Backing up your photos online

[JDArt]

There's a lot to be said for the idea of backing up your photos online. You get a copy of your important photographs in a remote location. You can access the backup from any computer that has an Internet connection. And you can even use the backup to share your photographs, if desirable, with others.

But one significant problem has prevented most folks from taking advantage of the online backup solutions available: their Internet connections were too slow to make the process bearable.

A lot has changed over the past year, however, to make the reality of online backup more palatable. First, Internet connections continue to get faster, with broadband gaining traction around the world and, thanks to fiber rollouts giving cable and DSL real competition, forcing Internet providers to offer higher and higher speeds for less money. Second, online backup services have gotten smarter about how they use your Internet connection, making the prospect of backing up your data over even a relatively slow Internet connection more realistic.

I've been looking recently at some of the supposed best online backup services, and I present my findings to you here. I think online backup should probably have a place in the lives of most professional photographers who have a fast Internet connection. The reason is simple: even most of us with a solid backup routine do not store our backups offsite. Doing so is the only way to really secure your precious photographic memories. Mozy (Mozy Online Backup: Simple, Automatic, Secure) and Carbonite(Online Backup: Easy, Completely Automatic. Secure. Carbonite.) both employ a "slow go" approach to backing up your computer. To overcome the drawback of slower Internet connections making online backup an unrealistic option, these services both employ smart applications that, once installed on your PC, take care of backing up your data behind the scenes. The backups occur so slowly that you probably won't even be aware that they're occurring.

If you end up doing something intensive online - such as game playing or videoconferencing - you can temporarily suspend both Mozy and Carbonite until you've finished. It makes sense to compare these services because both employ essentially the same backup model and both appear intent on remaining competitive with one another in terms of the service offered.

Should you ever need to restore a file, you just log in to your account and select the files you wish to restore. Doing an "image" backup of your entire hard drive and restoring an entire computer using one of these services is not possible.

If you're not sure whether online backup is for you, Mozy offers a free trial that does not require you to give out acredit card but does provide you with two gigabytes of storage space for your backups. That's enough to back up many people's most precious data files - ones you'd never want to lose under any circumstances. And while many the of applications required to use online backup are Windows-only, Mozy now offers a beta version of its Mac-compatible client. Mozy's unlimited plan removes limitations on storage space and costs $4.95 per month or $54.95 per year.

Carbonite also offers a free trial, but it's limited to 15days rather than two gigabytes. The upside is that should youdecide to make online backup a part of your strategy for datasecurity, you can get an unlimited storage option for a bitless than Mozy charges: $4.16 per month or $49.95 per year - less if you choose a two-year option.

Taking a slightly different approach to online backup is XDrive (Free Online Storage—Xdrive), which has been around for many years now but is finally becoming a more realistic option for those with faster Internet connections. Instead of taking the slow, behind-the-scenes approach to backing up your data, XDrive's Windows-compatible installation lets you use the service as though it were an external hard drive connected directly to your PC. Once XDrive is installed, you simply drag and drop files to your XDrive or set up a backup routine with your backup application of choice. The backups do not occur slowly, over time, but immediately, using all of the bandwidth available to you, so XDrive makes senses for those with a good Internet connection. XDrive offer five gigabytes of storage space for free. Fifty gigabytes of storage runs for $9.95 per month.

Although many of us are loathe to take on yet another monthly or yearly subscription charge, the security offered by online backup services is compelling - and may even be cost-effective, if you consider that a typical external harddrive and enclosure runs for about $200. Ideally, any backup you make should be stored off-site anyway, in case of an on-site disaster, and few computer users who make backups bother to take them off site.

[JohnC]

I think online storage can be a good thing. Thanks for pointing out that there is a Mac client in testing for at least one of them.

Still, I have these questions going through my mind when I think about this...

What happens if the backup company goes out of business? Do you know if these companies have multiple co-locations for the data and how they do their own backups of your data? Is it all in one data center or spread out around the country/world? What safeguards do they have in place to protect your data/images from being accessed by someone in the data center? Can you back up from a PC and restore to a Mac?

And most "high speed" internet connections are for downloads. Few ISPs offer fast upload speeds. How long does it take to back up a 500 gig drive of images?

