Online Storage for photos

[Cleggy the Spyder Man]

Someone in here will know the best solution I am sure

 

I have something like 200gb of piccies and movies that I would like to store online (rather than sticking on a backup drive)

 

Is there an easy way of doing this - have visions of days weeks of uploading?

 

I have a photobucket account at the moment

 

Your thoughts

[Luapno]

Cleggy

 

You could look at Box.net / Amazon Cloud /justcloud.com or dropbox but for that amount of storage it will cost you. Depending on which one you go for they only give you between 5gb & 50gb free

 

Paul

[Blatman]

200Gb is a lot of snaps!

I agree with Laupano that it's not going to be a free solution and even with on-line storage I think I'd keep a local copy as well. 200Gb of local storage is easily duplicated on to two separate physical drives or you could use a NAS box with RAID 1 (2 HDD's required) or RAID 5 (minimum of 3 HDD's required) so your storage can handle it if a disc should fail. RAID 1's drives mirror each other, RAID 5 has data shared across the three discs such that a single disc failure has no effect on data loss, but if two fail, you're sunk. The idea being you replace a failed disc and the RAID array rebuilds the data from the remianing two discs.

I usually point our customers at Amazon S3 services for storage and retrieval but it's a monthly recurring fee and may not be suitable, but it's the only one I'm familiar with. But I'm checking out Laupano's options right now. 50Gb of free storage is very enticing!

[Norman Verona]

Cleggy, may I ask why storage at home isn't an option. 2 x 500 gb discs will cost about £80. You can keep the media on one and a copy on the other.

 

I had a bad experience with cloud storage. It lost some photos (as well as other stuff, like diaries). I'll never use it again. I have an (old) external disk which I copy my PC files to monthly (when I remember). This may be an untypical example but it happened. It was on my Motorola Android phone. Since then, and after Google bought Motorola, it's had a complete Android upgrade. and seems much better now.

[XTR2Turbo]

Is the store on line requirement so you can access them remotely or share with friends,

If so a small hp datastore and webserver could do the same and give you local backup also

[Blatman]

I use one of these for home storage and backups. I converted the optical bay to house the 160Gb HDD that mine came with to run the operating system (Ububtu 12.4) leaving the 4 bays populated with 4 x 2Tb Samsung Spinpoint SATA HDD's. So I have a little under 4Tb of storage and the same amount of copied backups with RAID1.

I also use it to stream music and HD movies across my network to a PS3 for playout to my TV and surround sound and it's been fine out of the box. I do plan to increase the RAM but so far it hasn't been necessary as it's really only used for storage and retrieval rather than memory hungry applications like move editing.

[Stuart]

I have a Netgear Readynas Ultra 2 and can't fault it.  2 x 1Tb hard drives all our music, movies, photos, documents on there.  Access from any device on the network, Music streamed to any device, movies will be to the TV when I suss out if WDTV will work for me.  Built in redundancy (backup) on the 2nd drive with a USB HDD further backup taken off site when appropriate.  Not that cheap though - whole lot £300 ish

[Dodgey]

I've been using online storage for all my photos and vids for years now, and I've got it streamlined and pretty effortless. First of all , reasons why I do it.

 

1) Hard disks fail - I see it all the time.

2) Even with a backup, if you are burgled or have a fire, you've lost it all

3) You can access your online library anywhere on any device at any time.

 

My setup:

 

All my photos and videos get copied/moved by me to a share called \pix  on a Buffalo NAS network disk hanging off my router.

 

Hanging off my Buffalo Nas is a small inexpensive WD USB disk that automatically backs up incremental changes from the NAS once a week. It emails me a report too :-)

 

So now I have two copies so far........ so now for the online bit....

 

On my PC I have the free Picasa (google product) software installed. This is a photo and video library management (and editing if you like) package. It is set to scan the \Pix shared folder upon launch to detect any new phots/vids. Normally it will add these to the library as it discovers them but I prefer to do it myself so I can keep an eye on what gets uploaded. So each time I add a folder to \Pix, I launch Picassa, and select the new folder, and tell it to add it to the library.

 

So now all my pics are backed up twice, and presented in a logical order in Picassa. The last step it to upload them. You can set it to auto upload everything, but again I like control, so all I have to do in Picassa is to right click a folder and select upload. At the same time I can choose whether this is a one-time upload, or if Picassa should monitor the folder for updates, and then upload the new stuff as and when it sees it.

