Hi all. Recently i have one external hard drive lost. I am very careful with my files and i have all storage in another disk but i lost some of my daughter movies that i�m able to restore , so is not a big deal.

  I am looking for a web storage service (affordable) where i can put all my files and port, about 2TB, and i beat the wall against prices about $200 month for 1TB , for me is very, very expensive, but i think that one storage place in web where i never lost anything is very useful and highly demand to my work.

  I found a place where i can set my own service and company of web storage, but is expensive just for me to use, so...two questions?

 - Do you known about some really good place and affordable to keep our files safe?
 - If i can get a service that provide this at an affordable price (ex. Like $120/year for 1 TB) would you consider to store files there? Just to do a little marketing inspection !!

Thanks.

Crashplan, very affordable:

http://www.crashplan.com

But uploading 2TB of data will take a very long time.

Backblaze is reasonable. Initial upload may take weeks depending on your upload bandwidth. It's a backup service, not an archive (so if you want to delete files from your hard drives and leave it in the cloud storage, this isn't for you). But it is great that it just runs - no remembering involved. They don't include NAS drives but any external drives connected to your system (e.g. my Drobo) are covered for the $5 per month per system

I do keep archives - external drives on the bookshelves - for long term access, but I don't update those on a daily basis.

There are now quite a number of cloud storage companies.  Many are new, many are still small and not all will make it.  I'd really hate to upload all my stuff and then have the company go out of business in a couple of years.   

I'd hoped that by now MS SkyDrive would be in the big leagues, but it's still crippled by lack of functionality and it's starting to look like it's just going to be an extension to Office. 

Or - if you don't believe in cloud solutions - you can buy unlimited hosting in a company (in my case Dreamhost), build your own interface and enjoy. I pay $100 a year, which is - in my opinion - cheap option, considering the fact that all my files are not on Google/Amazon/Other servers. This includes hosting, unlimited space, unlimited traffic, unlimited internal addresses, etc.
You can find plenty of similar options in US.

Price is important, but so is the client program.  If you're uploading a lot of stuff you'll need a smoothly functioning client piece on your end which will handle it all automatically, in the background, over a period of days or weeks if necessary.  And it will need to detect changes and additions and keep the backup current.

I don't think Photoshelter can do that, can it?

The PS uploader can't do continuous backups on its own.

For initial upload I would just put maybe 100 files at a time into Filezilla and FTP up direct from my local server.

For easy updating I would run a scheduled weekly RoboCopy job on my local server to put all files with their archive flags set, in a given set of folders, into outbound folders, then run an automated FTP transfer of those folders to PhotoShelter.

I saw the Amazon S3 , looks great but i have to admit i don�t understand nothing of that price list.....And they charge for communications when we download the files?

Yes, there are charges for storage, and for bandwidth.

cheaper one time fee solution ... go to wal-mart and buy a fireproof safe then head over to BestBuy and pick up an extra external drive.

I've been looking into crashplan, $70 for the year, unlimited storage. I've got a hard drive from 2011 that powers up but can't be recognised, it'll no doubt cost more than that just to have some tech person recover it.

[rant]
No doubt USA plans are cheaper, cos we get "the lucky country" premium added to all our costs and services.
[/rant]

Wouldn't Amazon Glacier be perfect for this? Basically designed to be cheap to upload, not designed for a lot of retrieval until you need it. I think this would be different than just the S3 services, yes?

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/

Quote from: RacePhoto on April 13, 2013, 19:33

Most of the time those unrecognized drives are the controller card, not the drive. You can pull the drive and put it into an external caddy, dock, bay (whatever someone calls it) read everything. Worth the try and then you can use the docking station for an external drive as a backup, so no loss. 1T drives are under $100.

Sorry but still save your own on a drive is much less expensive than paying for storage on the web. Thing time and speed also.

This one reads IDE and SATA, if you'll never see another IDE in your lifetime, they make a dual SATA that does copies, drive to drive. There's your backup! Around fifty bucks, just buy a new drive every year and keep using the old ones until they go up in smoke. Copies laptop drives, hard drives, backs up drives...

Inexpensive redundant backup.

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Drive-Docking-Station-2-5in/dp/B002UAR8JY/ref=sr_1_11?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1365899321&sr=1-11&keywords=external+hard+drive+bay+star+tech

Quote from: gillian on April 13, 2013, 16:58

I've been looking into crashplan, $70 for the year, unlimited storage. I've got a hard drive from 2011 that powers up but can't be recognised, it'll no doubt cost more than that just to have some tech person recover it.

[rant]
No doubt USA plans are cheaper, cos we get "the lucky country" premium added to all our costs and services.
[/rant]

I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understood much of that.

but a 1T hard drive is @$100, and i'd need one per year, so $70 for back up that (knock on wood) will never fail is a good deal.

What is "Never Fail" and the drives last five years, I just made the relative comparison that you could buy a new one every year and it would be less that storing off site and you would have complete control, redundant backup.

Also backup and archiving are two different things. People often use backup services, and delete from their hard drive, only to find out, the files are also deleted from the backup. They blame the backup.

People have raid drives and do the same, but they blame the drives for "losing their data". When it was operator error.

People format drives or delete everything and then claim it was equipment failure. Odd, it's always the computers fault, isn't it. That poor innocent little box? 

1T Sata drive $90 OfficeMax, I didn't even try for sale items or websites. 2T drives are often $100, which is still cheap.

Anyway, if you have a defective drive, which is likely to be a fried drive controller, get an external dock or find someone who owns one. Your recover may be much less than the worst case. Here's hoping?

No I don't like renting electronic storage that I have no control over or their security. These remote sites have actually irrecoverably lost data, more than once!

I've been looking into crashplan, $70 for the year, unlimited storage. I've got a hard drive from 2011 that powers up but can't be recognised, it'll no doubt cost more than that just to have some tech person recover it.

Not a storage service, but if the drive is still visible in BIOS, you could try SpinRite from grc.com.  Very good at fixing bad sectors and recovering faulty drives.  It does cost $89 - I've found it worth every penny.  You can use it as many times as you need in the future too...

Of course you could also use dropbox as a backup? isn't that an easy solution?

You could to some extent, but it would hardly be easy.  I suppose it would do if you only had a small number of files though.  Dropbox is really just online storage, offering only limited space - and costs more if you want larger amounts.  It's really intended for file transfer, sharing and temporary storage, not as a backup solution. 

Carbonite gives you unlimited storage, with automatic background upload of selected files and backup copies from up to 3 months past.  It's also automatically encrypted before upload - you control the encryption key if you want, so nobody, not even Carbonite themselves, can read your files.

Of course that could be a problem if you forget your password...