Cloud storage

Someone we know was recently burgled and lost all their photos - the thieves stole amongst other things the entire computing set up, including two hard drives they used for photos. They were on holiday at the time and the thieves seem to have been able to take their time.

So it got me thinking about somewhere else to store photos. I could give a hard drive to a son I suppose and update it say once a month, but that is not ideal. So then I thought about a cloud (must be all the rain we're having :lol.

Does anyone here use a cloud? If so which one do you use? Are you confident it won't suddenly evaporate taking your photos with it?

I use Carbonite which backs up everything. If there was a total disaster I could get everthing back. link

I use mobile me, but for much more than just cloud storage (iDisk).

It is also used for an online gallery (in my sig), remote syncing of contacts, calendars, email & bookmarks on both our macs, PCs and iPhone, and will also be used for web hosting when I get round to it. Another useful feature is find my iPhone.

I'm finding more and more that every time I use any file now, I automatically store it to the iDisk and it is slowly becoming a revelation! No more wondering which machine a file is on, as they are all available on any machine. As an example, needed to know something out in the field about flash, and just read it up on Mattmatics flash guide via the phone!

Might not be ideal for just storage, and I'm sure there are better options for just photos, but my experience with mobile me does show that it is becoming indispensable.

There's a free 2 month trial as well

Another option for online storage would be Mozy. Similar to Carbonite it can back up your entire HD if you want. They offer a free 2GB package, or a US$5 per month unlimited package. I've used both and they work as advertised. The app runs in the background, you just tell it what folders to backup and after that evertyhing is automatic. There are both Mac and PC versions of the app, although in my experience the Mac version seems to have a few issues (excessive CPU and HD use) which the Windows one doesn't suffer from.

If you need to recover files you can either download them through the Mozy website (I've had to do this, it was a pretty painless experience) or have them send you the data on DVDs (there is a small charge for DVDs).

Mozy are owned by one of the big backup companies (EMC) so they should be fairly reliable.

As well as back-up drives I use Archival Gold CD's.

If you are worried about burglary, you could hide them or take them to your son once in a while.