Cheap photo storage/backup hint new Amazon announcement

  I am sure everyone has a backup plan. If not you should. Photography is my hobby, and I have about ~300GB of pictures, RAW and JPEG collected over the years.  I've been using crashplan since it has a linux client, but recently Amazon announced a great plan, just for photo's, at $12/year, it's dirt cheap for unlimited photo's. It also supports some RAW formats, my old CR2 (Canon RAW) format is supported, I have not tried my new Olympus RAW, or Panasonic RAW, so that test will be later. You also get 3 months free trial as well, and it has an iOS and an Android app, so I can upload my phone/table pictures, having a kid sometimes forces you to grab what's near by, and not necessarily your camera. 

  Currently Google Drive, and Photo's, which I guess is being moved into Drive, has one big drawback, that it can't give you a link to send or embed into a blog or webpage, except blogger. I use WordPress for my photoblog, and I also have a little gripe about posting from WordPress to facebook. If I upload the images to WordPress, and post using it's publicize post, the images get uploaded to Facebook. I want to keep the pictures in one spot. For that I use Smugmug, but this Amazon Cloud Drive can change all that, we'll see.

  Amazon's Cloud Drive has an unlimited plan for $59/year, which is almost what I pay for Crashplan, but 99% of what I backup are images, the rest, documents, and other random files are on my Google Drive, or OneDrive, or dropbox, as you can see I don't keep them in one place :)

  Since I'm using a Chromebook, which is basically a cloud laptop, this whole idea of not storing locally is becoming more convenient, and efficient.  If I ever upgrade/change my Chromebook to a Chrome Base, or a newer Chromebook, I don't have to worry about my content, it's all up there in the cloud, safe and sound.

  I remember in the past, you needed an external drive to backup all your content, so you can format your machine (when I used Windows) and then copy things back it was a pain and a long process. It looks like in the future you won't really need a hard drive or local storage, specially if prices keep dropping so fast. What's your storage/backup strategy?  

5 Months using a chromebook

  

Acer C720

  I've been using the Chromebook for 5 months now and I can say it's a successful experiment.  It is not for everyone, photo management isn't perfect on it.  And another issue I found over time, is that it doesn't fit into my backup plan, as CrashPlan doesn't support Chromebooks, or ChromeOS.  Google drive is there, but my photo archives are not there.  New photo's are on GDrive now but that is one place, which I can't say it counts as a backup plan.
  I save my photo's on my RAID1 Drives on my desktop, NAS (1 Drive NAS) and remotely to CrashPlan.  I also upload it to SmugMug, am I over securing them, yes but those pictures are precious memories that can't be brought back if lost.  The problem with Photo management on the Chromebook that I can't achieve efficiently is Tagging.
  So lately I've been contemplating re-structuring my backup plan.  I may upgrade my NAS, so that I can use it with my other devices such as Tablet, and Phone, but it needs to have 2 drives.  Once I upgrade my NAS I'll probably cancel my CrashPlan because I'm thinking of getting rid of my Desktop which currently is used by the CrashPlan client, which uploads what's mirrored from my local NAS.
  The Chromebook, and ChromeOS is a great Cloud based computer. I would recommend it for light home users, even elders, as it's low maintenance, can't accidentally install viruses, and you can't really mess up settings on it.  Worst case you do a Powerwash, and start using it with in minutes of restarting it.
  Maybe over time NAS server makers will make applications for the ChromeOS as well. We'll see.