Hello Community, Where Is The Safest Place to Store My Photos Online? DropBox or iCloud? Elsewhere?

[HappyDude20]

Hi, I have thousands of photos and files on the following:

1. 3 hard drives (1.5TB)
2. 2 SSD's (300GB)
3. Drop Box (30GB)
4. iCloud (100GB+)
5. Google Drive (Megabytes online, not including 10Gbs of Gmail)

my friend runs a national company and uses dropbox, of which i have an associated account as an incoming consultant from time to time, the debate arose whether which place is best to store documents and I remember the last Apple keynote Tim Cook started out the presentation talking about the importance of privacy.

Thoughts?

Its really just family photos and like journal entries but that does admittedly freak me out still.

 

[ActionableMango]

For privacy you could put them in an encrypted container and upload the container. This is fine for backup purposes, but makes sharing difficult.

If you need to share them and yet also keep them private from the company with the storage, well I think those two goals are inherently in conflict.

 

[HappyDude20]

OH well I mention my friends company only because DropBox happens to be the online storage method they use. He gave me a personally 50GB one year account to use, of which i've been uploading my iPhone Camera Roll to it for the past few months but considering I take pictures of absolutely every thing every day and every aspect of my life, it kinda freaks me out if I should be allowing them to upload to dropbox or if I should stick with iCloud or something.

Accessing them on the go is not necessary but appreciated which is why i keep thinking about iCloud and how Apple keeps stating their stance on privacy.

 

[HappyDude20]

Would a WebDAV server where I can too store files for syncing be a better alternative than the bigger services?

 

[Fishrrman]

My opinion only, but...

Put a COPY of your photos online for convenience, but...
... DON'T depend on online to be the "sole repository" of your photos.

What's online today could go "offline" tomorrow, with no recourse.

MAKE SURE you keep your originals on drives someplace under your own control.

AT LEAST TWO COPIES of each drive. Three is better.

 

[grahamperrin]

Yesterday's https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/23128028 mentioned Wuala, and Upthere beta.

Wuala is no longer available but for some time, it was in many ways – not least, security – outstanding and in a few ways, unrivalled. There was a great article that compared it with the very few services that were in the same class but (sorry) I can't find my bookmark of that article. If security, encryption and so on are of interest, here's a related publication from the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich:

• Cryptree: A Folder Tree Structure for Cryptographic File Systems (2006)

During the years when Wuala was outstanding, amongst the most memorable alternatives was Mozy but (again, sorry) I can't recall whether I properly tested any of their offerings. http://mozy.co.uk/about/legal/privacy

https://policies.yahoo.com/us/en/yahoo/privacy/products/flickr/ describes Yahoo's privacy practices with respect to Flickr.

Postscript

Would a WebDAV server where I can too store files for syncing be a better alternative than the bigger services?

If you might run your own server, consider NextCloud.

I follow things there with interest …

 

[maflynn]

Its really just family photos and like journal entries but that does admittedly freak me out still.

With dropbox, you'll be storing your photos on your local storage and the cloud. Is that something that is feasible?

How much storage will you need and what is the purpose of putting the images and files up on the cloud? Will the cloud storage be the primary method to which you'll be storing the data or as a backup mechanism?

Have you looked into Amazon's S3 storage solutions?