Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Online backup
A different alternative is to use an online backup service. There are a number of services that pho-
tographers would be interested in, but they primarily fall into two camps. The first camp is a pho-
tography-oriented backup service, designed to both archive your photos and to provide gallery
and sales features, and the second camp is a general-purpose backup solution, designed to back
up your entire hard drive.
Some of the photography services include PhotoShelter (www.photoshelter.com), SmugMug
(www.smugmug.com), and Swiss Picture Bank (www.swisspicturebank.com). PhotoShelter and
SmugMug (as of this writing) charge either a monthly or yearly fee, and they have different rates
depending on what features you need, ranging from basic gallery services to terabytes of storage
with online sales and custom Web site templates. Josh currently uses PhotoShelter to drive his
Web site. He uses its Aperture export plug-in to upload his master files to a RAW folder within his
PhotoShelter archive, and he uploads JPEG versions of his images, with all his adjustments burned
in, to another folder that he then posts publicly.
Swiss Picture Bank is a newer service, but what's special about it is that your data has a lifetime
guarantee through the Foundation for Data Permanence so that if Swiss Picture Bank goes out of
business, your data is always safe and accessible. Furthermore, rather than paying an annual fee,
you pay once for however much storage you need and have that for life.
Unfortunately with these services, you have to manually select what images you want to upload to
the sites and upload them yourself. But that's a small price to pay to be able to access your images
anywhere and for some of the other features these sites provide.
The more general services, like Mozy (www.mozy.com) and Carbonite (www.carbonite.com) pro-
vide programs that monitor the data on your computer and upload any new or changed files
whenever you make a change. These services cost less (each is roughly $60 per year for unlimited
backup, compared to the $60 per month you might pay PhotoShelter for storage), but they don't
provide any gallery or photo sales features.
Should you choose to use an online backup service, remember that the initial backup can take a
significant amount of time depending on how much data you have to back up and your network
connection, possibly even weeks. Furthermore, we recommend not relying on an online service as
your only backup solution, as restoring your data can also take a significant amount of time.
