Internet Backups

Limitations

With so many photo-sharing sites on the Internet, it’s natural to think of the Internet as a way to back up and protect images. It can offer offsite protection even if your city is devastated by a hurricane. While it can be an important component of a backup strategy for some, it’s not a place for comprehensive backups, especially for the photographer who has a large collection of raw files to archive.

Bandwidth

As a comprehensive backup, the Internet is limited by both bandwidth and cost. Even with a fast fiber optic connection, uploading gigabytes of image files is going to take a long time. You may not be finished uploading yesterday’s shoot by the time you need to start uploading today’s. And if you have a catastrophic loss and need to download terabytes of data, you could be looking at several anxious months as you wait for your files to come in (there are some online archiving services that will send you a drive in the event you need everything back in a hurry).

Cost

The cost of storage is very high for reliable Internet archiving of a sizeable archive. Internet backup sites use drives that are probably more expensive than the ones you use in your home or studio. And remember, the Internet service will need to keep at least three copies of each file as well. Factor in the cost of secure server space, high-speed access, and professional administration, and it’s going to be a lot more expensive than doing it yourself.

Although some online photo services may offer cheap or free archiving, there will always be a catch. No one can provide a service for below cost for long and stay in business. They will eventually have to charge what it costs to provide the service, or stop offering it. Based on our research, every affordable contract for online archiving states that they bear no responsibility for the loss of the images, no matter what the reason.

No guarantees, No validation

At the moment, none of the online services provide any kind of guarantee or validation that the files remain on the server in an uncorrupted form. In the event files encounter some kind of error in transfer, you would not discover the problem until you need the files as you attempt to restore your archive. While it's not impossible for a web service to offer some kind of MD-5 validation, this is not commercially available in a price range that is affordable for photographic collections.

Even if some kind of data validations were available, there is still no guarantee that the service would be available when you need it. Companies can go bankrupt even while they seem to be doing well.

Okay, so what are Internet backups good for?

If you want to use an Internet service for worst case scenario backups, we suggest that you make best quality JPEG files of your best images and upload those. This can be a very affordable (or even free) way to preserve your most important images in the event of a major disaster. You may even want to upload TIFF files of your very best images if you have 16 bit master files, but they will require a lot storage space room and bandwidth to upload.

You may also want to consider using some kind of Internet-based backup to save your parametric edits. Uploading the small lrcat file from a Lightroom catalog will preserve all the organizational and image-editing work you’ve created.

DIY collocation

While commercial Internet backups are probably not cost-effective for most serious photographers, there is another method that can make use of an Internet connection to get the images offsite without sneakernet. You can collocate the files in a do-it-yourself manner. If you have a fast Internet connection, you can set up a storage system in a family member or colleague’s house and mirror the files to that system. Of course, this means that the receiving end needs a fast Internet connection, a relatively secure place to put the storage hardware, and has to be okay with your using all the bandwidth.

Advantages of DIY collocation are real cost savings and your personal control of the media (to the extent you control your family or colleague). The challenges, at least at the present time, are that it can be difficult to set up; you need a dedicated fast connection, and you need a good place to put the offsite copy. Another real concern is that Internet transfers and FTP servers face many forms of file corruption, so data validation is a must.