Over the past few months I moved all my original photos (RAW) onto Amazon S3, principally because the price/GB was so good. However since then I’ve had a lot of trouble finding the right backup solution. Basically all I wanted to do was upload the RAW files to Amazon S3 after I’d processed them on my laptop, that’s easier said than done. There’s a few good tools out these for Amazon S3 and they’re got their uses:
- Cloudberry Exporer – Like an FTP client for S3, quite handy, there’s free and paid versions
- S3 Organizer for Firefox – Again like an FTP client and is an Add-In for Firefox
- Gladinet – Makes your S3 drive look like a mapped drive on your computer, really quite handy and works with other online storage as well, such as Google and SkyDrive
I’ve been using the free versions of all three but my favourite has been Gladinet and after a lot of experimenting I settled on Richcopy to do my backups. There’s many backup tools out there but the only one I found that allowed me to sync just based on filename was Richcopy. However I’ve never been fully convinced about this as a backup solution, while Gladinet is good, it seems to cache your files so I was never fully convinced all my stuff was there. It would then be a lengthy process to try and compare directories. What’s the point in backup if you’re not convinced the file is there, and only find out it’s still in the local cache when it’s too late!
So I’ve still been looking for the right solution but have only recently started using Dropbox, and that could be what I’m looking for. I’ve never seriously looked at it in the past but decided to sign up for the free 2GB as I’ve been disappointed by the changes in Microsoft’s Live Mesh (a discussion for another day). So over the past couple of days my files have been happily uploading and then I noticed their pricing, ~$10/month for 50G. With Amazon I’m currently using about 20G and paying about $5/month so suddenly 50G for $10 seems like a viable option. The further advantage is that it comes with it’s own client which just looks like a drive on my computer. I fire my files into that folder and they get sync’d in the background. There’s a bunch more handy features like versioning that I’ve not tried, but the G/$ looks comparable to Amazon.
There’s no doubt that Amazon have got a lot of positives and you can use S3 with their other products, but I don’t need all that stuff. They’ve also got the Reduced Redundancy option (only 99.99%…) that’s a bit cheaper, but for my use I’m thinking Dropbox is better.
The only issue I now have is getting the 15GB of files uploaded. I suspect my broadband provider will frown upon me when I try to upload all that again!
So Amazon S3 Dropbox, I think Dropbox is in the lead for me now, gotta try it for a while to be sure but it’s looking good!
Update
I didn’t realise that Dropbox also done photo galleries. While it should be noted that this nothing akin to Flickr or Smugmug, it’s a really useful feature. It takes me an add to process then upload pictures, but that uploading chore is now taken away. All I need to do is ensure my photos are in the Photo directory and they’re automatically published under a Gallery in the name of the folder they’re in. That’s really handy! It might even mean that I stop using using Smugmug as my photos don’t have much interaction, I jsut share them with my family. The only hassle then is sharing them, it would be handy if Dropbox had a Gallery homepage that showed all your Galleries.
The other thing I’ve found out is that Dropbox uses Amazon S3. I dropped them a message to see if could copy across my existing buckets to theirs but the answer was no. I didn’t expect much else but it would have saved me from uploading 15Gs worth of photos again!
Hello Halesy,
You’ve got me wondering now!
I use both Dropbox and S3 for different things. So for example I use Dropbox for all the every day files I use like Word, Excel etc. So the idea is that if there’s a disaster and any of my computers expire then I will always have the latest file.
The other obvious benefit is no matter how many computers, iPhones you have you can always access the very latest version of your files so you don’t accidentally end up with more than one version which I’m sure we’ve all done in the past.
I use S3 Amazon for my photos and videos – mainly for my blogs (e.g. video tutorials) but also to make sure I always have a copy of my personal family photos – I can’t think of anything worse than losing all your photos of your kids growing up etc.
The bit you’ve got me wondering about is the cost of S3, at the moment I’ve got loads of videos and photos uploaded. Some of my videos are published on blogs so get viewed fairly frequently. My monthly bill has never been more than $10.
