Looking for a good and trusted place to store my digital pictures. Not to show them but to use it as a backup incase my backups get corrupted. Privacy is important. What would be my best choice? I have like 10 gigs of pics.

was wondering about this myself. i just need a place to archive a large amount of data outside of my house, mostly pictures.

S3 is too expensive for the amount I want to store (200-300gb)

I am curious about this as well, although for a different purpose (I want to store my postgresql backups.

400gb+

I looked at Carbonite... but has anyone tried using the service to mirror the PostgreSQL data folder?

you mean to run as a database server? That won't work. If you are talking about just backing up your DB, that should be fine

Is using your gmail account as a backup storage a valid option?

http://www.instructables.com/id/Onli...Gmail-Account/

Has anyone tried this?

http://www.onlinestoragesolution.com/backup.html

not a very reassuring website. it doesn't even say if their data is backed up/redundant. It also doesn't talk about data privacy/security.

tempting for the price/features though... anyone want to try it out?

I tried gmail drive but I couldn't even get it to work, I got error messages every time and couldn't figure out why.

Gmail doesn't usually come with quite enough storage for that amount of pics, or at least mine doesn't have 10GB of storage but when I had a quick look into this recently for a similar amount of photos using Google Picassa seemed to be the most cost effective way of storing this amount, and may be a simpler way for storing photos in your Google account than other workarounds. This might be worth looking into for you.

It comes with 1GB storage for free but you can add storage to your account:

# 20 GB - $5/yr
# 80 GB - $20/yr

Online storage like Mozy and Carbonite might be more private if you choose to manage your own encription key but are far more expensive for small amounts of data, esp less than 80GB.

Seems like Carbonite hada lot of complaints last time I checked.

Yeah, I saw those too and that's why I am still looking.

The whole unlimited storage really intrigues me because I have a lot of files that I'd love to back up.

DropBox.

2 GB free. Referrals to dropBox earn you an extra 1/4 GB each up to 10 GB total.

It's free, and you can pay to upgrade up to 100 GB.

Ive been looking for a solution for this as well.

Aug. issue of CPU Magazine did a round-up of online storage services. (I know magazine reviews can be pretty bad but fwiw i've had good luck with pretty much anything CPU has recommended).

Elephant Drive: Unlimited capacity starting at $4.95/month. Overall a good review but the word "glitchy" came up a few times.

Amazon S3: More of a big corporate player, $0.15 per GB. Definitley the most reliable, Elephant drive actually uses Amazon S3 servers.

ADrive: 50gb free but anything over is quite pricey. Uploading easy but apparantly the downloading interface is a real PITA.

Dropbox: great interface, great syncing features, 2 GB free, 50gb $9.99/month.

Curious to here of anyones experiences with the services listed or any other alternatives.

50gb just seems inadequate overall...

Why is Picasa less private?

Just found an other very good offer imo.

www.imgur.com

It's basically something like photobucket, only fast, small, working and consists of good code.
The pro-Account is 24$/year for unlimited storage.

They even have an open API if you plan on using the pics somewhere on the web.

What about Windows Skydrive free 25gb?

How did I not know about this? Thank you, sir.

It's my understanding that almost everything in the new Windows Live suite is pretty incredible. They delivered a bunch of really cool **** that they are barely advertising, skydrive included

They reduce all pics to 1MB which I don't want. Also, will this site still be out there when my external hard drive melts in 2030?

For short distance picture storing+displaying this sounds very good.

Agree with the 1mb thing is pretty garbage, but overall, I find imgur the best of the free image hosting sites (ie. photobucket, tinypic, imageshack) who are bastards about hosting images that get a decent amount of traffic or deleting pictures that don't get enough traffic.

With the pro account you got 5mb per pic limit which is sufficient for very high res pics.

Because:

Unsure if google encrypts your photos but Mozy etc do

Managing own encryption key increases privacy even if google do

Your email account is more public than Mozy etc username, so may be more likely to get hacked

If you don't sign out of email your pics are immediately available along with your contacts list.

I'm obviously not saying that this level of privacy is usually necessary and that Picassa and the like are unsuitable for your holiday pics etc. Its just that OP said privacy was important so I mentioned this - as depending on just how important privacy is these things can become concerns.

Someone already said it but SKydrive from Microsoft will do the job here.

Except there is a max file size limitation of 50MB.

Gladinet Cloud app let's you create a link in Windows Explorer for direct access, it can be a little glitchy but for free tools and storage it is pretty cool, if you can live with the 50MB limitation.

Carbonite software says it doesn't allow network drives to be backed up. Mozy isn't exaclty clear, but might work. The bad reviews I have read about these services (more Carbonite than Mozy) are problems restoring data, is that what you're talking about too?