cloud storage

Luke

Legend
Location
Milwaukee, WI USA
Name
Luke
OK..... I'm no techie. And the way I store my photos is abhorrent. But I just receieved an email offer from this outfit called pogoplug. https://pogoplug.com/promo/friends2013#features They are having an introductory offer of UNLIMITED cloud storage for $29 for a year. It seems awfully cheap, but I haven't really looked around.

Do all these types of services have similar user interfaces? Is the price good? ANyone store their stuff in the cloud? I'd really just be using it as a backup for my backup with the added bonus of being able to access stuff from work as well.

Any and all input welcome.
 
OK..... I'm no techie. And the way I store my photos is abhorrent. But I just receieved an email offer from this outfit called pogoplug. https://pogoplug.com/promo/friends2013#features They are having an introductory offer of UNLIMITED cloud storage for $29 for a year. It seems awfully cheap, but I haven't really looked around.

Do all these types of services have similar user interfaces? Is the price good? ANyone store their stuff in the cloud? I'd really just be using it as a backup for my backup with the added bonus of being able to access stuff from work as well.

Any and all input welcome.

Didn't Pogoplug used to offer some sort of web enabled hardware thing? This sounds pretty familiar. As long as it's not your primary cloud storage I think it might be worth a try. I've been a Dropbox user for a few years now and I feel like they have earned some loyalty because of how dependable and seamless that experience has been.

It looks like Pogoplug is using Amazon Glacier's low cost storage...our LNMS here at campus uses AWS and it has been very reliable so that at least is a positive. Of course services like Zenfolio and SmugMug (think Flickr without the social aspect) are better suited for photo storage and not that expensive.
 
For photos, I use local and a backup, and I use SMUGMUG for sharing. Just really like the interface. I am not familiar with the one you are talking about, but Dropbox is really awesome and easy to use. I keep my business and personal (though non-financial) docs on smugmug, so I can access them from anywhere. But the storage is pretty limited, at least compared to my photo library :)
 
I use Smugmug and I think they do both, photosite and documents. I'e been using Smugmug for a long time. I got in at $19 a year for unlimited storage and display of images (IIRC). A couple of years later they bumped up the price from $19 to $24 for the basic service, but, all existing customers were grandfathered in at the old price. I really like how Smugmug threats their customers. They're located in San Jose and are always available human-to-human to answer any questions. They're much higher now $55 a year for the basic plan.

G
 
I tried to use the Pogoplug "device" for web-based access to photos, music and files. Horrible. It was cheap, so I got what I paid for. Based on that I wouldn't consider them for anything, but I can't speak to the cloud storage offer.

SmugMug works very well for me. $60/yr Pro plan that allows unlimited pics and videos. Basic plan for $40/yr is pretty much the same but does not allow any video.
 
If you are just looking for storage rather than photo display you can build up a reasonable amount of free storage with reputable businesses if you don't mind managing multiple accounts. At one point MS were offering 25GB free with Skydive though they have now cut that way back to around 7. Every Google account you have gives you 5GB free and your Amazon account will give you another 5 free. I happen to have 7 Google accounts (there is a valid reason) so that's 35 plus 25 from MS plus 5 from Amazon - total 65GB.

All of these offer extra storage for a fee. I too have a SmugMug account though I don't really use it for storage. All my jpeg files go to Flickr and while SmugMug do offer raw storage they are selling you storage with Amazon so it's as easy just to go direct to Amazon.

The problem for newcomers or smaller providers like this one is that you can never really be sure if they are sustainable and if they are not then do you want to entrust your images to them? While I like competition and competitive pricing when it comes to backing up my image files I want to stick with an established big name whether Amazon, Google or Microsoft.

Of course everything is also backed up on external drives as well.
 
These schemes seems cheap until you stop paying and you either have no access or lose your stuff. The other threats are terms & conditions change, charges go up, company goes broke.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 2

Yep, always a danger. I think I would probably stick to the known. Get a NAS, RAID it, store your stuff yourself.

I only ever use the free ones which carry bonuses for referrals and I never depend on them completely. Eg I dont mind dropbox for storing my calibre library, and some of my other things, because its a copy of something that is on my computer. I would never trust one of these places to be a permanent backup... I don't even trust flickr, to the point where I don't even upload full size full res shots there. Its a convenient repository for a while.
 
I use Carbonite at $59/year (less with an offer code) and Bitcasa beta at $10/month (free for now). Bitcasa is an interesting service, providing true unlimited storage with File browser integration. It looks just like a network or USB storage device on the computer. It sounds too good to be true, so I'm still cautious.
 
I use Carbonite as well. They've been around awhile, the backup is seamless, it's all quite easy to deal with. I also have a local hard drive backup, figuring that for both my local backup and Carbonite to go soth simultaneously will require something like the end of the world.

-Ray
 
My images aren't valuable to anyone but me however I do have a multi layer backup in place.

For the cloud I use Carbonite (it just works away in the background), I also use Photobucket for a few images that I link to in forums. I have a removable USB HDD on which the Mac Time Machine keeps up to date files and as a final safety net I make a daily clone of my master HDD to an identical internal drive from which I can boot the Mac if the master drive fails.

Over the top, probably, but with storage so cheap, why not. When on vacation I can put the USB drive somewhere else. If the house burns down I have Carbonite (but none of my thousands of 35mm film prints in the cupboard!).
 
While storage is affordable, I sometimes think that the money could be spent elsewhere. But I then think about how much money I would be willing to spend to recover the files and I realize that cost to prevent that situation is only a fraction of the amount.
 
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