Using SmugMug As Photo Backup

Ken K

Hi, not sure if this is the right forum to ask this, but I am looking for an online backup solution for my photo images. Would SmugMug be useful for this? I sort my photos by the year they were shot and would like to keep the online backup the same way. Thanks in advance for any input.'

Ken

Hikin' Mike

You can't upload RAW files, so in that respect, no. Uploading JPGs is certainly allowed. I sort-of do that with my stuff. I have a backup here at home, but I do upload copies to SM.

Ferguson

A backup program, to be worthy of the name, must also do versioning and point-in-time restore.

Smugmug doesn't. It's not a backup even if you are a pure JPG shooter.

Backups should be:

• Sufficiently automated you will actually do them
• Provide for multiple copies so any one failure does not lose your backup
• Be OFFLINE most of the time, so malicious activity like ransomware does not have access to the backups and corrupt them
• At least one copy should be off-site away from your computer to protect against fire, flood, theft, etc.
• Must have versioning (maintain a change history) so that user error or bad software that corrupts a file but is not immediately noticed can be recovered to point in time.
• Be testable -- so you can test your backups and know if they are working
• Provide for individual file restore as well as all-data restore

IMO if you can't check off all those items, you are not doing backups, you are doing something else.

EverythingEverywhere

I've begun using Backblaze. They recently removed their upload speed restrictions and I was able to upload over 2TB of RAW files in a little over a week. (I have a gigabit fiber connection).

Richard

It really depends on what your needs are. If you want to protect raw images, then as Mike pointed out, SmugMug is not the answer and you should look into other cloud-based solutions. A backup service can protect all your data, not just photos. OTOH, if all you want to safeguard are JPGs, then SM would be fine, as it has no storage limits and you can organize your photos however you like. If SmugMug is your only backup, you do have to be disciplined about timely uploading. Personally, I rely on two off-line copies of my archive (and my Lightroom catalog) on separate hard disks, but if I were ever to lose both, I at least know that there are copies of my best stuff on SM. Reconstructing the Lightroom catalog would be a pain, but not impossible since I include all the metadata when I upload to SM. I'm not a pro and though I do keep copies of the raw files in my archive, I only rarely go back and reprocess them, so this arrangement is good enough for me. How much time and money you spend on backups should be driven by what it would cost you to lose your pics.