After my external hard drive gave up the ghost the other month I've been thinking about online photo storage, I think they call cloud storage don't they? Anyway does anyone have any experience / recommendations of these?
Depends if you are worried about storing RAW or just jpeg, if it's just jpeg then Flickr is the best value you can get. You can keep all your shots private if you want and it's fairly safe being a fairly big company these days. What does concern me about Flickr though is it's future as Yahoo's future is uncertain and what might happen to Flickr if the Chinese Alibaba group get a hold of Yahoo? There have even been rumours of Yahoo just losing interest in Flickr and shutting it down, if they do that they damn well better pay me back all my future years of subscriptions as I have paid years in advance Smugmug and Zenfolio are pro level alternatives but all of these companies are open to the same question namely what is their long term future? Personally I love Flickr, I would love it more if I could store my RAW files but it can't, all of them are slow to upload to, if you have a large collection it will take days to upload everything, for example I have a large part of my collection backed up online about 20,000 photos but it's not all of it and it took me a hell of a long time to upload all of those jpegs I estimate close to 30 days and yes I mean 30days x 24hours Personal storage like Microsoft Livemesh or Skydrive while it sounds like a lot of space is so unusable that it is not appropriate as a photo store. Other systems like livedrive offer huge online private storage but again same problem you will never use it all because you simply can't physically upload stuff that fast. I know this from experience as I tried a service called Humyo some years back, 100GB of storage, I never got past 5 percent usage as it just took forever to upload stuff, faster to download stuff obviously but you have to get it up there in the first place for it to be any use. Finally these services are not a substitute for having your own backups, your primary back up is your local backup on an external drive or drives, the online stuff is purely a secondary backup in the event of a disaster as it will take you so long to get your data back that it is just a last line of defence. When 100 Mb internet becomes ubiquitous then ok these services will be much more usable but right now they are far from practical unless you are very very dedicated.
Sorry to wander slightly off-topic, but I have a question about Flickr. I have deleted a couple of photos recently, but notice they are still viewable and able to be copied etc around the internet. I thought if I deleted 'at source' then anywhere those pics were displayed would also be deleted and just display something like 'this picture unavailable' Does anyone know about this? Is there any workaround? I've sent a number of e-mails to Flickr but just never had any answers. (well apart from munerous messages telling me they're on the case and 'will reply soon but it may take some time' Any help/advice appreciated
If you have deleted them Peter then they will be deleted unless you are checking only a minute or two later that they are gone. Flickr runs on a server farm which means that images and the database are stored and accessed across many many multiple servers. Normally the data is partitioned i.e each physical database server serves a small subset of the total data but many web servers on the farm will have a cached version of the data you just accessed, these cached versions can take a little time to vanish but eventually they do. The other issue depends on how you used the images in web sites like for example this one, if you link the way I do then when you delete at Flickr the image here is only a reference to Flickr so it vanishes here, if on the other hand you use this forums mechanisms to display a photo then you are making a copy of the image that is stored on this forums server, Flickr can't do anything about that. Please note that even if you delete an item from Flickr that it is still likely that there will be a second tier copy that remains in the long term storage, Flickr and Yahoo require really enormous amounts of storage so Flickr uses a standard technique of gradual migration of data onto longer term slower read only storage. So your image will disappear from Flickr's database but in reality they will still have copies that they cannot delete. In this case it sounds more like you have inadvertently used a facility that has copied your image from Flickr and referenced the copy from a different system as I mentioned above, the other issue is that Google and other systems also cache copies of publicly available content and you don't really have control over when these content copies will expire. The only situation Flickr would be liable for is if you had deleted an image and the other references on other sites were like http://www.flcikr.com/photos/peter/6338078440 or http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6221/6338078440_27b2baf8a3_z.jpg Any other way of linking or refrerencing that does not mention Flickr in the URL is linking to a copy of your photo not to the original on Flickr, so Flickr can't do anything about it. By the way both of those links above are deliberately fake folks.
With an upload speed of just 0.3 Meg I have never really considered on-line storage for photos. I only use on-line storage for e-mails, contacts, log-on credentials for websites, copy of passport/driving licence, credit card details and other other important documents (including travel documents). I even keep a copy of my Will on-line - all safely encrypted! You really do need to back-up your PC once a week anyway to an external drive - preferably encrypted and stored in a fireproof data-safe is a good option. You can even buy data-safes with a USB connection so that your USB drive remains housed inside the fireproof data-safe when backups are taking place! Ideally, you should have a second backup stored off-site, though I just use a hardware-encrypted flash drive on my key ring; if that is stolen, the contents are automatically erased if the wrong password is entered times times in succession.
