Ask Tim Grey - Cloud Storage

Ask Tim Grey - Cloud Storage

Today's Question: Given the number of different companies offering cloud backup and the complexity of evaluating them, we'd be well served if you could share any thoughts you might have on which are best suited for photo files.


Tim's Answer: This is a topic that has gotten a lot more attention since Apple announced their soon-to-be-available iCloud storage service. I suspect we'll se other players getting move involved in the near future as well, so look for a lot of development on this front.

I actually wrote an article recently for Digital Photo Pro magazine (the November 2011 issue, I believe), so keep an eye out for that article. In the meantime, here are my thoughts about some of the service options that are currently available:



There are a variety of options available for cloud storage, with varying costs and benefits. At a basic level you’ll find options for simple online backup. In most cases this approach involves an automatic backup of photos, documents, and other files stored on a particular hard drive. One of the more well-known of these services is Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/) , which offers what they term an unlimited backup option for one computer at $59 per year.

The storage space you can consume with Carbonite is unlimited, but after 200GB of storage is consumed—a limit most photographers have far exceeded by now—the backup transfer speed slows significantly. As a result, it can be very time-consuming to achieve a full backup of all your photos. Considering this limitation, if you are using this type of online backup service you may want to reserve it for only your most important images, providing an additional layer of protection for those images, with the rest of your library backed up locally.

For truly unlimited online storage without restrictions, you’ll have to pay a bit more. Sometimes much more. For example, another popular provider of online backup services is Mozy (http://www.mozy.com/). To backup the volume of data typical for photographers, you’ll need the MozyPro service. This costs $3.95 per month per computer, plus $0.50 per gigabyte of storage per month. For one terabyte of storage, that translates into a cost of over $500 per month, which is obviously a relatively high price to pay for an online backup.

One of the more innovative solutions for cloud storage aimed directly at photographers is Mosaic (http://www.mosaicarchive.com/) . To begin with, the pricing structure offered by Mosaic separates the data transfer costs from the data storage cost, which can greatly help reduce the overall cost for photographers. You’ll pay $0.40 per gigabyte for transfer, but only $0.025 per gigabyte per month for storage from one to four terabytes (the price per gigabyte goes down for larger storage capacities). For one terabyte of photos, that means a one-time fee of $400 to transfer your photos, and then just $25 per month to store those photos. While you could theoretically upload your photos online via Mosaic, they also offer a hard drive transfer service. They will ship an external hard drive to you, so you can copy your photos to that drive and then ship the drive back for it to be transferred to Mosaic’s servers.

Perhaps more interesting, Mosaic also offers a plugin for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This plugin allows you to manage your Mosaic storage directly through Lightroom. Conceptually you can actually take your images offline once they are stored safely on the Mosaic servers, enabling you to free up storage space on your local computer. The images can still be managed through Lightroom, and retrieved from the Mosaic servers if the original is needed at a later time. Of course, this approach assumes you are comfortable using Mosaic as your complete storage solution, which is probably not realistic for most photographers. Still, this plug-in provides considerable value for photographers who make use of Mosaic services, since it provides an easy method for adding new images to your online storage and keeping track of which images have been archived and which haven’t.

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