Online BACKUP Advise Needed

[marc and jan]

I would like to get an online backup service besides my external drive that I have, but there are so many I don’t know which one to choose and would really appreciate some direction.

I’m especially interested in the backup portion of the service, but if I could also display pics for people to look at that would be great too. I've seen threads out here for posting pics. but I’m not sure if these are back up services or just for picture displaying. I have loads of photos that are just misc shots, and wouldn’t need to be in a display book, just stored. Are there any others that you would recommend? Any opinions on any sites? What are the costs involved?

Thanks so much in advance for all your help

[bruce-r]

The upload speed from a ship's internet connection would be painfully slow, too slow to use by anyone without a great deal of patients and a free internet connection. There are two other more reliable backup methods, first is to either find someone with a notebook computer and ask them to burn you a CD of your photos or have the ship's photo service do it. The other best choice is to get a hard drive based storage device like one of these

[marc and jan]

I'm sorry, I mustn't have made myself clear at all. This is for me to do at home, not on the ship. Recently my external hard drive crashed after I only had it for two weeks. and I lost some pictures that meant alot to me. So I want to use an online backup service besides the external hard drive instead of using CD's or DVD's as a second backup.

[Tater1800]

Here is an alternate suggestion. I have the same problem and my photo collection is approaching 20GB in size. Online storage just isn't possible for various reasons including file size, upload time and cost.

 

My solution is simply a second computer. Most of us have an older PC that was replaced, just because! I have a wireless network and the photos are transferred to the other PC as shared files. So, my photos are safe from crashes. My network could suffer a virus infection and this is where the DVDs come in.

 

For Internet display, I use the webspace provided by my ISP. Most Internet accounts come with a few megs of webspace. An actual webpage isn't necessary. This is just storage and is accessed by a simple address.

[bruce-r]

I'm sorry, I mustn't have made myself clear at all. This is for me to do at home, not on the ship.

No problem. I guess I just assumed that because this is a cruise message board, you were interested in backing up while on a cruise.

 

Yes, hard drives do crash and while data recovery services are pretty good, they are also quite expensive. I keep my files on my computer and back up to an external hard drive. If I think about it, I also burn a CD or DVD. Burning to a DVD is the most economical back up.

 

I don't have any experience with online back up storage other than with my own web host and that requires a FTP program for uploads.

[Tater1800]

...and that requires a FTP program for uploads.

 

I thought this once also as told by my ISP customer support. As I tend to go cheap, I learned to use the "ftp" commands in DOS. After a year of typos a customer support rep introduced my to the Internet Explorer method.

 

In the address bar:

ftp://your.ftp.address

At the site, click "File" then "Login as" and enter your information.

Now, copy and paste or drag and drop, your choice.