The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: niknak on November 11, 2018, 05:01:53 PM
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Now that Flickr will be limiting its free account to 1,000 photos, I'm curious what Mustachians are using to store/back up their photos. I have 16,000+ photos. It looks like Google offers the best pricing at $20/yr for 100GB. But if there's another free option out there, I'm all ears.
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I guess this isn't very mustachian at all - but I pay $99/year for a Dropbox account that has unlimited space. I digitized 30 years of photos, documents, tax returns and lord knows what else...and have a giant amount of stuff in the cloud and almost no paper or photos in the house. Relief!
So, not too mustachian in terms of price, but super minimalist in terms of space.
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The most Mustachian would be to go through those 16,000+ photos and decide if you actually need them. Digital clutter is still clutter.
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If you're OK with not-native-resolution, Google Photos offers unlimited storage for "optimized" photos (not sure what this works out to, I... have a lot of Drive credit and just upload at native res).
Plus you can search stuff by face/location/etc. Creepy? Maybe. Useful? Yes. And I don't keep any interesting photos up there. But being able to have an automatically backed up photo store for stuff is quite nice.
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We just keep photo's on a harddisk at home. And we occasionally take a backup, although we should do that more often. The backup should be stored elsewhere. In the past we used to print backup on a CD that was kept at work. But this is now too small. We think about getting an additional backup harddisk. For the moment we have the old laptop in use for backup.
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I use google photos free option to automatically store all my photos. Periodically I copy the original files (full resolution) onto my PC and do a back up of that onto a flashdrive that I keep at work.
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I use the free version of Google photos - it resizes them but works for my needs. Syncs with my phone and computer which works nicely. I do try to clean up the clutter once in a while since I have a lot of extra photos of stuff I don't need.
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Extra hard drive, NAS if you've got a lot (a lot meaning >4TB or so). Backup to an additional hard drive or NAS, ideally stored offsite. Flash drives and optical media are bad long-term storage, stick with hard drives (or tape if you hate yourself). Cloud storage can work as an additional backup, but most of the cheap/free ones downsample your stuff to save space, so that's basically worthless as an actual backup. I would absolutely not use it as primary/only storage. Nope nope nope.
GF is a pro photographer that has probably taken at least 16,000 photos in the last month or so (about 8TB so far this year), so we have a bit more of an involved system at home.
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I just back them up with the rest of my files. I pay about $70/yr to backup 2 PCs.
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The most Mustachian would be to go through those 16,000+ photos and decide if you actually need them. Digital clutter is still clutter.
Ha! The best advice. I just don't want to deal with it. The Cloud is the biggest rug under which you can sweep everything.
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We built a small private cloud across three homes (San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle) with the Synology NAS devices. They are somewhat expensive on the front end but should last for a long time. That way we can keep copies of everything in multiple locations in case of natural disaster. They have some pretty awesome apps for all kinds of cool features (geolocation that auto backs up your phone/photos when you come into the house) if you are into that. I also recognize this isn't for everyone either but thought I would bring it up. I am not a technical person and was able to pull it off with limited headaches.
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Amazon gives unlimited photo storage to prime members. Comparably priced to most other options, and comes with a lot of other benefits of prime. Pretty easy to use.
My photo collection is pretty much the only 'thing' I have of any value to me, and I'm extremely protective of it. I do Flickr, Amazon, and periodically back-up to two different external hard drives (in different physical locations. I'm still deciding if I will find another service to replace Flickr, or just be ok with what I have, and very better about backing up to the physical drives more frequently.
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We have a little over 1000 photos on Flickr, so we created a second account with my wife's email address.
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Amazon gives unlimited photo storage to prime members. Comparably priced to most other options, and comes with a lot of other benefits of prime. Pretty easy to use.
My photo collection is pretty much the only 'thing' I have of any value to me, and I'm extremely protective of it. I do Flickr, Amazon, and periodically back-up to two different external hard drives (in different physical locations. I'm still deciding if I will find another service to replace Flickr, or just be ok with what I have, and very better about backing up to the physical drives more frequently.
Thanks for mentioning this Amazon prime benefit! I need to check that out... I was only vaguely aware it existed.
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Google Photo offers unlimited photos. It's high resolution but it's not FULL resolution. The storage is free for pictures with a limit of 16 megapixels. 16MP is plenty! Most professional photographers 6-8 years ago, didn't even have cameras with higher MPs so it's fine.
Unless you want to print pictures 20 feet x 30 feet, megapixels are irrelevant. 16 MP is pretty much a 24 inch long side print at 250 dots per inch (super high resolution print).
Even if you want to backup RAWs or bigger high resolution files, you can use Amazon Cloud services. They charge about $0.0125 per GB of storage and it's scalable. So, if in one month or most months you only have 100 GB online backed up, then the bill will be $1
EDIT: Actually it's cheaper. FOr backup purposes you could use Amazon Glacier which is for archival purposes (long term backup and rarely accessed). The cost per GB is $0.004 ... therefore 100 GB is 40 cents, or 4$ per TB = 48$/year but again this is for long term "tornado happened to destroy all my backups" solution since it takes a couple hours to retrieve files.
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Google Photo offers unlimited photos. It's high resolution but it's not FULL resolution. The storage is free for pictures with a limit of 16 megapixels. 16MP is plenty! Most professional photographers 6-8 years ago, didn't even have cameras with higher MPs so it's fine.
Unless you want to print pictures 20 feet x 30 feet, megapixels are irrelevant. 16 MP is pretty much a 24 inch long side print at 250 dots per inch (super high resolution print).