When comparing the cost of Dropbox it’s not quite straight forward (unless I’m mistaken). With Dropbox – you pay the same fee month in month out for the storage. But with S3 Amazon you only pay a fee when you upload or download a file – or when a file is used in a website or blog.
So as far as I know if you upload say 20Gb of images to S3 you only pay when you upload – so that would be approx $3. After that you wouldn’t pay anything unless you either download them again or if you access them to view them for example. In reality once you’ve uploaded them all you wouldn’t actually access all of them that often so you monthly bills would be very small.
If I’ve got that wrong please let me know – I’ve not really analysed my bills before but if I had to pay to keep all my stuff on S3 then I’m sure my bills would be much bigger.
The real benefit with Dropbox though is that it is really simple and easy to use. The cost of it is also pretty fair even though I’m sure S3 is much less. The drawback with Dropbox, especially if you want to use a lot of data is that you have to store all this data on each computer, whereas with S3 all your data is in the cloud and you just access the bits you want when you need them. (As you know, your Dropbox files are also stored in the cloud which is in effect the central point at which they are updated and synchronised).
Thanks for a really interesting and thought provoking article.
Best wishes – Dave
Hello Again Halesy,
I need to correct my comments…
I’ve had a quick look at my S3 account and you’re right – you do pay for the actual storage. Well I don’t quite know how I misunderstood that – What a dope!
Anyway it just shows how cheap S3 Storage is I guess.
Best wishes – Dave
Dave,
Yep you pay for storage but I also agree it’s not a lot, but I did forget to mention the bit about paying for upload/download. For me I’m only backing up one computer but I can see you’re point about sync’ing multiple computers. It would be better if you could back everything up and select which computers sync to which data, maybe Dropbox are listening.
I’m probably going to another post on my experiences so far, once all my stuff has uploaded. Like you I’ve been using S3 for my photos, including RAW, now they’re all going to Dropbox. There is however a few more days for them to upload though
For me though I love the convenience of saving to the right folder and it’s uploaded. So when I download my photos from my camera and edit them, I just save to my Dropbox directory and they’re online. I’ve got Flickr and Smugmug accounts at the moment, but it’s always a hassle uploading and sync’ing the photos, this makes it much easier. There’s no doubt that Dropbox could do a lot more with their Photo’s folder but rolling all the costs together I think I’m happier to put up with less functionality. I mainly just share my photos and don’t expect in depth reviews on my photos.
So for me the convenience is the selling point, and I think I’ll recoup the difference between S3 and Dropbox by not using Flickr/Smugmug.
And thanks for the nice words,
Cheers,
John
Hello John
I totally agree with the fact Dropbox is so easy and user friendly. I’m pretty sure they will develop their service to incorporate some of the features you mentioned.
By the way, I don’t know of you know or not – but they have a beta version which has a “Pause” function. I managed to find this out as I was suffering with my pc slowing right down when I installed a new dropbox on a new machine. So by pausing I could continue with my normal stuff then set it going again over night.
To get the beta version I think you need to visit the forum, I somehow found it through a Google search – but I’m sure it was on the Dropbox forum somewhere.
Look forward to your update.
Dave
Thanks for the heads up Dave, I’ll head over to the forums and have a look, and put forward my suggestions…
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Maybe you could use google picasa for photo’s uploading and syncing? I’ve only tried it once and that was on linux, but it worked fine uploading fast and syncing also of the folder on the local hard drive. I’m also using Dropbox, and thinking about trying S3. It sounds really interesting, only problem is I don’t have a credit card >.<.
Yeah but I’m not a fan on online Picasa, albums etc are not well organised, although the HTML5 version of Windows Live looks good…
Here’s a tool I wrote to sync my photos & vids to Amazon S3 (or to an external drive).
http://amazons3filesync.codeplex.com/
Dropbox has an inflexible pricing model, fixed price for fixed amount, not sure what happens when you hit that limit, run 2 accounts?