What do you use to store and back up personal photos?

[musicalgrl]

I've been looking at a few options and would like to have a cloud-based backup as well as a physical backup of my photos. I'd love to hear what sites or combinations of things are working well for you.

[Globetrotter]

I started paying for a tetrabyte worth of storage in iCloud, after losing a bunch of photos with a disastrous Carbonite reboot. It's worth it to me because I instantly get all my photos on all my devices, so I literally have all my digital photos in the palm of my hand. It's nice when I want to look for something, and honestly for me the photos are so precious and I'm kicking myself for trusting Carbonite.

I did once do a physical back up to a portable hard drive, But honestly I haven't done it in months.

[hillview]

Google drive

[wendibird22]

I started paying for a tetrabyte worth of storage in iCloud, after losing a bunch of photos with a disastrous Carbonite reboot. It's worth it to me because I instantly get all my photos on all my devices, so I literally have all my digital photos in the palm of my hand. It's nice when I want to look for something, and honestly for me the photos are so precious and I'm kicking myself for trusting Carbonite.

I did once do a physical back up to a portable hard drive, But honestly I haven't done it in months.

Just know that if you are using Applie iCloud this is a photo sharing mechanism, not a photo archiving mechanism. If you delete the pic from one device it'll delete it from the cloud and all devices.

[Globetrotter]

I keep the messages on all devices, but they are low res on my mobile devices. I like that it's consistent across all devices.
I don't want to do another back up like Carbonite, after my experience, so I like that this is instantaneous and I can check to see that it's happened. And I know I will never do a hard drive back up regularly…
I'm curious to know what other options are out there. I've use Google for sharing but that, as far as I know, is not automatic. I need something automatic.

[94bruin]

Google drive

How do you set this up? Is there a limit? Assuming it's free?

[Liziz]

I keep the messages on all devices, but they are low res on my mobile devices. I like that it's consistent across all devices.
I don't want to do another back up like Carbonite, after my experience, so I like that this is instantaneous and I can check to see that it's happened. And I know I will never do a hard drive back up regularly…
I'm curious to know what other options are out there. I've use Google for sharing but that, as far as I know, is not automatic. I need something automatic.

Oh no, not to highjack, but what was so disastrous about Carbonite? That's what I use right now.

[sariana]

Well, I DON'T use a private server in my basement.

We actually use all physical backups. We download to our main hard drive, which is backed up by a "mirrored" external hard drive. Once we edit the photos we want to use, we put those on CDs (I know, I know).

Any photos I upload to Costco's photo center also are stored there. We have a couple years' worth of holiday photos and a few others on their site, but we don't routinely upload photos to print because our internet connection is too slow to upload the hundreds of photos we usually print at once.

If I were going to use a Cloud service, I probably would use Google Photos. It is connected to Google Drive. I don't know the storage limits, though, or how much it costs to buy more.