Even if you want to backup RAWs or bigger high resolution files, you can use Amazon Cloud services. They charge about $0.0125 per GB of storage and it's scalable. So, if in one month or most months you only have 100 GB online backed up, then the bill will be $1
EDIT: Actually it's cheaper. FOr backup purposes you could use Amazon Glacier which is for archival purposes (long term backup and rarely accessed). The cost per GB is $0.004 ... therefore 100 GB is 40 cents, or 4$ per TB = 48$/year but again this is for long term "tornado happened to destroy all my backups" solution since it takes a couple hours to retrieve files.
You have to be really careful with Glacier pricing. They also charge to retrieve data past a certain point and it adds up fast (if you do only individual files at times that's fine, but if you're doing a full restore you can get in trouble). I remember crunching the numbers on it once and it was sobering to say the least. Probably worth coughing up if it's your only way to save everything, but I wouldn't set things up that way.
And FYI, the Canon 5D Mark II, the standard in professional photography in its heyday, was 21MP and released just over ten years ago. :P (Current iteration, the Mark IV, is 30MP.)
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Google Photo offers unlimited photos. It's high resolution but it's not FULL resolution. The storage is free for pictures with a limit of 16 megapixels. 16MP is plenty! Most professional photographers 6-8 years ago, didn't even have cameras with higher MPs so it's fine.
Unless you want to print pictures 20 feet x 30 feet, megapixels are irrelevant. 16 MP is pretty much a 24 inch long side print at 250 dots per inch (super high resolution print).
Even if you want to backup RAWs or bigger high resolution files, you can use Amazon Cloud services. They charge about $0.0125 per GB of storage and it's scalable. So, if in one month or most months you only have 100 GB online backed up, then the bill will be $1
EDIT: Actually it's cheaper. FOr backup purposes you could use Amazon Glacier which is for archival purposes (long term backup and rarely accessed). The cost per GB is $0.004 ... therefore 100 GB is 40 cents, or 4$ per TB = 48$/year but again this is for long term "tornado happened to destroy all my backups" solution since it takes a couple hours to retrieve files.
You have to be really careful with Glacier pricing. They also charge to retrieve data past a certain point and it adds up fast (if you do only individual files at times that's fine, but if you're doing a full restore you can get in trouble). I remember crunching the numbers on it once and it was sobering to say the least. Probably worth coughing up if it's your only way to save everything, but I wouldn't set things up that way.
And FYI, the Canon 5D Mark II, the standard in professional photography in its heyday, was 21MP and released just over ten years ago. :P (Current iteration, the Mark IV, is 30MP.)
Sort of. From what i can see it wouldn't be that expensive. Bulk pricing of Glacier is 0.0025 per GB... Meaning if you wanted to restore 4 TB of data in one go, price would be around 20-30$. If you want expedite then it's 10-15x the price.
I talked to a friend of mine and he uses BackBlazed. It's 5$ per month and you have unlimited storage. You can retrieve data for free (its hot all the time) or you can also request in case of disaster, instead of having to download 50 TB of data which could take months... They would send you hard drives at a very premium cost. HOWEVER, if you return the drives, you get refunded the total price making it essentially free. However, they mirror your hard drives and is not additional data... if you delete anything from your harddrive it will be deleted from the cloud as well.
It would also be a set and forget approach.
Amazon Prime also offers unlimited storage of photos to prime members (I dont think they limit how high of resolution files can be as in Google).
Regarding the MPs... true, but I said most :D (just kidding) but I think you know what I meant. 16 MP is plenty for any hobbyist, enthusiast and really for any professional as well. You can print anything with 16 MPs really, of course you can't print at 30 ft wide at 300 dpis... but then again, dpis are dependant on viewing distance as well so it's a moot point.
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OP here.
The Cloud options seem convenient, but they're always changing (a la Flickr), and I don't like monthly payments for anything. On the other hand, some kind of NAS backup at multiple locations is overkill for my needs. Instead, I decided to keep it simple.
I downloaded all of my photos from Flickr and added them to my Photos library on my Mac. The 30GB Photos library is stored on an external SSD that I already have. I'll then buy a $25 SD card with 128GB of storage and make a backup of the library on the card, which I'll keep at the in-laws' house in town. Every so often I'll fetch the SD card and update the backup. Not as automatic and convenient as some of the suggested solutions, but it's cheap, straightforward, and relatively future proof.
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^ That sounds like a good plan. Cheap, efficient, and safe.
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My DH purchased a technical device that you can use to hang an external harddisk to a USB port. We tried to connect 2 different thick harddisks to the laptop, to make the backup. Unfortunately the laptop didn't recognize them. They didn't make sounds either.
After trying a lot of different stuff, he connected the harddisk from the old laptop, which finally worked. So backup of our files (documents, pictures and ripped music) is finally being made. First time in 2 years, so it was overdue.
I think this smaller laptop harddisk requires less power than the bigger harddisks and that might be why this device was the only one that worked.
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I've got them auto-uploading to Google Photos (original) and OneDrive, and I'm also putting the files on an external HDD.
Hmm, I've got a Prime membership, I'll need to look into Amazon Photos.
Sorting out my photos and other assorted digital detritus is something I really need to do soon, my laptop is on it's way out.
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I've got the photos that I'd want to access anywhere (to show friends, access remotely, etc.) on Google Photos. Probably about 5 or 6 GB worth.
What I enjoy about Google Photos is that it's so accessible, much more so than the other options (I find).
The rest of them (including the ones on Google photos) are stored on 2 1TB flash drives. I keep one in our fire safe, and the other (a water-resistant model with a metal body) I keep in the camera bag. Every so often (as needed) I'll backup as necessary.
(Note: not a professional, my pictures are mostly kids/family/landscapes)