Photo bucket....what is this??

[Marcel]

Personal media (hard drives, memory cards, etc.) are very affordable and much more reliable than some server off in cyberspace...

I tend to disagree here. Well actually you're right when you are talking about these free sites.

Still, a backup in the same house on an external disk is not a backup. When your house is on fire, you still loose everything and harddrives are notoriously unreliable for data loss, not to speak of memory cards which are even worse. Cloud storage however uses distributed storage which is virtual unbreakable. Especially when they are distributed globally like Amazon's. So it does make sense to store your data with a party you trust if data is important to you.

 

[GrauGeist]

However, how many times have we seen cameras recovered from the ocean and the owners found from the photos on the SD card?
There's quite a few examples, such as this:
Camera lost at sea returned with the help of social networking

I've had issues with Apple's icloud - plus they offer a free 5GB storage limit (which gets maxed with system backups, apps and all sorts of garbage, not including photos) and you have to pay for additional space. As it stands, I keep all my photos archived on duplicate external drives that get updated (or used to, when I was still taking photos) and one is at the computer and can be removed from the computer at a moment's notice, the other is stored in a fireproof safe. I've had one drive fail a few years back and Seagate recovered the data and all is right with the world

 

[Marcel]

Here at work at least 1 HD fails per week Thumbdrives fail by the dozen, which is similar memory as an SD card. Also an SD card fails after a certain amount of writes to it. I don't trust flash memory. At work we backup to the cloud.

But I myself at home also don't backup to the cloud. I've got a NAS that collects all backups of all devices im my house. So when I do a backup of my laptop, it rsyncs to the NAS. This NAS rsyncs over the internet to a NAS that a friend of mine has. There, the backups are stored encrypted there and I store his backups encrypted on mine. I think that's more than most private persons do. So in order to loose data at least 5 HD's have to fail, (the 2 in my NAS in RAID, the 2 in my friend's NAS in RAID and the laptop HD to begin with, so I'm pretty safe.

 

[Gnomey]

I'm backed variously on the cloud and offline but still need to invest in a NAS system. That's the next purchase I think.

 

[fubar57]

Never heard of NAS Marcel. Are there any extra fees after purchasing?

 

[Gnomey]

Never heard of NAS Marcel. Are there any extra fees after purchasing?

There are not for the most part. Essentially it's a hard drive box attached to the network that you can access from anywhere (depending on system).

Network-attached storage - Wikipedia

 

[fubar57]

Thanks Hugh. The next question, and remember, this is me we are talking about. Are they easy to operate?

 

[Marcel]

They are not really difficult to operate . Almost everything is done through a website. But I guess you will have to understand some basic technical principles of networking .

 

[fubar57]

....well that leaves me out

 

[Marcel]

Why Geo? It's not hard to understand. You only need to know that computers have ip addresses and that services talk through ports .

 

[fubar57]

I'm sure I can muddle through it. Who can see what's stored on it, not that I have anything illegal or dodgy. It's just that I don't need anyone else to delete or add to without my knowledge. I was looking at this one though I can't see (or maybe understand) the storage capacity. I don't have a lot on my external hard drive, maybe 300GB

WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra Diskless Network Attached Storage (WDBVBZ0000NCH-NESN)

 

[Marcel]

Hmm, there are mixed reviews on that one. I would go with one of the established brands, wither QNAP or synology.

So who can access it depends on your settings. You can close it completely, so you can only access it when you are in your own network. That's the safest. You can also open up port 443 to the world and buy a good https certificate (or use 'Let's encrypt' which is free) and you can use it as a cloud everywere. The last option will open up your NAS to the outside world, so you'll have to make sure you update in time, so any security leaks are fixed before the become a problem.

 

[fubar57]

Thank you Marcel

 

[Crimea_River]

My brain hurts again.

 

[GrauGeist]

 

[MiTasol]

My brain hurts again.

Amen to that

 

[Gnomey]

I've been looking/thinking about one for a year and I'm still no closer to actually doing it. Meanwhile the amount of data needing the NAS keeps on increasing...

 

[GrauGeist]

I've been looking/thinking about one for a year and I'm still no closer to actually doing it. Meanwhile the amount of data needing the NAS keeps on increasing...

I've had a Seagate Black Armor NAS setup for a while now, but I've yet to make the time to get it setup and configured!

 

[fubar57]

Thanks for the input. I think I've narrow it down to this one...Synology DiskStation DS218j SAN/NAS Storage System

 

[Marcel]

That looks good, does it come with harddisks?