{"id":5077,"date":"2016-09-12T12:05:07","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T11:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/?p=5077"},"modified":"2016-09-12T16:20:52","modified_gmt":"2016-09-12T15:20:52","slug":"backup-storage-solutions-and-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/backup-storage-solutions-and-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"Backup Storage Solutions and Costs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a data-flickr-embed=\"true\"  href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/adambowie\/29186233750\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" title=\"Old Technology\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/c7.staticflickr.com\/9\/8044\/29186233750_1a7c99bfac_h.jpg\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1211\" alt=\"Old Technology\"><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>More than a year ago, <a href=\"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2015\/05\/storage-and-backup-some-personal-experiences\/\">I wrote about some experiences<\/a> I&#8217;d had with backup storage and thoughts about &#8220;off-site&#8221; back-ups. It prompted a couple of responses on the blog, and a few more on social media. Not the most exciting of subjects, but an important one, as I still believe that in this age of digital collections, backup will be a key issue. Just one that most people don&#8217;t spend much time thinking about.<\/p>\n<p>To recap. <\/p>\n<p><strong>I use a <em>lot<\/em> of storage:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I shoot video and although I upload edits of what I shoot to Vimeo or YouTube, I like keep the original materials (in one instance this paid off, when I sold a shot to a company who&#8217;d found part of it on Vimeo).<\/li>\n<li>I shoot photographs. Lots of photographs. Anything I take on my phone gets backed up to my Flickr and Google Photos accounts. (They also go temporarily to a Dropbox account.) But that doesn&#8217;t help for shooting with my cameras, where I prefer RAW. These large files end up on a local NAS drive once I&#8217;ve moved them off the PC where I edit them. I should note that I <em>do<\/em> delete files. If I shoot a batch of ten broadly identical photos, then assuming I like any of them, I&#8217;ll only keep one version. So for every 100 photos I shoot, I perhaps keep 10, and upload 5 to Flickr.<\/li>\n<li>I have a digital music archive. I keep a local copy of it in iTunes &#8211; loathsome as that software is. And it&#8217;s mirrored on Google Play Music where they upped the limit to 50,000 tracks (I have more than 25,000 on there currently). I mostly play back music via Google Play Music either on my phone or via Chromecast devices. Beyond music, I have lots of other audio, both field recordings and radio recordings.<\/li>\n<li>I have other legally purchased commercial video files &#8211; including iTunes downloads and DRM-free mp4 files.<\/li>\n<li>I have a myriad of other documents, mostly much smaller in size.<\/li>\n<li>I have several PCs and tablets, including the hard drives from a number of older computers, some of which files I&#8217;d like to have retrievable.<\/li>\n<li>I have around 100 MiniDV tapes that I&#8217;d like to &#8220;rip&#8221; and store (A project for another day).<\/li>\n<li>I have a large box of film photos that I want to scan at some point (Another project for yet another day).<\/li>\n<li>Probably other stuff too&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>While some files sit on various computers, I try to mostly copy files onto one of two Synology NAS drives. Cumulatively they have about 6TB of space, of which I&#8217;m using more than half. One NAS in particular will need its 2TB drives replaced by 3 or 4TB drives fairly soon (Yes, I Know 6TB drives are available, but I try to be cost efficient).<\/p>\n<p>I also have a plethora of old hard drives and expansion drives that I have been slowly consolidating onto larger, newer portable hard drives (Three old small hard drives might now sit on one larger capacity drive).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Services I use that offer storage:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Google Drive. Through various promotions and purchases, including a Chromebook, an HTC phone, doing work for Local Guides, and running security check-ups, I have a cumulatuive 2.2TB of space. However, this space is not permanent, with 1TB disappearing at the start of next year when my Chromebook will be two years&#8217; old (Plus, they don&#8217;t hand out 1TB for new Chromebooks now, in case I was thinking of upgrading).<\/li>\n<li>OneDrive. Beacuse I have a paid subscription to Office 360, I get 1TB with this. In fact, I could have five accounts, each with their own 1TB. But that would be painful with multiple logins required. For those with lower usage needs, this offers a great deal however.<\/li>\n<li>Dropbox. Just the basic free account with 2GB of space. Although I have occasionally gone on the paid plan for a podcast I work on.<\/li>\n<li>BT Cloud. My ISP gives me 500GB because of the plan I&#8217;m on. I&#8217;ve never used it, and have heard it&#8217;s a bit slow.<\/li>\n<li>Evernote Premium. Used for note taking and scanning. Not for files, but scanning magazine articles I want to keep and making them searchable, for example, does take space. But it&#8217;s not for files per se.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What I need:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s say I need 6TB of space. It&#8217;ll probably more than that in due course, but 6TB is a good starting point. Let&#8217;s <em>try<\/em> to price that up at the various big vendors.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Google Drive is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/settings\/storage\">\u00a37.99 a month per TB<\/a>. So for 5TB of additional storage (1TB drops off my account in January don&#8217;t forget), we&#8217;re looking at <strong>\u00a3479<\/strong> pa.<\/li>\n<li>OneDrive is <a href=\"https:\/\/onedrive.live.com\/options\/Upgrade\">\u00a31.99 per 50GB<\/a>. So for 5TB of additional storage, it&#8217;d be <strong>\u00a32388<\/strong> pa although I feel sure that there must be most cost efficient ways of buying storage from Microsoft. I just can&#8217;t see them &#8211; aside from opening multiple Office 360 accounts which seems mad.<\/li>\n<li>Dropbox seems to push me towads a Business plan at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/plans?trigger=wahexp\"><strong>\u00a3110<\/strong> pa<\/a> for &#8220;As much as needed&#8221; (which may not include VAT). Still, that seems to be pretty decent value.