Tech dummy here, please explain online backup options for pics and documents

[ang79]

I'm pretty clueless so could use some good input here! I really need a good backup option to store things (especially pictures) and I keep putting it off. DD1 was just working on a school project and needed some pictures and I realized we have pictures stored on 3 different laptops and a desktop! Two of the laptops are older ones that I don't really use (the girls sometimes play games on them). Some of my pics have been transferred to Dropbox and some are stored at Shutterfly and Snapfish (from when I make cards and calendars). What is the best (preferably free) place to store them all together? I also use Dropbox to store some files for my Girl Scout troop. Is that the best option for everything or would something else be better? Oh, my new Acer laptop that I got for Christmas also has OneDrive on it but I haven't really used it yet.

[rolypoly27]

We backup to an external hard drive attached to our computer, then we back up the external hard drive to Crashplan offsite.

[mom2khj]

C/P my response on another thread about photo storage because it answers this question too. Both my services are paid though.

I use Lightroom to edit and manage them on an external drive from my laptop. This drive gets backed up to CrashPlan automatically. They are organized by year/month/event, sometimes folders for longer spanning events (like soccer seasons, or vacations).
Example:

2015 (main folder)
--2015.01 | Misc (sub-folder for all photos in January that don't really fit in an event, I have one for each month)
--2015.01.22 | So-and-so's birthday (sub-folder for all photos from that event)
--2015.02-05 | Spring Soccer | U9 (sub-folder for all my 9 year olds soccer photos, each game that I take photos at would have it's own sub-folder)

I use Zenfolio to host/share my photos. I think I have the $60/year plan,, it's unlimited and they do videos too I think. My structure on Zenfolio is almost an exact replica of how I structured them on my hard drive. Lightroom has a super easy plug in (donation-ware) to publish my photos and keep Zenfolio and Lightroom in sync. I also use keywords in Lightroom as much as possible (sometimes I fall behind on this because it can be time consuming), so that if I need to search, it makes it super easy. The tags get uploaded to Zenfolio and I can search there as well too!

[elizamom]

I posted the same question about 6 months ago. I decided to use two external hard drives to back up my pictures. At the time, the cost of cloud storage didn't make sense for my purposes.
I organize my pictures by year and then month.