In reality, it is indeed complex, but being in a band doesn’t require playing all the instruments-just mastering a single one. You may have heard the opinion that AWS is complicated to use. It is well established and proven by the mile-long list of clients like: Adobe, AirBnb, Netflix, NASA, SoundCloud, Canon, GoPro… The list goes on and on. A storage solution is one of the many services that AWS has to offer. From computational power, through to database storage, content delivery networks to machine learning and IoT (Internet of things) related products. Say hello to AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)ĪWS (Amazon Web Services) is a platform that offers a number of things that your business or you, as an individual, may need. I spent years looking for a solution that suits my needs, and I would like to share it with you. I am here today not to compare the available options or convince you to use one over the other.

It is a last resort backup-the file structure is probably never going to change. I don’t need constant live sync and seamless integration with my OS. I don’t need a fancy app with tons of bells and whistles. The providers listed above usually offer tons of things that I simply don’t care about. Also, price is an obvious factor, of course. New services show up and vanish often, and I am really not interested in investing my time in solutions that may not be around tomorrow. There are a few key things that I need to get out of my cloud backup solution: security first! There is a reasonable chance that my collection will grow over time, so auto-scaling and unlimited storage resources are another must-have. Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, OneDrive or Backblaze just to name a few. There are plenty of services that offer cloud storage for amateur and professional photographers. What I consider to be a good cloud backup and things that I don’t care about Although making a backup to a local hard drive is fairly easy and straightforward, cloud backups are way more complicated. I have tested multiple solutions and services over the past few years, and finally, I feel that I have found something that is going to stick around. In case any of that occurs, I need one more copy in the cloud.

However, things happen! Disks fail, people rob, rivers flood, comets fall. Taking that into consideration I’ve realised that I may run out of storage on these hard drives very quickly, but for now they do the job. I am the happy owner of a superb Sony α7R III that shoots 80 megabyte ARW files. Currently I use two totally average external hard drives by Segate. It can be my computer’s hard drive, an external flash disk, NAS server or a RAID array. No matter what, I always store this collection on two physical devices. It’s not an enormous amount of data (around 200GB), but the sentimental value it holds is immense. I maintain the same habit for all of my pictures taken on my iPhone as well. Since May 2007, I have kept all of my photos in a well-organized collection, ordered chronologically by year and by session/event. The only thing that I keep backed up is my photo collection.

I can download an operating system in a few minutes, restore my system preferences with a single click, install all my frequently used apps using a single command, pull all of my projects from GitHub and listen to music on my Technics SL-1200 or stream it from Apple Music. I never do a full backup of my machine though. Luckily for me, I have never been a victim of a situation where I lost all of my data simply because I do backups regularly. “There are two kinds of people, those who back up their data and those who have never lost all their data.”

Backblaze offer code