Recently I have run into storage issues for my images. This was a problem I knew was coming but a combination of the new Canon 5DMKII and a increased shooting schedule has brought the problem to the forefront.  A typical shoot can be 16Gb-24Gb and even with a 1Tb drive space quickly gets eaten up.

So here is the dilemma. I want to have good backups of all of my images and don’t consider them truly safe unless I have 2 copies if not 3. My recent strategy has been to copy images from the memory cards to my desktop computer, where I have a 1Tb drive dedicated to photos. I then copy these photos to a 4TB Drobo as a backup. I would like to backup these to the cloud using one of the online backup services like Carbonite, Jungle Disk, Backblaze, etc. The problem is that the Drobo is a shared drive on my network so other family members can have access to photos and it is where we keep our music collection. All of the cloud based backup solutions either will not allow backup of networked drives or have very expensive rates when you get beyond 600Gb or so.

My initial plan was to just backup my local 1Tb photo drive to the cloud and the Drobo would be a local backup, but this all changed with the purchase of the 5D. I had been able to keep the last 5 years of photos on the drive but with the 5D it quickly filled up. Last week I had to transfer the last 4 years over to the Drobo and keep only the 2009 photos in order to have enough space to import a recent shoot. So what to do?

Here is my current thinking.

- Purchase another multiple drive enclosure or another Drobo
- Mirror the network shared Drobo and this new set of drives
- Sign up for Backblaze and have it backup the new (non-network shared) drive(s).

This is not the cheapest solution but seems to be the best bet for backing up to the cloud. I also then have at least 2 local backups as well. I wasn’t planning on a 2nd Drobo but when I priced multiple drive enclosures they were almost as expensive as a Drobo.

So that’s my current thinking. Would love to hear from anybody else who might have a solution.