Topic: More (photo) storage for iMac

[Perspective]

I'm guessing they're cheap to build a user base. Once they have users they can up the price and your data is basically held for ransom if you don't renew your subscription.

[kermi3]

Haha. Was wondering. Been reading on my phone, so hard to follow everything. I haven't found a catch yet. Switched from carbonite for my newest laptop. Been happy so far, but I haven't had to restore yet. Life hacker can't stop saying good things about crashplan. Coolest part is probably that you can also backup to another of your own machines if you want....

[kermi3]

They also do they're own hardware etc. Were some cool stories about them pillaging Fry's for 1TB externals to break down and put in servers last year when there was a huge shortage and price hike in wholesale HD sales. Can't find now from the airport, but if you google it - it's worth the read. Interesting solution to a tech problem.

[ober]

I don't know that it's crazy cheap.  I guess the single computer plan is pretty cheap, but the multi-computer plan is more than Dropbox if you ignore the limit... kinda hard to believe they do unlimited. Like I have a 100GB yearly subscription with Dropbox that is $100/year.  Their multi-computer plan is $150/year but it's unlimited.

[ober]

Hmm... I could do 2 single unlimited plans for $120/year...... tempting.

[charlie]

Interesting take on the options here: http://www.benchfly.com/blog/are-unlimited-online-backup-services-really-unlimited/

Several concerns for me in the research I did. The biggest one is that it seems my use case is not common, which means that the solutions aren't specifically designed for it. Will the upload of the original data take forever? Will I lose my stuff if I do something weird like unplug my hard drive (one plan deletes everything if your drive is unplugged for 30 days)? How will it affect the time machine info on the same drive?

It's looking like I might just buy a second hard drive, keep both hooked up, and use one for time machine backups and the other for photo storage. I hope I can use Time Machine to back up an external drive.

[ober]

Yeah, the initial backup will take quite a while based on what you've said.

[charlie]

Just ordered a 3TB hard drive for $70 after gift cards. We'll put photos and maybe music on that drive and Time Machine on the other. It will be so nice to clear the photos off the machine's hard drive. They take up over 50% of the space.

[charlie]

Woot! 180GB free on the internal drive, all photos from 2002-2006 back in iPhoto instead of being separated on the backup drive, downloaded 20GB of winter photos smoothly, all photos being backed up with time machine along with regular machine contents. All for $70 (and $95 in gift cards). I'd say that's a successful solution.

Both external drives are connected via USB. That leaves one USB port on the machine for the keyboard, stylus, printer and whatever extra peripheral (camera/iPhone/etc) we're using at the time. Luckily we have this weird man looking USB port hub thing that works even better than the fancy one we had bought at first and everything connected to it works smoothly.

So I'm very happy right now. Thanks for the help folks.

[kermi3]

Get Crash Plan too! Protect from fire/theft

[charlie]

Get Crash Plan too! Protect from fire/theft

Meh... don't have the money or the months it will take to upload the stuff. If there is a fire, so be it.