It’s pretty amazing to learn that the majority of our peers, developers and even some businesses don’t have the habit of backing up their precious data. Those nomad days are now over, I will outline several “free” services to backup your photos and videos and also, some pretty cheap ways to backup your data locally or in the cloud.
Note: The following is outlined from easy to pretty damn hard, you will ultimately decide which service best fits your needs and wallet.
Free
Caution, free is always good but it comes at a cost; that cost can be your privacy. If you have gigabytes of personal photos and videos the following services are the best to try out:
Google Photos: Google offers “unlimited” storage space for both your photos and videos, the only gotcha is that the quality of the image or video is reduced during uploads. You can ‘tweak’ the settings to upload your media at full resolution by using Picasa.
Amazon Prime Photos: Yes, even Amazon offers unlimited storage space for your photos, the only catch is you need to have an active prime subscription, if you live in the Kindle ecosystem this option is the way to go.
Flickr: (A Yahoo Company) – Flickr offers a 1 TB of storage (1,000 GB) that’s a lot of storage, the only negative you can only upload images.
Other services are available like Dropbox or even iCloud but I decided to only include services that offer 100 GB or more of media storage for free.
Locally
Caution, having your personal data locally is always great. You have total control, and you keep it away from big brother; ha. Make sure you select a backup drive that will be reliable for years to come, here’s an amazing technical blog that outlines the most reliable hard drives.
Backup Drives: You can find a great backup drive (laptop or desktop) pretty cheap these days, summer is your best bet to find a 1.5+ TB backup for less than $70.
Note: Don’t know how to setup or configure backups on your machine? No worries, OS X users here you go and Windows aficionados I got you covered too.
FreeNAS: Oh yeah! If you’re not too technical, move along. But if you have an old desktop collecting dust somewhere it’s time to give it a second life. If you want to learn more about FreeNAS here’s a great YouTube video showcasing what it is.
Cloud
Caution, the following cloud services are subscription based you will need to pay a backup fee per machine. Also, please be aware if your ISP (Internet Service Provider) has data-caps on your plan. Best way to find out is to give them a call and ask, backing up to the cloud will use a lot of bandwidth. Depending on what amount of storage you are backing up you can go over your monthly data limit.
Backblaze: My personal favorite I’ve been using their service since 2012 and I’ve never had an issue. Monthly price is at $5.
Code42: I’ve read raving reviews about their service and even the company I work for uses their CrashPlan (Business Plan) for our payroll server. They have two monthly plans at $5 and $12.50 for family.
Carbonite: Another service I haven’t personally used but I’ve heard okay things, my past employer used their service to backup Windows workstations. As of this writing current monthly plans start at $47.99 per year and per computer.
Cloud Backup – Developers Only
Caution, the following is at your own risk; ha! It’s cheap and here’s a guide how to do it.
Amazon Glacier: It’s fast, dirt cheap and pretty reliable; as long as AWS is up. The setup is pretty straight forward and prices start at $0.01 per GB, yes you read that correct.
I hope this list helps you make the right decision for your backup needs, and remember the best service for you is the one you can pay for.
Cheers.