My Cloud Backup Strategy

Not going to go into why you should backup, but here is how I handle the things that matter to me: Code, Documents, PC Games, and Photo and Video.

Code

This one is pretty much a no-brainer for me. Use Bitbucket to host your private repositories for free, and use GitHub to host your public ones.

Documents and other miscellaneous files

Some prefer Microsoft, Google, or another company. Take your pick (numbers from time of writing):

PC Games

Just use Steam.

Photo and Video

I have a Flickr Pro Account. For $25/year you get:

  • Unlimited uploads and storage
  • Unlimited sets and collections
  • Access to your original files
  • Stats on your account
  • Ad-free browsing and sharing
  • HD video uploads & playback

Their upload download procedures aren’t super smooth, but I mostly do uploads and the Flickr Uploadr makes that pretty easy. I tried out Google’s Picasa a while back, but with my massive collection of family photos it was getting very expensive very fast.

I also have a Synology DS211J NAS that I use to store all my photos and videos in house. If you edit/view/print your photos a lot, having this local network copy/cache will help out a lot.

Bonus: I have 2 projects on Github relating to photo management.

“Organize My Photos” aims to organize all of your local photos into folders by date. It’s a really basic/ugly implementation in Winforms, but it works for my purposes.

“Organize My Flickr Photos” aims to keep your photos “backed up” to Flickr, avoiding duplication. I don’t think this code is fully functional right now. Last I checked I was fighting with the limitations of the Flickr API. Once over those hurdles it shouldn’t be too much work to get some nice sync action going on.

Published: April 25, 2012

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