<\/li>\n<li>Amazon Cloud Drive has finally updated its UK offer and either gives Amazon Prime users their free &#8220;Prime Photos&#8221; service which is unlimited space for photos, and 5GB for other files including video, or their Unlimited Storage offer which is <strong>\u00a355<\/strong> a year, with a free three month trial.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are of course lots of other providers which are and aren&#8217;t aimed at the consumer end of the market. And different not all cloud services are aimed at the same use cases. I&#8217;m not really looking for a shared working environment so much as reasonably priced archival space. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m looking for something that&#8217;s reliable, that allows me a clear understanding of cost, and doesn&#8217;t place many limits on what I store and how large the individual files are. While I&#8217;ve not shot many yet, a 4K video file lasting more than a few minutes is likely to take up an enormous amount of space. I don&#8217;t think I have any single file that&#8217;s larger than 4GB, but some services top out what they&#8217;ll accept at 5GB per file. <\/p>\n<p>I also want to be certain that a provider I use is going to be there next year, in five years and in ten years. <\/p>\n<p>Amazon has actually built an enormously profitable business offering cloud servers and storage. However, S3 storage pricing is a little opaque &#8211; essentially it&#8217;s based on how much access the files have. While Amazon Glacier is intriguing because it&#8217;s a very low cost backup solution at $0.007 per GB \/ month. It&#8217;s based around archival needs, and the data might take a few hours to become available once you&#8217;ve requested it. <\/p>\n<p>It seemed pretty clear to me that Amazon Cloud Drive is the winner here. \u00a355 for unlimited storage is a good deal from my perspective. But there are a few provisos worth getting into. This is for non-commercial use &#8211; they particularly seem to be concerned about people running photography businesses who no doubt generate lots of files all the time. I&#8217;m <em>not<\/em> running a business, but am an enthusiastic amateur. I assume I won&#8217;t be in trouble!<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re also unsurprisingly worried about people sharing illegal files, or storing such files in the first place. I&#8217;d guess that this is not going to be home for your massive collection of torrents. That said, I&#8217;m not clear how they can determine a film bought legally and an illegal one. If I rip my DVD collection, can I store it in the cloud? <\/p>\n<p>If you have large files, then you won&#8217;t want to use their web interface to upload them (But you didn&#8217;t want to do that anyway). And files with more than 255 characters or special characters, unsurprisingly, cause problems.<\/p>\n<p>If you stop paying Amazon, they may delete your files. Kind of obvious, but worth knowing anyway. <\/p>\n<p>To be clear, I&#8217;m using this as purely a <em>backup<\/em> service. There will be no files on Amazon that I don&#8217;t also have locally. Indeed the NAS drives I own are in RAID arrays themselves (although other files that will eventually reach Amazon may only have a single local backup).<\/p>\n<p>Finally there&#8217;s the small issue of getting terabytes of data into the cloud in the first place. My BT Infinity 2 service is fibre-to-cabinet, and claims that it has no upload or download limits. But if I&#8217;ve got something like 6TB of data I want to initially back-up, that&#8217;s going to take quite some time. <\/p>\n<p>At time of writing, I&#8217;ve only been uploading a 2TB NAS drive for less than 24 hours, and it&#8217;s not clear how long it&#8217;s going to take me in total. But it could easily be a full <em>month<\/em> before that first NAS is in the cloud. It does seem that Amazon &#8220;drip feeds&#8221; the files across. This is probably a good thing, because I don&#8217;t want all my bandwidth used up all the time as files fly back and forth. <\/p>\n<p>Indeed I&#8217;m actually using a Synology app called Cloud Sync to do the backups, and that can limit the number of simultaneous files being uploaded. Furthermore, I&#8217;ve scheduled the syncing to stop at various points during the week when I&#8217;m more likely to want unfettered internet use myself. So I&#8217;ve got three hours in the morning and another six in the evening when it pauses syncing. At weekends, the syncing process will also be halted during the day.<\/p>\n<p>To be honest, I was happily streaming Netflix <em>while<\/em> syncing over the weekend, so it&#8217;s probably not really necessary. But it lightens the load on the network during peak hours. <\/p>\n<p>The good thing about using a NAS drive app is that only the NAS needs to remain on while the upload happens. Amazon does have a PC\/Mac app for backing up your local PC, but there seems to be a question mark over whether it keeps your computer &#8220;in sync&#8221; with the cloud, or simply does a one-time back-up, requiring you to manually sync additional files at a later date. Either way, I&#8217;ve not bothered yet, since I&#8217;ll do one at device at a time. The good thing is that there are plenty of third party applications that will work with Amazon and will probably do what you need.<\/p>\n<p>Amazon also has a mobile app which will dutifully send through all your photos and videos, but as mentioned above, I&#8217;ve got these covered already. <\/p>\n<p>I will report back on the success of Amazon Cloud Drive and any issues I have with it in due course. In the meantime&#8230; let the upload continue!<\/p>\n<p><em>Note: All prices and offerings are correct at time of writing. This is clearly a very fluid market.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More than a year ago, I wrote about some experiences I&#8217;d had with backup storage and thoughts about &#8220;off-site&#8221; back-ups. It prompted a couple of responses on the blog, and a few more on social media. Not the most exciting of subjects, but an important one, as I still believe that in this age of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[153,479,706,377],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5077"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5077"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6039,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5077\/revisions\/6039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}