Security first - I really don’t want anyone to look at the pictures of my beautiful girlfriend.

There are a few key things that I need to get out of my cloud backup solution.

Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive, Zoolz or Backblaze just to name a few. There are plenty of services that offer cloud storage for amateur and professional photographers. What I consider to be a good cloud backup and things that I don’t care about # Although making a backup to a local hard drive is fairly easy and straight forward, cloud backups are way more complicated. I have tested multiple solutions and services over the past few years and finally I feel that I have found something that is going to stick around. In case any of that occurs I need one more copy in the cloud. However, things happen! Disks fail, people rob, rivers flood, comets fall. Taking that into consideration I’ve realised that I may run out of storage on these hard drives very quickly, but for now they do the job. I am the happy owner of a superb Sony α7R III that shoots 80 megabyte ARW files. Currently I use two totally average external hard drives by Segate. It can be my computer’s hard drive, an external flash disc, NAS server or a RAID array. No matter what, I always store this collection on two physical devices. It is not an enormous amount of data (around 200GB) but the sentimental value that it holds is immense. I keep exactly the same habit for all of my pictures taken on my iPhone in parallel. Since May 2007 I have kept all of my photos in a well organized collection, ordered chronologically by year and by session / event. The only thing that I keep backed up is my photo collection. I can download an operating system in few minutes, restore my system preferences via a single click, install all my frequently used apps using a single command, pull all of my projects from Github and listen to music on my Technics SL-1200 or stream it from Apple Music. I never do a full backup of my machine though.

Luckily for me, I have never been a victim of a situation where I lost all of my data simply because I do backups regularly. “There are two kinds of people, those who back up their data and those who have never lost all their data.”

Amazon s3 vs dropbox pricing