Do You Use Online Photo or Data Storage or Backup Services?

[MountainDon]

If you do Will you lose pictures stored online if your photo site goes bust? I saw this a week ago, but never got around to commenting on it till now.

Members of Digital Railroad found out the hard way that the answer may be yes. The digital photo archiving and commerce site used by over 1,500 professional photographers abruptly went dark on October 29th. All that was left up on the site was a note that said "We deeply regret to inform you that Digital Railroad (DRR) has shut down."

Digital Railroad members saw an additional message saying "The archive may only be accessible for the next 24 hours." Although accessibility was extended until October 31 and images were preserved on existing hardware in hopes that photos could be retrieved after DRR's assets were purchased by another company, DRR representatives announced yesterday that it had been unable to sell DRR's assets and the company's top creditor will be taking possession of the hardware, erasing all information from storage devices, and selling the equipment at auction.

full account here.

Basically this comes down to not trusting anyone but yourself to archive anything on your computer that is important to you. Not even any of the highly advertised backup services. Especially today with companies downsizing all the way to disappearing.

We use removable external hard drives and a regimen of backup and copy sequences.

[glenn kangiser]

I don't even trust myself with my stuff.  I might lose it too.  I backup sometimes.

[peternap]

I use online photo hosting Don. I have lost everything several times but have always kept it on my system also.
I do keep some some data on my web site but I don't put anything sensitive because of snoopers.

I don't understand why anyone would backup online when external hard drives are so cheap.

[taveuni13]

I started using Carbonite a while back, but only as a third backup after running RAID mirroring hard drives and also a USB external hard drive.

When just about your entire business is built around computer data, losing it all can be devastating.  A house fire (been there) could easily ruin any onsite data storage or backup.