Alternatives.

Cloud backups are not for everyone and, as I explained earlier, should never be your first line of defense against loss of your photographs. No one foresaw Fukushima happening. The power supplies ended up below the water line, useless. If it can go wrong it will and one of the great disasters to befall the world in the twenty-first century will likely be a massive failure of the ‘cloud’ through human error or enemy action.

What prompts this thought is an email from a friend of the blog who points out the futility of adopting CrashPlan for his very large photo library. A picture being worth a few words, here is his problem:

A reader’s problem.

I am a patient man but, even so, waiting for the best part of a year for your initial upload to complete is unrealistic. While CrashPlan does offer to provide you with a ‘seed drive’ by mail where you copy your pictures and which you mail back to them, this particular reader is in the UK where no such service exists. Eventually, this reader decided to upload smaller JPGs and not RAW files, so he will have a credible recovery source, albeit not of the highest quality afforded by RAW originals.

So here are some ideas, in addition to the JPG one, where your upload broadband speeed is slow and your picture catalog large:

• Identify the best pictures and upload first. In Lightroom the ‘star rating’ system makes it easy to create a separate catalog with just the highest rated pictures.
• Use the CrashPlan software to populate a friend’s computer if you can get comfortable with all the issues of trust, integrity and competence this approach raises.
• Adopt my CarBak approach, meaning offsite storage, and encrypt the data in case of theft.
• Don’t waste time backing up applications, movies (unless they are home movies) and music. You can always buy those again. And with Apple shortly migrating to cloud storage of all your movies and tunes, recovery will be easy as long as no one rains on their cloud. The problem with Apple’s cloud storage, unlike with CrashPlan’s, is that everyone knows where it is in North Carolina, open to attack. CrashPlan wisely keeps mum on the location(s) of its drive farms.