I set up a Dropbox Business account, and it's the best thing I've done for a long time.

The amount of money I've spend on harddrives (including a 48TB NAS-server configuration that required way too much maintenance) is ridiculous.

At the moment we have 58 TB stored on Dropbox. Everyone I work with can access any files from any shoot anywhere in the world at anytime. It's brilliant.  It especially comes handy when you collaborate with people remotely. But it comes at a price and requires a good Internet connection when we upload our shoots.

$720 a year?

Some of us, don't need the anywhere, anytime, or available for someone else features. I do have dropbox, the maximum free account. If I needed to send a photo, or a series, and I don't do much video, then I have the resources. But yes, for different people, cloud would be much better.

I think you are missing the biggest draw of cloud backup -- protection against loss resulting from fire, burglary, or similar office-destroying events.

I have zero interest in the "anywhere, anytime" aspect of cloud backups.  In the last 50 years, we have

(1) been threatened by a volcano (we lived in the shadow of Mt St Helens when it erupted in 1980),

(2) evacuated due to a regional fire in the San Jose (CA) hills in 1985. The fire destroyed 36 homes, including that of my boss at Motorola.  The fire was literally stopped across the street from our home, so we ended up only with smoke damage.

(3) Our home was split in two during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 (also known as the World Series quake, since it occurred moments before the opening pitch of the San Francisco / Oakland baseball world series.)  My office was completely destroyed.  (Actually, we sold that house just 3 months before the quake, so it was the buyers that got destroyed.  We moved North to Berkeley, where....)

(4) evacuated due to the largest urban fire in the US in 1992, in Berkeley (CA) where 3300 homes were burned in the Oakland Firestorm.  Again, the fire was literally stopped across the street from us, so our damage was a canopy and landscaping.

(5) were burglarized in 2016, where the thief took two laptops, a Canon 70-200 f2.8 lens (costs $2500) and $1000 in cash from our petty cash drawer (my wife had sold a painting the day before).  Fortunately, the disk drives were in a separate locked room, and were not taken,

When I have a disk failure, I have local backups to recover, via Time Machine.  Much faster and more convenient.  However, in those 5 instances noted above, we might have lost all our onsite data in one giant flop.  Had that happened, I would have been VERY happy to have a cloud backup to recover from.

Box and mega have 100 gb for free combined.

Agree with Leaf! I have used Jottacloud for years and have 30TB+

Quote from: kjekol on January 31, 2019, 09:33

Agree with Leaf! I have used Jottacloud for years and have 30TB+

Hi kjekol,

Are you on the Jottacloud Personal plan?
How long have you had 30TB online ?

Thanks!

I'm also very interested.

I've just read that after 10-40TB Jottacloud may limit your "unlimited" plan.
Is anyone else using it with big amounts of footage for example and for how long?

Thanks!

Thanks for sharing your experience.

For photos I use SmugMug, it's $6 per month unlimited and I like the interface, it's also possible to store unlimited HD video there, but not 4K.

Unfortunately, Seagate constantly crushes... Well, they work for 2-3 years though, but not more in my case.

So I'm looking where to store all the 4K stuff online in addition to disks and Jottacloud has a wonderful price, but will they allow tens of terabytes?

Smugmug does not keep your original files. They convert the video to mp4.

Ah, thanks, good to know.

Anyway, there is no 4K, so need another solution for video. But for photos they're pretty good, you can sync or upload via Lightroom and there is an app, so everything is accessible anywhere.

I use both a NAS (drobo) and backblaze.com. Very happy with both. Backblaze will backup my NAS.

I use both a NAS (drobo) and backblaze.com. Very happy with both. Backblaze will backup my NAS.

Is it possible to connect only external drives to Backblaze without connecting the main computer?

Also, if I delete something by mistake (and if I won't notice), then it will be deleted on Bb as well? If yes, what is the point of such backup... Just curious how it works. Thanks.

