Recommendations for digital picture archive

[cadee2c]

The three companies that provide cloud service that is safer than anything you can provide on your own are Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Think about this, they are trillion dollar companies and they arent going anywhere. They are not going to risk anything going wrong. If they go down, their customers go down, and they will lose big big big money. They have the resources to hire the best people and buy or create the best equiptment to keep things going well. I dont know about you, but thats way more than I can do on my own. I'll take my chances on the cloud.

 

[Larry N.]

The three companies that provide cloud service that is safer than anything you can provide on your own are Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Think about this, they are trillion dollar companies and they arent going anywhere. They are not going to risk anything going wrong. If they go down, their customers go down, and they will lose big big big money. They have the resources to hire the best people and buy or create the best equiptment to keep things going well. I dont know about you, but thats way more than I can do on my own. I'll take my chances on the cloud.

What you say is true, but they can chance their minds/service and cause problems. One example: I'd had a web page for a number of years, as part of my internet service, including through several buyouts/mergers ending up with Comcast. Then, a few years back, Comcast dropped all web page space that you didn't pay extra for.

So I'd be leery of doing all that cloud storage without backup in another form.

 

[Molaker]

I've not seen any mention of RAID HDD storage which can be a reasonably secure method of storage as well as others mentioned above.  With the cost of hard drives being so low, you can affordably store a lot of data within a dual drive NAS.  My preference is RAID 1 which makes a mirror copy of the drive.  Performance suffers when writing to the drives, but when being used as archiving, this should not be a particular problem.  It will still be much faster than writing to the cloud or to a DVD.  Since RAID 1 mirrors the drives, if one fails or even if the NAS itself fails, at least one of the drives can be removed and inserted in another external drive or new NAS.  For further protection, a 2nd NAS located off site and/or a cloud service like Google could add an automated insurance policy.


Currently, I actually do not use a RAID drive, but that doesn't mean I couldn't/shouldn't.  I have a little Synology NAS, but I didn't set it up with RAID initially.  When I can afford it (soon, I hope), I plan to get another RAID NAS and a couple of large multi-terabyte drives.  In the meantime, I maintain my photos and data on my local computer with Google Drive set up to automatically copy specified folders to Google.


As far as privacy concerns when storing on a cloud, all I can say is do whatever floats your boat.  Storing critical financial and, perhaps, medical data might not be a particular good idea with the exception of, perhaps, a service specifically designed for privacy or "secrecy".


Lastly, I'll readily admit I have not kept up with technology since I retired, so there may be even more reliable options out there.  But, I am satisfied with where I'm headed with my archiving method.

 

[8Muddypaws]

"As far as privacy concerns when storing on a cloud, all I can say is do whatever floats your boat.  Storing critical financial and, perhaps, medical data might not be a particular good idea with the exception of, perhaps, a service specifically designed for privacy or "secrecy"."

For financial information I suggest a product (free) called VeraCrypt.  (From www.majorgeeks.com) It creates a virtual disk that requires a password to open.  Prior to opening the virtual disk looks like a corrupted file and you can name it anything you want.  (Bad Sectors Found.blk for example)Then copy that file to Google or whatever.

VeraCrypt is the successor to TrueCrypt and has all the same options.  Decoy passwords, full disk encryption, multiple layers of recursive encryption and so on.

Another option would be WD USB 3 drives.  Hardware encryption is standard on them and very easy to use.