Just for the sake of argument, why rent when you can own? For $99 a year, you can buy a 2-TB external drive (Seagate's is $90 on Amazon at this time) and keep backing up your stuff to fresh hardware.
If you plan on subscribing to Amazon Prime in perpetuity, great. But if you should change your mind, you have a pretty big downloading task ahead of you to get all these images and move them elsewhere. Of course, you do have them all safely backed up on at least two local devices, do you not? In which case, why pay extra for AMZN's service?
I let Google+ back up my phone photos and videos because why not? It's convenient. But I still plug in the phone and pull the camera folder onto a hard drive periodically.
There's also the privacy consideration. Now that we all know the NSA can take our data arbitrarily, secretly, and with impunity, do we really want a pictorial guide to our lives to be out there and available for them to peruse?
Doing exactly what you are suggesting, I will tell you why it's a much bigger cost than just the cost of the drive.
- The Seagate drive you mention has horrible failure rates, IIRC.
- Unless you know how to set up and monitor a ZFS pool, don't bother. Your data will not survive without this.
- Are you confident enough in your backup solution? Are your backups offsite? Are they offsite on another ZFS pool, or similar mechanism? Do you check your backups for integrity? What is your strategy for when backups (or original data) is corrupt?
- Does your home grown solution provide a secure sync capability between all your devices? Alternatively, do you have access to the photos from all your devices?
- Does your home grown solution allow your friends and family to view/download a subset of the photos from any of their devices?
- Is your solutions online a reasonable percentage of the time?
- Is your home grown solution as fast as AWS? As in, if you are traveling and want access to your data, how fast will it download/upload?
Basically, unless you plan on spending quite a bit of time setting this up, and know what you are doing, it is much much cheaper to pay from Prime, or similar.
Edit: BTW, the box you put these drives into must have ECC RAM. Without it, expect corruption. Same goes for your other box, the backup you host offsite.
It's a rather fair statement to make. The rates of errors in memory are significant[1], and ZFS does nothing to ensure that in memory data structures are uncorrupted; it was designed to be used with ECC RAM[2].
> Just for the sake of argument, why rent when you can own? For $99 a year, you can buy a 2-TB external drive (Seagate's is $90 on Amazon at this time) and keep backing up your stuff to fresh hardware.
I do this (home backups), but I also value having offsite backups.
I don't see Prime photos as a reason to signup for Prime by itself, but hell, as a longtime Prime member who has signed up just for shipping, I'm obviously very happy with how they've continued to role out perks.
I don't even plan to use Photos (OS X isn't supported yet, anyway), but I love the demonstration of their commitment to Prime members. More than anything, that's where I think things like this are valuable.
Having photos on my own external hard drive is an enormous liability. Even ignoring the risk of a fire / theft / loss (not to mention the hassle itself of backing them up locally), drives fail.
> have a pretty big downloading task ahead of you to get all these images and move them elsewhere
I would say instead you have an enormous uploading task ahead of you to move 2 Tb of photos from your HDD into the cloud somewhere.
Plus, the main reason I have photos is to share them with other people. If I'm going to end up uploading them somewhere else, it's just easier.
I know opinions differ on privacy, but I honestly could not care less who sees my vacation photos.
- the auto-backup apps on the different platforms
- the web interface for online browsing and sharing.
- not having to worry about hard drive failures.
If you actually want to do this, get a RAID 1 NAS like the Synology Diskstation 214 or 214+, stuff a couple 4TB drives into it, and then additionally set it to periodically auto-backup the valuable bits to Amazon Glacier.
This ends up being a good bit more expensive, but you'll actually have your photos in 10 years instead of having just a dead hard drive.
(If you don't feel like visiting TechCrunch.)
Just for the sake of argument, why rent when you can own? For $99 a year, you can buy a 2-TB external drive (Seagate's is $90 on Amazon at this time) and keep backing up your stuff to fresh hardware.
If you plan on subscribing to Amazon Prime in perpetuity, great. But if you should change your mind, you have a pretty big downloading task ahead of you to get all these images and move them elsewhere. Of course, you do have them all safely backed up on at least two local devices, do you not? In which case, why pay extra for AMZN's service?
I let Google+ back up my phone photos and videos because why not? It's convenient. But I still plug in the phone and pull the camera folder onto a hard drive periodically.
There's also the privacy consideration. Now that we all know the NSA can take our data arbitrarily, secretly, and with impunity, do we really want a pictorial guide to our lives to be out there and available for them to peruse?