My current photo backup recommendations

“Johnz”:http://www.igncap.com/who_we_are.html#john-zagula recently asked me about photo backup and sharing strategies.

I’ve settled on two basic schemes for the moment.

* My “autonomic” choice is “backblaze”:backblaze.com tho you could just as well use carbonite or crashplan or any of the other N choices. This is a “set and forget” system – I tell it to backup my hard disk, and it just chugs away all the time and keeps me backed up. If my machine ever explodes or my house burns down, I have a recovery option. Now I’ve never had to test the recovery, so fingers crossed, but I have a plan. And this provides me great backup, but provides no sharing features or even remote use for myself.

* For more intentional sharing and remote use, I use “smugmug”:smugmug.com. A little overkill for amateur photographer, but provides great viewing and sharing features. And integrates well with Aperture or Lightroom. And has a decent iphone app.

An alternatives I’ve considered: Dropbox would be super easy to use if I just cared about my own remote access, and is pretty appealing. But no sharing. But I could dump intentionally shared images up to facebook or flickr. This would not be an unreasonable combination to use.

Mix and match all these as you wish…but I hope you are using something, because it would suck to lose all your photos to a machine failure.