I'm evaluating online storage offerings for personal use and wanted to get hubskiers' opinion on the matter. I think I have it narrowed down to Amazon cloud drive, dropbox, or google drive. There are some other lesser known services out there, but with mixed reviews.
I'm mainly looking for a safe haven for photos (~50GB right now) and also some breathing room for dumping large files for collaboration (like drafts of video projects). I already back my files up locally across two drives, so while this is partially about backup, it is more about being able to get to my stuff from just about anywhere.
What say you hubski?
I don't trust the cloud. All my stuff is on my primary raid in my computer, backed up to external drives twice a week, 3-4 times a year archived to DVD in a diff fashion and stored at a location other than my house. I used to work in DR in IT, so i have a "lets pretend my house explodes" option, hence the off-site copies of things. The only data I care about protecting are my photographs, and as a professional photography who shoots concerts/weddings/modeling, I have a respect to my client to both maintain that data, and keep it private. And with the "moving window" of copyright law and what the cloud providers are allowed to do or not do with my data, I'd like to just keep it to myself with my own backup and distribution methods. I just don't want all of my photo work to be anywhere else other than in my possesion or my clients. I'm probably the only photographer who doesn't have a Flickr page or post his shit on the internet. Because if my pictures got leaked or out there, good luck ever getting them back. It's like taking pee out of a pool.
too right. I also keep one of my time machine backups off site, and just rotate them regularly. I work for a DR company now, and it's easy for my brain to slip into "world war 3 - what happens now?" mode. but my interest in cloud is a little less about DR, and more about some convenience. Like what I get out of dropbox, but I'm looking for more than a couple of gigs. I'm still working my way up on the referrals like kleinbl00.It's like taking pee out of a pool.
I have, and could again, but I could also change the oil in my car, but frankly, I'd rather pay some one else to do it and do other things with my time. I don't need server functionality, just a big ol' internet mounted hard drive. And I know there are all kinds of solutions for this. I could build a server, I could have a NAS, I could get one of those pogo plug personal clouds... sometimes it is worth buying a service. And at this point I am looking for that kind of ease. I don't really know what you mean by VPS.
I use my desktop for all my storage. All my work is versioned in git. I need to start doing a backup to a dedicated harddrive, though. Currently if my desktop chokes, then I'm SOL. For other file transfers I generally just use scp, as my desktop is always online. For music, I run a subsonic server. I don't use the cloud much, other than google docs for word processing. For my laptop+desktop setup that I use, it's just not worth it. I can see how it would be nice if I had more devices, though. I'm not a privacy nut by any stretch of the imagination, but I see no reason to trust someone else with all my data if I can do it just as well.
I use dropbox for light backups/file syncing. My server is backed up to my desktop via ssh+rdiff-backup. I am planning on getting an external drive and do nightly backups with rdiff-backup soon. If I were to use an online service for any serious backup tasks, I'd use tarsnap.
There are 5 computers in this house - 2 laptops, a Mini, a fire-breathing Mac Pro and an eeePC Hackintosh. My four all have Dropbox. as the King Shit of /r/favors, posting my referral link at the top of every Dropbox thread has given me 20GB free. My wife's has Dropbox. She's got like 10GB because she told all her friends. Both laptops write to the Mini's time machine. The Mini also holds select photos and all the MP3s and MKVs. The Mac Pro (and its 5 drives) back up to a 4TB Time Machine. The Hackintosh, other than dropbox, is without backup. I should maybe do something about that 'cuz it was a stone-cold bitch to configure. Back when I lived in two places I used to carry a drive with me on the plane and then conform both locals using Deltawalker. Now I pretty much lack an offsite backup but a lot of that has to do with the lack of satisfactory large file storage space. For collaboration I've used wetransfer.com for a couple years now. Works great.
"Data is only data if it's in two or more places. One, it's just cache."
I typically pass nothing more than docs and small files between pcs, and for that I use Dropbox. I'm not sure about that size. minimum_wage has a good suggestion. A home server might be fun and versatile.
I still use my external harddrives for mostly everything.
I have a 2.5 inch portable HDD I take with me everywhere.
But I use google drive whenever I need multiple people to have acces to a certain file or document and I've been content with it so far.