[JDArt]

Originally Posted by JohnC

What happens if the backup company goes out of business? Do you know if these companies have multiple co-locations for the data and how they do their own backups of your data? Is it all in one data center or spread out around the country/world? What safeguards do they have in place to protect your data/images from being accessed by someone in the data center? Can you back up from a PC and restore to a Mac?

And most "high speed" internet connections are for downloads. Few ISPs offer fast upload speeds. How long does it take to back up a 500 gig drive of images?

John, I don't have answers to most of these questions, but here's how I look at this:

I believe this should be just one part of a backup strategy. I would have a local backup copy of all of my work as well as an off-site copy. These services can provide the off-site copy. I doubt they'll go out of business. The need for this service is only growing, and storage is cheap.

Keep an eye on Google, too. It's rumored that the company will be bringing out a "GDrive" offering that may provide the same or similar service.

As to the speed of the backup: I signed up for the 2 gigs of free space from Mozy, and it took a few hours to upload my files. Of course, this was running in the background, so I really didn't care how long it took. Subsequent backups are incremental, and you set up the client to give you what is essentially an unattended backup by schedule.

[JohnC]

Not trying to be argumentive--I want a solution like this. But, how many dot.com companies provided growing services at cheap prices a few years ago before the dot.com bust.

That said, I will go take a look at Mozy now. Thanks!

[JDArt]

Originally Posted by JohnC

Not trying to be argumentive--I want a solution like this. But, how many dot.com companies provided growing services at cheap prices a few years ago before the dot.com bust.

I understand. No offense taken at all. I'm not affiliated with any of these companies. I wouldn't rely on any one backup method, that's for sure. Yeah, I suppose when/if Google gets in this game, we won't have to worry about the underlying company's stability. Or will we?

[Mark McCall]

Not to hijack Jay's thread but I test drove Mozy and Carbonite a week apart.

Mozy was the more fluid of the two, easier to pick up and use.

Here's how it works:
Download and install. Open the interface. Your drives are listed in the left hand pane. Check off each drive you want backed up as well as directories on the C drive, ie: My Documents, ect.
Backup will start immediately or at a your predetermined time. (we choose 3:00am every night).
Drives must be running to backup. We only turn on the drives we want backed up before closing for the day.

Now the downside.
It takes a loooong time to backup each drive the first time.
After that drive is backed up, future backups will included only new files that have appeared, or any files that have been changed. That speeds up the process dramatically.

To retrieve folders, files or entire drives, click "Restore" in the interface. Mozy will ask for a directory to place the files being retrieved.

At $50 a year, it's the deal of the century.

[uk2usa]

Perhaps there is a down side to my method of online storage that I am not aware of... it does not cost me a penny and is very accessible.

I set up gmail accounts and email myself the files...

So I may have alexmarch08@gmail.com, alexapril08@gmail.com etc (not real) as my email addresses.

There is a limit to the amount I can store in these accounts, but at the moment my pics tend to be in the 6MB range... so I can comfortably store 1000 per month. I am not sure if there will come a time when Gmail tell me that I have too many accounts... I guess I will have to wait and see.

[mimiya]

Alex,
Gmail limits emails to 20MB....does it takes a long time to split up your files and email them to yourself?

[Alfred D.]

If you really want an online backup scheme – in addition to good local backups – (and provided you have a broadband connection) then why don't you arrange to store your online backups on a friend's, relative's or colleague's hard drive (preferably two friend's)? And vice versa.
It's probably cheaper, and certainly much more trusted/secure than some faceless commercial company on the other side of the country which may pull the plug overnight on your precious backups...

[uk2usa]

Originally Posted by mimiya

Alex,
Gmail limits emails to 20MB....does it takes a long time to split up your files and email them to yourself?

No, not at all... I already save them to 2 hard drives locally... All I do is email myself 1 pic at a time... That way I can put the title of the image in the email heading so I can find it easily.

I probably only keep 50 images per month... so far this has really worked for me, but I could see it being an issue if I were emailing large numbers of photographs.

[bitterman]

Try adrive.com they give you 50gig free

[Alfred D.]

Originally Posted by bitterman

Try adrive.com they give you 50gig free

Until they withdraw it.

