Cloud Storage: Options

[BarretWallace]

Hello all,

 

I keep fairly rigorous backups of my files at home (external hard drive), and am looking for a good cloud-based solution to augment this.  I want my ideal cloud service to do two things.

1. Provide an off-site (online) place to backup files exactly as I currently do with the external hard drive.  This includes "active" videos (i.e. video files that are part of current projects).
2. Provide an off-site (online) place to archive large files, especially older videos, so I can get them off my hard drive and free up space.  Once I'm done with a project, I would like a place to store video and project files for possible future use.  Additionally, I would like to digitize my camcorder tapes while this is still possible (and before the tapes degrade).  Maybe I will never touch that footage again, but maybe not.

 

Already I use One Drive to store/sync some files, via my Office 365 subscription.  It's all right for syncing, but if there's a way to make it do an archive as well, I don't know how.  I have Google Docs storage via my Gmail accounts and find it generally easy to use.  Neither of these feels quite right when I add in item #2 on the list above.  I have done (and will continue to do) some solid research on my own, and figured I'd tap the Hero boards for advice from my more computer-savvy (doesn't take much, I admit) board-mates.  I've also done some searching on these boards for similar topics and have not found anything yet.

 

Cheers,

 

BarretWallace

[Pariah]

I use Dropbox in addition to Google Drive. It's worked pretty well for me, but I haven't posted anything really memory intensive like videos. Honestly, I'm not sure what the storage limitation would be, although I do know that you can subscribe for a higher limit than what comes for free. Anyway, it's something you might want to check out.

[Ternaugh]

Dropbox is my primary cloud storage provider, and I pay $99 per year for 1 TB of storage (plus whatever free storage I've earned). I use OneDrive (with my Office365 subscription) for synchronizing some files, and for holding mp3 files for a Plex cloud instance*. The music directory is set up to not synchronize with my various devices, mainly to save space, and it's technically possible to archive stuff this way. Adding stuff is through the web view. Dropbox also has a way to mark folders so that they don't synchronize, and I've done that for certain folders on some of my devices.

 

In either case, functionality is somewhat limited by my upload speeds from my ISP. I've not tried to save a large video file, but I'd imagine that it would take a long time. My initial music load for the Plex cloud server to OneDrive took somewhere around a day and a half for about 200GB of files.

 

 

*Which works okay, but I find that Microsoft Groove works better. It sees music files on OneDrive, even if they aren't synchronized on your computer, and plays them with very little fuss.