How to backup 231 gigabytes of photos w/o really trying
A few weeks ago I got paranoid about the 50,523 photos I’ve amassed since 1999. Prior to this point, I was backing up my Lightroom pictures folder whenever I thought about it—which wasn’t too often. This technique meant that I wasn’t totally at risk of losing my photos, but I certainly wasn’t totally backed up in a timely manner. And a fire that burned down the room with my MacBook Pro and my external drive would have hosed me.
I thought it would be great if I could have a totally automated solution for my pictures just like I have with my documents in my Dropbox folder. There’s a local copy of these files on my MacBook, and when I change the files, Dropbox updates the copy in the cloud immediately if I’m online or the next time I get online. Also, using Dropbox, I can access these files from my other computers, phones, and tablets.
The problem was that my 50,523 photos took up 231 gigabytes of space, which is about ten times larger than my Dropbox limit. Lo and behold, Dropbox recently created “Dropbox for Teams” which provides 1,000 gigabytes of storage for $795/year for up to five users. Then an employee of Dropbox upgraded my account.
But I was hesitant to make a radical move like transferring 50,523 files and screwing up my Lightroom directory, so I checked with my main man Scott Kelby of Photoshop and Lightroom fame. He thought that my idea would work—but “thinking it would work” wasn’t good enough for me. So then I checked with Graham Abbot at Dropbox, and he said it would work too. Then I checked with my partner at Alltop, Will Mayall, and he said it should work three. Three smart people telling me it would work was good enough for me.
During Christmas I did the transfer. What better thing to do during the holidays, right? But I was traveling in Hawaii and Phoenix, and my hotel connection speeds weren’t exactly blazing. However, over the course of two weeks of intermittent connectivity, I got all the files uploaded, and the first time I launched Lightroom after the upload, it asked me to find the pictures folder, and lo and behold, when I pointed Lightroom to it, everything (including all sub-folders) worked like a charm.
So now when I import to Lightroom, the files go into the local folder on my MacBook. Then they get synced to the Dropbox folder in the cloud when I’m online. If I delete pictures, Dropbox syncs this action, too. I can access these pictures from my other devices—mdash;really any computer because I can sign into my Dropbox account using a browser. Life is good. If you have a bunch of pictures that you want to know exists in the cloud as well as your local computer and hard disks, you should definitely check out Dropbox for Teams.
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Guy, that is a great idea and infact the "worry" you describe has been the foundational idea for my product PicBackMan http://www.picbackman.com which helps users to associate folders on their PCs as well as online social accounts like Facebook and then PicBackMan AUTOMATICALLY uploads the pictures (current and new ones that it monitors for) to multiple accounts like SmugMug, Picasa and others which will be a lot more cost effective! Please take a look – I’d love to know your feedback!