[lightandimages]

Interesting thread. I did a piece on this for Macbreak a but ago and I will summarize it here. In my testing, the Amazon S3 service was the best overall choice when used with a decent S3 client. The pricing is very cheap and the service has been pretty reliable. Several big name photosites actually use the S3 service on their own backend. In my personal case, I use it with Jungledisk (Windows, OSX, Linux) to back up key PSD files and key JPGs. I run about 10 gig on the servers right now. My backups cost me about 2 bucks a month. I did buy a second DSL line with 700Kbps upload speed (cable was limited to 300 kbps) and I have some custom route statements on my Mac to send all Jungledisk/S3 traffic over the DSL link.

Jungledisk also offers HTTPS access to the file, not just their own client. Other apps like Transmit is now S3 smart.

Is S3 perfect? hardly but it saved my bacon a few months back when something ate my Photoshop directory on my external disk. What I do now is run a Terastation RAID5 for local restores and I use S3 for emergency and offsite storage since I do live in a firezone.

Here is my original review which needs to be updated to reflect some changes to the product. But not today

Product Name:
Jungledisk

Pricing
List price: $ 20.00 USD
Free Download

Specs/From the website:

You can copy files to it using Explorer (or Finder on Mac). When you copy a file to your Jungle Disk it is encrypted and uploaded in the background to Amazon.com's servers.

Amazon S3™ provides a set of web services for web-scale, fast, reliable storage. They store your data in multiple data centers around the country for complete redundancy.

Jungle Disk runs on your local machine as a WebDAV server. WebDAV is a protocol for remote file access supported by all modern operating systems.

As you copy data to your Jungle Disk, it is transparently cached, encrypted, and uploaded to Amazon.com. Since uploads occur in the background, copying files to your Jungle Disk is as fast as a local hard drive.

When you browse your Jungle Disk, if the data is already available in the local cache nothing is downloaded from Amazon, which makes Jungle Disk super efficient

Features:

* Not just a "backup" application.
* Automatic scheduled backups
* Load and run from a USB keyfob (thumbdrive) on ANY system, not just your home system
* Can be managed by third party tools such as ChronoSync or SynBack
* No restrictions on the amount of data sent to Amazon's S3 servers
* No minimum tier of cost, you pay for as little or as much space you use
* Cross platform application, supports Macs, Windows and Linux so you can put or get data from any one to the other
* Source code is available to browse and download your data even if Jungledisk were to "disappear"
* Data is encrypted on Amazon's S3 servers
* For extra cost of one dollar a month, you can have HTTP access to your files without having to use Jungledisk client
* Supports block copies so only changed data is copied up to servers

1st Impression:
The 1st impression was this application was too easy to do everything they claimed or there was a catch somewhere. No catch, the software works well and is very stable. Performance of the uploads and downloads are limited by your pipe. Both worked well over DSL, Cable and EVDO while on the road.

Install:
Typical Mac installation of copying the file to the application folder. You do need to set up an Amazon S3 account but Jungledisk has a wizard that takes you through the process. You will need to get a pair of security keys from Amazon before you can complete the installation.

Use:
This is a very easy application to use. You can use the Jungledisk monitor to make real time backups or configure the scheduler and what to snap. Or you can just double click on the Jungledisk mount point and drag your files in or out.

The new HTTP access make what was easy so easy a brain dead zombie can get to their data. With HTTP you can access your Jungledisk data from virtually any platform that supports a web browser and secure socket or SSL.

Other Notes:
Since this application uses the Amazon S3 service, there is additional cost from Amazon over and above the cost of the application but it is very cheap. The uploading of six gig of images to the S3 servers cost me 90 cents.

Negatives:
Webdev and online backups are still a technology in the beginning stages. You need to understand at least the basics even with a well written application like Jungledisk. This might not be the application for your mom and dad trying to archive their pictures.

Jungle disk is not "smart" about file relocation since there is not any kind of pre-scan before the backup starts. (NOTE: This has changed in the newest version) So if you move a file to a new folder, it will recopy the file completely thinking it's new.

Positives
Works very well and is reliable both in the home, office and on the road. The price is right on both the application and the S3 service. No interference with anything else.

Fatal Flaw (what would cause you NOT to buy it?)
None so far.

Competition

Other tools like Transmit FTP now has S3 upload/download capabilities built in to them but Jungledisk is still one of the easiest and cheapest to use. It is one of the few if not the only one that offer all three platforms and the ability to run off a USB thumbdrive.