BackBlaze is USELESS IF YOU TRAVEL!

I spent 3 months getting a full 4TB of data backed up to BackBlaze. Thought I was in good shape...

Then I took our recent trip and discovered just how wrong I was!  Because the main disk at home is not traveling with me, it has not connected to the web for 30 days. BB just deletes the disk in that case. No chance to recover it. No chance to flag a disk as "keep it even if off the net for awhile."  Just gone.

I deleted my BackBlaze account. Totally useless piece of junk if you travel as I do.  I am out of the country roughly 3 months of each year.  Gone for more than 30 days at a time, and kiss your precious backup goodbye.

I will be home in a couple weeks, and then will search for some usable cloud backup that won't just delete a disk because its main computer is roaming...

Wow, that's hard.

I'm using Crashplan, don't know what they will do when your PC isn't online for longer time periods (well, they do send warnings after a few days, but I never had issues continuing the backup process after a few weeks). Maybe ask them what they will do if you're away for longer...

@swisschocolate: they do keep deleted files, if you want to (you can configure that) even forever. And they do keep versions of files, so you can go back to older versions of e.g. documents when you have overwritten something you want to get back.
I don't think you can connect only an external drive, as the backup process runs on the PC...

BackBlaze is USELESS IF YOU TRAVEL!

I spent 3 months getting a full 4TB of data backed up to BackBlaze. Thought I was in good shape...

Then I took our recent trip and discovered just how wrong I was!  Because the main disk at home is not traveling with me, it has not connected to the web for 30 days. BB just deletes the disk in that case. No chance to recover it. No chance to flag a disk as "keep it even if off the net for awhile."  Just gone.

I deleted my BackBlaze account. Totally useless piece of junk if you travel as I do.  I am out of the country roughly 3 months of each year.  Gone for more than 30 days at a time, and kiss your precious backup goodbye.

OMG, you've just described my situation exactly! I don't travel out of the country (or anywhere) for that long, but I often go more than a month without uploading new images to my backup drives.

I purchased BackBlaze last week and have uploaded most of the contents of my laptop. Was about to hook up my "first tier" 3T backup drive (from which I back up to other drives) to Backblaze to get that uploaded too.

But if I understand what you're saying� all that data from the backup drive will be erased on BB if I don't have the drive hooked up to the computer at least once a month. Is that correct???

If so, I'm going to cancel too, because that's no good for me.

Thanks for tipping me off to that!

BackBlaze is USELESS IF YOU TRAVEL!

I spent 3 months getting a full 4TB of data backed up to BackBlaze. Thought I was in good shape...

Then I took our recent trip and discovered just how wrong I was!  Because the main disk at home is not traveling with me, it has not connected to the web for 30 days. BB just deletes the disk in that case. No chance to recover it. No chance to flag a disk as "keep it even if off the net for awhile."  Just gone.

I deleted my BackBlaze account. Totally useless piece of junk if you travel as I do.  I am out of the country roughly 3 months of each year.  Gone for more than 30 days at a time, and kiss your precious backup goodbye.

I will be home in a couple weeks, and then will search for some usable cloud backup that won't just delete a disk because its main computer is roaming...

Backblaze is a great product at a really great price. I have 3TB on their cloud and I only pay $6 a month for peace of mind.

If you can afford to travel away from home for a really extensive amount of time, I'd say you can probably afford to have 2 accounts with backblaze. I had 2 accounts for a while. One account is for home computer and the other account is for travel computer. So in that  case your data is always backed up. I'm also periodically away from home for months at a time but that isn't typical for most people. So I assume backblaze's 30 day thing works for most people. I'm really commenting to come to backblaze's defense. I really like the product.

In your case, what you could do is probably just pay for web hosting space. Use a FTP program to sync your hard drives automatically to the cloud every day, or do it manually. In this scenario your data on the cloud would not be deleted ever. There is no 30 day no sync automatic deletion here.