I've been following a conversation in the Canon group on LinkedIn about storage mediums for photographers... I know I've talked a bit about this topic before, but I want to dip my lens back into the subject for just a few minutes to clear something up... "Cloud Storage is not the server in shinning armour" ....but, what the hell IS cloud storage you ask? ...errr, basically it's lots of servers all over the place, and your data goes out "into the clouds" and you can download from whatever server is closest or quickest... and it all happens without you having to think, mostly. Still don't get it? Ask your Grandma...
this awesome image is used with cc goodness
People bang on about "Cloud" and how it's going to revolutionise storage as we know it... How it's where everything will sit and that's where we'll work from... There are some things that make this idea an absolute pile of steaming doggy whatsit...
Got Data? Yeah, a lot! OK, so I took some photos of my little boy this morning, and after about twenty minutes, I had around 1.5GB of images... (21mp at 3.9fps) He's a quick little mover, so I had the camera on burst and was pushing it often to make sure I caught the expression I wanted... That's not even on a shoot "shoot" ..that's just at home, for fun... So, I have pretty fast internet at home, about 6mb down and around 768kbps up... so, that's nice, but it's still going to take an AGE to upload 1.5gb of RAW images!
What if I want to work on those RAW images after I've uploaded them? Do I point Lightroom at the cloud and tell it to get its files form there? Can you please tell me how long it's going to take to download, edit, upload each change? So that won't work...
I have an image library that needs to be kept together, in one place, so I'd need to upload my existing image library to said cloud... that's almost 1.5TB... Can anyone tell me how long that's going to take to upload and then how much it's going to cost to keep up?
Cloud is just disk based storage, and it's on more than one server, but there is something that weirds me out about not being able to physically pick up my external disk and say to someone "here are my photographs, guard them with your life"
So, that's not even scratching the surface of what could possibly be wrong with a semi-pro photog trying to use cloud storage as his main archive... opinions, please....