I'd be interested in seeing a service like this but for professional photographers. A friend of a friend is a wedding photographer. The work flow for something like this is to have multiple shooters each taking ~25GB worth of photos for one shoot. Then they process the worthy photos, making 3 large files per photo (RAW, .psd, and a final .png). During the turnaround time between wedding and delivery, it would be ideal to keep a copy of each of these files somewhere, but at least keeping the RAW somewhere safe is a minimum requirement. We were trying to figure out a feasible backup solution for the volume of data that such a shoot would require. The time to upload this data is longer than the delivery time for the photos, given the current available upstream bandwidth.
We came to the conclusion that putting files on BluRay disks or hard drives and keeping them physically separate was the best solution for the cost. The problem is that disks take a long time to burn, and external hard drives aren't the best archival medium (not to mention they don't always travel well).
Has anyone here solved the problem of data backups where bandwidth limits make pure online/cloud storage infeasible?
Have a look at The OpenPhoto Project. It's an OpenPhoto photo platform you can sign up to use or install yourself. Works with S3, Dropbox, Box.net, local filesystem or anything else you want to write a little code for.
Interesting, but we run into the same issues as before. We are either storing locally (backups are good, but local storage doesn't have quite as much redundancy as a data center), or taking infeasible amounts of time to upload to a remote backup.
Ideally, we would be able to ship BluRays to a data center (USPS has terrible latency, but great bandwidth!), where they would load them into their servers. If anything happend to the local copies, we could either have them ship us back a hard drive or BluRays, or download the lost files (downstream is much faster for us, and because we are theoretically only downloading a subset of what we backed up, direct downloads are feasible).
The issue I run in to in my thought experiments is that a data center doesn't necessarily want to physically handle data shipped to them or create recovery media to ship back.
Actually, all that is really needed is a secure place to archive the BluRays. A way to view and download backed up files is a nice-to-have, but not required.
Backblaze should provide an option for you to ship them a hdd or blu ray disk. They can store those however you want but if/when you need it you can restore files over the Internet or they can ship you physical media.
Probably not cost effective for them but that's what you're looking for, I think.
We came to the conclusion that putting files on BluRay disks or hard drives and keeping them physically separate was the best solution for the cost. The problem is that disks take a long time to burn, and external hard drives aren't the best archival medium (not to mention they don't always travel well).
Has anyone here solved the problem of data backups where bandwidth limits make pure online/cloud storage infeasible?