they let you access deleted files and previous revisions of files, it might be good enough. The fact that the service is so dead simple reduces the risk of mishaps that can happen with more elaborate backup solutions.
My current home setup consists of a single-bay Synology NAS box, which in turn backs up about 100gb of data (mostly photos) to Amazon Glacier once a week. I pay Amazon around $3/mo for the service. Synology makes pretty reliable and accessible software, but I would still be wary of recommending this route to nontechnical people. At the very least, you want to be able to read the logs and understand whether the backup jobs are succeeding or failing.

[JLee]

To elaborate a little on my setup, I have a mirrored disk array in my desktop computer for anything I care about.  That is occasionally backed up to an external drive (that is normally kept unplugged in case of lightning strike), while also continuously backed up to Crashplan's cloud.  This way I have redundant primary storage (if one disk fails, I don't lose any data), separate storage (external hard drive), and off-site storage (Crashplan cloud).

[jade]

hiya,

I've used Google Drive for years, with no issues (and it's free :)).

Good luck!

[SpreadsheetMan]

AWS S3 is a good professional choice. It is designed for massive storage volumes, so is pretty cheap at more "normal" amounts.

I'd be a lot more confident that the provider wasn't data mining in my confidential docs too - unlike any of the free options.

[sokoloff]

Like JLee, I use a Synology NAS at home (though I have a multi-drive setup at home with redundancy to overcome a local hard drive failure). Portions of that are backed up to Amazon S3; other portions are backed up to Amazon Photos (if you already pay for Prime, Photos is free for photo files and gives you a small amount of non-photo storage for free as well).

The Synology then also provides home directory storage space for users in the house, TimeMachine backup service for computers in the house, and "CloudStation" (which is a personal DropBox workalike, but where I own the data and has no quota). The CloudStation area is part of the backup set, so most of my working files live on my laptop, on the NAS box at home in Cloudstation, on TimeMachine backups on the NAS, and the TimeMachine and Cloudstation areas are additionally backed up to Amazon Web Services S3 service. Photos are on the NAS, some recent ones on the laptop, and backed up in Amazon Photos and on S3.

I do other things on Amazon Web services as well, so I can't say exactly what the backups are costing me, but I am certain it's under $11/mo (as that's my entire S3 bill for the month).

[MandalayVA]

Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive cover my needs.  I have an Office 365 subscription that gives me the latter.

[Daisy]

I 3rd the Google Drive suggestion.

[Cwadda]

I use Dropbox. Very easy to sync things between computers.

[SingleMomDebt]

For years I have used OneDrive and Google drive for my docs and photos. Love it.

[The Money Monk]

thanks for the suggestions everybody, i'll research them some more but I'm sure I can find what I need among them.