 

That's it! - the photos and video upload in the background. The beauty of using Picassa is that it is a proper application, not some web app - so it can:

 

- run in low bandwidth mode if you like - this means it won't screw up your net connection by hogging all the upload bandwidth (using all U/L bandwidth kills download bandwidth)

- pause, stop, resume uploads

 

Typically I run it in low bandwidth mode when I want to use the net for other things, then let it run at full chat when I'm out.

 

I've uploaded over 75Gb so far - the online storage is Google's offering - now called "Google+ Photos", the first 20 odd GB (I think) is free, after that you pay. I pay for 80Gb at the moment and it's $20 USD a year. Not much ! 

 

I have my online photos all set to private (as a default setting in the application) and share the odd folder for web stuff.

 

The real benefits are this:

 

- simple to operate - add folders to Picassa, right click, select upload, minimize

- I have 3 copies of all my media - two at home, which covers disk failure, and one online which covers house failure.

- I have "Web Albums" installed on my iPad and "Just Pictures" installed on my Samsung Android phone. These both let me browse all my photos and videos, stream them, and both apps also allow local caching - images you look at get stored locally so you can view offline, they get removed when you reach user chosen local storage limits. When I put new albums online I force my iPad and Phone apps to cache the entire album as I'll probably be showing it to people for a while.

 

Only downside so far? I can't upload a single movie over 1Gb - but that will change, and in the meantime it's making me a better editor :-)

 

My tips?

 

- Really make sure you are happy with folder naming conventions and structures before you start uploading. Changing things after does work, but it can get messy/confusing.

- Upload just one small folder 1st. Test everything - like you got the default permissions correct etc. Better to find out now than 200Gb later :-)

 

This is all about convenience and simplicity - that's why I'm using this solution. If it's tricky or laborious in any way you will start to "forget" to upload photos.  

[langy]

This is something I'm looking at. Something to stream iTunes to Sonos system and films to Samsung TV and a backup of photo's.

Need to look at and investigate in a bit more detail in the new year.

[Blatman]

iTunes to Sonos is easy, it's a basic network share by pointing the Sonos at the iTunes library... or it may be the other way round.

I don't know if the latest Samsungs can take movies streamed directly to them. I have an older Samsung and whilst it has a network port, I use a PS3 to receive the stream which is then HDMI out to the TV / surround sound. I suspect you could use an Apple TV or WD media player or somesuch in place of the PS3. I actually quite like Apple TV

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman)]

The latest Samsung's that I've dealt with seem to have extensive media share capabilities. Certainly the three or four on the current site can all handle the streamed movies from a Plex server set up. (Not a system I've dealt with personally, other than to handle the control and integration of the Samsung's to the HDMI distribution system.)

[Blatman]

Not had much of a chance to play with the new Samsungs but what I have seen of the SMART interface seems to be quite good.

Dodgey makes a good point too. With 200Gb to upload, that's gonna take a fair while. I think I'd be checking the fair use policy even if there are no data caps on the account... 

[Dodgey]

...fair usage frequently does NOT includes uploads.....

 

Sonos - yep - my Itunes library is on the same NAS box, and I point my Sonos library to the same location. Organise my music and folders with itunes, listen with Sonos :-)

 

I stream some stuff to my Samsung TV but it's really picky about streaming HD content like MKV 1080p files. It plays them off USB no probs (even 3D 1080)but gets funny with streaming, even with a proper cabled lan link. Either refuses or stutters. Gb backbone network so it's most definitely the TV. Going to get a WD Live TV box for streaming media.

 

Edit: Little update on the google storage - you get only 5 Gb free and I am on a "legacy" plan - I pay 20$ a year for 80Gb. Now you have to pay monthly and the closest is $5 USD per month for 100Gb - $60 a year.

200Gb per year is $120 USD. I wish I'd bought that in the past as I'd now be on a legacy deal for $50 a year for 200Gb!

[langy]

Mmm,will need to look at teh whole movie streaming thing. I know there is a Plex app on the Samsung, so maybe need to look at that rather than just thinking, cable from A to B will make it work.

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman)]

Just be aware, (as Dodgey said), I've yet to see a streaming app on a TV that works as well for Movies all the time as a dedicated movie client hardware device. We've got the one I mentioned, (client supplied), on a hardwired connection to all the TV's via a network with segregated VLANs for video streaming, pc's, control system etc. Each VLAN also has its own QOS settings, in the case of the video, it's set up as the highest priority.

 

But even so, very occasionally, you still get a little stuttering. (It's why we only recommend/supply dedicated hardware solutions at this point in time. Though no doubt that will change.

 

Still quite impressed with the Plex though, compared to what we've seen of these types of setups in the past. If you use Plex's own client to view films, it seems to work pretty trouble free.