Alternatives to the now departed Amazon Drive for offsite photo storage

[doobs]

So,

My "friends" at Amazon have deprecated Amazon Drive. Drive was a part of the Prime package that provided free photo storage.

I'm guessing it became a problem with people storing other stuff as Amazon turned off uploading photos into Drive, and now you must use "Photos" to upload images.

The problem is Amazon photos is roughly equivalent to Google photos and allows virtually no capability for image management. I tried uploading a single image and goodness only knows where it went as it doesn't show up in my drive listing.

So, thus ends Amazon Drive as my offsite photo backup. Cheeses me off as the cost of Prime continues to escalate and no discount was offered with the sunsetting of this capability.

I'll throw it out to the folks here, what's a good alternative? It pains me to have to pony up another $10/month (or more) for this, but I don't see an alternative.

I've got about:

1. 31,500 jpg's
2. 1,000 orf's
3. 18,000 nef's
4. 25,000 raf's
5. 1,000 dng's

Consuming about 2 tb of drive space.

Thanks for any words of wisdom.

 

[Ad Dieleman]

I use Dropbox as an online backup facility (besides two revolving backups on external hard disks). 3 TB of storage costs me € 199 per year, allowing all types of files backed up and shared online. I don't use Dropbox for sharing photos with others; there is a user-interface for it but I don't even know how it works. I also use Smugmug (Power subscription $173.95 for 2 years) for sharing pictures with family but I'm starting to think I can do away with that; other family members use Google Photos and feel the Smugmug site isn't very user-friendly.

 

[rayvonn]

I do have one or two opinions on Amazon, but I can't complain at all about their S3 storage. I do use a front end software to make the usage easier but for backup/ storage I've found it to be the best and also at very minimal cost.

 

[Drdul]

I use Sync for cloud storage (and sync between devices). I was a long-time Dropbox user (all the way back to the beta), but switched to Sync for the end-to-end encryption and lower prices.

For cloud backup I use Arq and backup to OneDrive. I get a total of 5 TB of storage with a Microsoft 365 Family Plan, which I subscribe to for Word, Excel and PowerPoint (need ‘em all for work). As I don’t use OneDrive for cloud storage, I repurpose it for backup.

 

[Kevin]

I do have one or two opinions on Amazon, but I can't complain at all about their S3 storage. I do use a front end software to make the usage easier but for backup/ storage I've found it to be the best and also at very minimal cost.

S3 is used for file storage here at Cameraderie and I use it for some personal backups as well. Primary personal storage is a SAN here at the house but for the family photos I use multiple backup locations.

What software are you using for S3 transfers? Something like Filezilla Pro or something that integrates at the OS level?

 

[William Lewis]

I prefer to use an external drive. Copy them all to it every so often & put it in my safe deposit box.

 

[rayvonn]

S3 is used for file storage here at Cameraderie and I use it for some personal backups as well. Primary personal storage is a SAN here at the house but for the family photos I use multiple backup locations.

What software are you using for S3 transfers? Something like Filezilla Pro or something that integrates at the OS level?

Arq. Wonderful piece of software.

 

[olli]

I used Backblaze for a few years until my backup function stopped working and they were honest enough to say they couldn't find out why. These days I use iDrive and I'm very happy with them. Their personal plan is $80/year and provides 5TB of storage. They also offer regular deals for people who are switching from other cloud storage providers so if they include Amazon Drive in that you could get the first year for $8 - that's eight dollars. I checked their website and Amazon Drive isn't listed but it might be worth enquiring anyway to see if it's included.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

I use a combo of iCloud Photos and PCloud. PCloud is a really nice setup because it’s not a subscription, but a one time payment, and it has clients on every platform, including Linux.

 

[gryphon1911]

I took an approach as follows. At one point I had over 200,000 images.

I realized that there were a lot of redundant images or things I were holding on to for weird or sentimental reasons and not because they were good images.

I culled it all down to 50,000 images.

I then donate money to use FreeFileSync and back up weekly to an external 2TB drive. That is for on Prem backup.

You can use various options for external or cloud based backup.

Flickr is still an option and they have a lot of very good DAM ish features that can help track and find images. I left due to personal reasons on how they treat existing customers.

Another alternative to them and what I use now is 500px. Not as robust a community, and the DAM ish features are scant. However, I like the more modern interface and if I need to send someone to see my work, 500px looks more polished.

Either of those products have options for paid versions that give you unlimited storage.

If I wanted to go full on cloud storage, I’d probably look more into an actual backup cloud storage service.

Maybe eve, as others have suggested looking into OneDrive as it has good auto synchronization options. We use it at work and it has been pretty good.

 

[doobs]

I used Backblaze for a few years until my backup function stopped working and they were honest enough to say they couldn't find out why. These days I use iDrive and I'm very happy with them. Their personal plan is $80/year and provides 5TB of storage. They also offer regular deals for people who are switching from other cloud storage providers so if they include Amazon Drive in that you could get the first year for $8 - that's eight dollars. I checked their website and Amazon Drive isn't listed but it might be worth enquiring anyway to see if it's included.

Thanks Olli.

They have a free plan that I'll try to see how it works. If it works out, $80/year is reasonable for 5Tb.