Dropbox

[Rum]

The easiest 'cloud' type storage system I have come across. Syncs your phone pics to your PC automatically if you want.

If you are looking: https://www.dropbox.com/

[Kristie]

That's what we use! We even pay extra for more storage. We use it fir picture storage. So much easier than buying external hard drives.

[Rum]

If it was a one-off cost I would buy extra space too, but it seems to be a monthly charge..here anyway.

[Kristie]

If it was a one-off cost I would buy extra space too, but it seems to be a monthly charge..here anyway.

We pay an annual fee.

[Rum]

9 bucks a month for extra storage seems a bit steep when I have loads of HD space here. I think I will probably use it as much as anything to sync phone pics to my PC.

[mistermack]

That's what we use! We even pay extra for more storage. We use it fir picture storage. So much easier than buying external hard drives.

I don't get that. I have several external hard drives, and they are no problem.
I use a 3 TB one for video, recorded from tv transmissions. They can store about 4,000 hours of standard definition video.
The only restriction on that disk, is that it needs a power supply and USB adapter, but these are pretty cheap. You can get an all-in-one docking station from ebay for about 15 dollars.

For photos, I use a 250 gig laptop disk, in a usb enclosure. That plugs straight into the usb with no need for a power supply, and the enclosure was about 4 dollars delivered. It's small, lightweight and easy to use, and would hold a gigantic number of photos, if it was ever filled. And used laptop drives are dirt cheap on ebay.

I suppose if you need to access your stuff on the go, from multiple different locations, this might save carrying a little laptop disk, But they are very small.
You can also get solid-state drives, that can take much more abuse.

[Kristie]

We started storing photos on external hard drives and we quickly outgrew them, even the largest ones we could purchase at the time. My father-in-law takes a lot of the holiday, birthday, vacation photos and it was always such a pain getting his images. We'd have to take a hard drive to his house or drag them across the network. That required his cooperation, which we rarely got.
With Dropbox, he just immediately puts photos in a file on there and I sort them into the appropriate folders. It's so much easier, especially since we now live an hour away from him.
We got to where we had like 6 different external hard drives that were all full and were never all in the same location. Also, he fear of losing all of our files due to a house fire or something caused us to have duplicates. Hubby is very paranoid, but he feels comfortable with Dropbox handling the backing up of our files!

[mistermack]

Yeh, I guess I'm a bit out of date with still photos. I don't take too many any more, it's so easy to use the little video camera.
Newer digital cameras probably make much bigger files that my old one.

I also have a little micro sd card reader, about half the size of a little finger, that I use for carrying files here and there.
The SD cards themselves are about the size of a little fingernail.
They generally only go up to 32 gig, but that's an awful lot of photos. And they can be dropped and abused without damage.

I agree about the fire risk though. Backups are vital for stuff that can never be replaced. Having said that, online storage can be destroyed in a fire too. Or can be mechanically lost. The only safe way to keep precious stuff is to have more than one backup. I don't know if the cloud storage firms have their own backups. Hopefully, they do.