cloud storage?

[Frankies Girl]

So the husband and I were discussing finally upgrading some of our electronics this year and the issue of storage and access came up. We both are graphic designers and have lots of photos/art projects, and my husband has an extensive collection of music and periodically adds to it throughout the year.

We've just been relying on our aging macbook with an external hard drive backup to save stuff, and haven't really paid much attention to the new options out there until now. But we're both open to the idea to getting on the cloud,  as long as we can avoid paying out tons of money or have really complicated setups/access. The fact that we both could access the music library from either of our phones or computer is kind of sweet, and after suffering a total hard drive failure right before we got the external backup many years ago - the idea that the stuff is always there is also a big plus.

Anyone got a suggestion for cloud storage and basic stuff we might need to know?

[impaire]

I have probably much smaller needs than yours (mostly pdf and word docs), and I currently use copy for my job stuff (copy.com), which is the largest free storage space I could find when I looked around. I also still have a dropbox (again, free) for photos and other files shared with my husband.

[dragoncar]

In general I'd say skip it.  It's fine to use for convenience, as long as you have local copies and don't mind the NSA reading it.  I like to control my data

[BlueMR2]

I've been down that road and it works, but I've ended pulling all my data back and handling my own backups/long term storage now.  Give it a try, see what you think.  Try it with some small storage items before you commit to uploading everything.

[Fireman]

Dropbox for most everything and a time capsule at the house.  Probably redundant considering that none of it is super important.  If I had to give up one, it would be the local back up.  Dropbox is entirely too convenient.

Edit:  I also use Google Drive for a few things because it makes it much easier to open and edit on my phone.

[Thegoblinchief]

I do local and cloud backup. Google Drive mainly, because I use a lot of the Docs stuff.

Microsoft is the cheapest currently for large storage, especially if you do the Bing rewards.

If you're paranoid about privacy, encrypt using TrueCrypt before doing the cloud backup.

[sleepyguy]

Crashplan if you want an all-in-one solution, but it will cost.

For something cheap and not too much storage requirements.  Googledrive or dropbox.  Then use a zip aes encrypt everything, do it once a month or something to refresh... a bit hands-on but it's cheap way of doing it.

Personally we have a storage NAS (Raid1) that we use at home and it syncs up with crashplan.

[Beaker]

I use Crashplan for backups, they're reasonably cheap if you have a ton of stuff to back up. AFAIK they don't provide easy access from phones, etc.

I think I heard that Google Drive dropped their price to $10/month (year??) for 1TB of storage, which is pretty crazy. So that might be an option depending on your temperament. I also heard that their TOS is pretty crazy - I think it allows them to basically do whatever they want with anything you upload, so uploading professional stuff there may be a non-starter.

[shadowmoss]

ADrive.com has 50G of free storage online.  As someone already said, use http://www.truecrypt.org/ to encrypt any personally identifying information.

[Left]

https://wuala.com/ is an encrypted cloud storage service, I got it to see how I liked it, but I stuck with dropbox because I had it setup already and didn't care about encryption
I use Adrive but I also like box.net and google drive as well.

Google Drive is fairly cheap now, once google fiber gets to my house (no idea when) I'll probably switch to that since it gives google drive space.