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by salberts 4147 days ago
When I considered starting my own company in the photo sharing/storage I did some research of the field. Ignoring the my business related conclusions, there is one thing I learned as a consumer:

-- You shouldn't trust your photos with these companies --

People store photos to last for long long time while most of these companies' lifespan is much shorter. The best outcome would be spending time, money and nerves on porting data from place to place.

I hate saying this but I'd go with established companies that either have a sustainable business model around photos/storage (Amazon, Dropbox, Apple) or have deep enough pockets to make up for it (Microsoft, Google). I probably forgot some but you get the idea.
3 comments
Mahn 4147 days ago
Personally I find a couple of hard drives in raid at home the most reliable photo backup strategy. It doesn't protect them from natural disasters, but these are much less likely than a cloud service being bought/sunsetted. I can not even trust Google Photos because since it's not Google's core product I have to assume they can decide to discontinue it overnight any time.
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salberts 4147 days ago
It could be a good solution but for me the overhead is too high and it lacks many of the benefits of having the data in the cloud. + what happens when there is a disaster, the insurance doesn't cover lost memories.

Specifically about Google, I agree that Google+ Photos (or however this is called) is a strange beast. But it shares storage with Google Drive and in fact Google Drive photos are accessible from Photos. So I use only Google Drive folders for backup. I also believe that in case Google (or any other company of that scale) chooses to shut down a major service it will give a fair notice (don't forget it has business users as well). As for Apple, Amazon, Dropbox, Box, MS... it seems like a core product.

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tdkl 4147 days ago
> But it shares storage with Google Drive

Not really.

> Google Drive photos are accessible from Photos

Only one way, read only. If you want to make changes like autoawesome or using the editor, you need to copy the album to G+.

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toomuchtodo 4147 days ago
The Internet Archive should offer this as a service to help fund their other operations.
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pathikrit 4145 days ago
Just pay $10/month and dump them in your 1TB DropBox account?
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