Photos saved locally and on the cloud. What about the backups?

[Yves Thomazeau]

My question is in the title .. : i wonder if i should put my backups of the database in a cloud. What is your choice , advices, ..?

Thank you.

[sybersitizen]

i wonder if i should put my backups of the database in a cloud. What is your choice , advices, ..?

Is there any reason why you wouldn't? You definitely need to back it up somewhere, and with redundant copies.

[PandDLong]

My question is in the title .. : i wonder if i should put my backups of the database in a cloud. What is your choice , advices, ..?

Thank you.

I do as it is easy to setup for automatic copy.  It is one part of my backup strategy as it is only helpful if my local storage is destroyed.  Accidental deletion, file corruption or virus/malware will quickly get transmitted to my cloud version.  (If you copy to the cloud manually it would prevent this problem).

It is also useful if you want access from outside the home.  I do have my photos copied to the cloud to make sharing easy.

In addition to a copy in the cloud, I use Macrium and keep a physical copy off-site - although the offsite copy is always a bit older.



Michael

[Mario]

Cloud is fine as a 2nd or 3rd backup tier (in addition to having multiple daily and weekly backups on something like an external hard disk and maybe disks configured in RAID1 for mirroring).

1. Never have just one backup of your important files, always have multiple daily and weekly backups.

2. And frequently verify that you can actually restore the backups.

3. Don't use Pack & Go for backups, it's not designed for that.
Newer IMatch versions are not compatible with older Pack & Go containers.

What you have to keep in mind is the size of your database and what your cloud storage allows for. If you manage many images in IMatch, your database may be 5GB, 10GB, 20GB or more. This is not much for local storage, but may require you to upgrade your cloud storage plan.

[mopperle]

As a normal consumer, I never used and will never use cloud storage as a primary backup, only use it to transfer or temporarily outsource data.

If you use free cloudspace, I see several major problems:

• Security (nothing in the world is for free)
• Availability, what happens when the provider dies?
• storage size and bandwidth

And a general issue for cloud storage can be the upload bandwith of your internet provider. In many cases the upload speed is lower then the download speed.

And what about your assets (pictures, videos etc) you manage with IMatch? Backing up the IM database into the cloud and having no back strategy for you assets makes IMHO zero sense. But when you have a good backup strategy for you assets, I dont see any need to backup the database to the cloud.

[Mario]

If you use free cloudspace, I see several major problems:

• Security (nothing in the world is for free)
• Availability, what happens when the provider dies?
• storage size and bandwidth

1: Use a software like the free Cryptomator (from Germany) or VeryCrypt (from France) to safely encrypt your data locally. Both products provide a "virutal disk" you can use like any other disk, but the contents of this disk are stored encrypted in the file system.

Very convenient when used with cloud storage. All that is uploaded into the cloud is encrypted.

2. It is quite unlikely that Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft "die". Smaller providers, you might be right.

3.Microsoft offers a Office 365 Basic subscription with 100GB cloud storage for 20€ per year.
A six seat Office 365 subscription (~130€ per year?) gets you 1 TB per user (6 TB in total).
Google wants 2€ per month for 100GB or 10€ for per month 2TB storage.

A 2TB external hard disk cost about 80 to 100€ and you need at least two for separate backups to protect against a backup disk dying. And you need to rotate the disks etc.

I use that as my second tier backup, and cloud as the 3rd tier, for selected data.
But I would never rely on cloud alone. If Microsoft / Google block your account because of some nebulous "violation of terms of service" (which they can do at any time), your backups are inaccessible. And probably forever, unless you can afford expensive lawyers.

Bandwidth is of course an issue, depending on where you live and whether you have fiber and how much data you have to backup daily / weekly / monthly. But cloud-upload is done in the background and it just takes longer when your upload speed is slower.