Some say Smugmug is expensive....BUT

Art Scott

Some say Smugmug is expensive....BUT ...... I found this site for archiving your photos and boasting a 4000 pro membership.....Guess they haven't found SM yet.....of course this other site does offer archiving of 400+ file formats including raw and tif.....BUT.....at $1000 per tb




just some food for thought

Seymore

But my question back to the naysayers... "What are your PICies worth to you?"
SM is, if nothing else, a cost effective backup.

Art Scott

Seymore wrote:

But my question back to the naysayers... "What are your PICies worth to you?"
SM is, if nothing else, a cost effective backup.

Exactly my point........

tsk1979

SM is not really a backup if you shoot RAW. If there was TIFF support, well then things would be different.

claudermilk

$1k per TB? That is pretty darn expensive. Let's see, head over to Newegg...yep, I can buy 2 of those new Hitachi 1TB SATA II drives and still have $200 change. Or, to be more cost-effective how about 4 Samsung 500GB SATA II drives for $460. Heck, make that a RAID10, then buy another set for backup--I still have $80 change. OK, so I don't have all the online tools, but it's not much more for a SM Pro account...oh and that's another backup, too (if you're counting that's nearly triplicate backed-up).

thebigsky

tsk1979 wrote:

SM is not really a backup if you shoot RAW. If there was TIFF support, well then things would be different.

I'd love TIFF support, I wonder if there are any plans... ?

Charlie

Art Scott

tsk1979 wrote:

SM is not really a backup if you shoot RAW. If there was TIFF support, well then things would be different.

You are exactly correct on the fact that SM cannot be a back up for tiffs of raw....but it is a back up for all the finalized completed jpgs you have and hopefully you will never need to go back and toiuch your Raw files or tiffs if you are saving as tif.....but at the price of Hdd's I just can't see spending $1k / yr / tb......that buys a lot of hdd's and have some left over for a Cf card or two.....

Art Scott

claudermilk wrote:

$1k per TB? That is pretty darn expensive. Let's see, head over to Newegg...yep, I can buy 2 of those new Hitachi 1TB SATA II drives and still have $200 change. Or, to be more cost-effective how about 4 Samsung 500GB SATA II drives for $460. Heck, make that a RAID10, then buy another set for backup--I still have $80 change. OK, so I don't have all the online tools, but it's not much more for a SM Pro account...oh and that's another backup, too (if you're counting that's nearly triplicate backed-up).

If your hooking them up externally well go with the P-ata drives for somewhat less and still ahve good speed with usb2........I just can't see how it can be cost effective.....but it is a choice......

Art Scott

thebigsky wrote:

I'd love TIFF support, I wonder if there are any plans... ?

Charlie

That would be nice...but I think I would prefer Raw support....and Raw is a smaller file to store.....

denisegoldberg

If you're looking for offsite backup for file types not supported by SmugMug, did you see Andy's post about using Amazon S3 & JungleDisk for backups - http://www.dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=549081&postcount=29?

I just started using Amazon S3 for backups - after one of my two external drives that I use for backups started getting I/O errors. Ouch! I think that the prices are quite reasonable, although to be honest I don't yet have terabytes worth of data yet.

You can see a description of the service, along with prices - which by the way went down on June 1st, on this page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261.

--- Denise

urbanaries

re: photoshelter

I agree with Art 100% that if you're looking for a backup, photoshelter is way overpriced.

I do like smugmug for its archiving of my finalized JPEGs. I joined in October and have approx. 50 shoots on SM, including four weddings, and I'm only at 8 GB. So until RAW is supported, I can't imagine I'd get anywhere near a TB of final JPEGs. (Now my personal RAW backup drives are another matter).

One aspect Photoshelter does that is quite attractive is letting pros charge for non-prints online. They use EZprints as a printer, and the custom pricing module is very similar to SM, but pros can put non-printed products (like sitting fees, CDs, ASUKA books, design fees, anything really) in the shopping cart, and collect profit on those, as well. I am not sure what's keeping SM from doing this, if its accounting or programming or what, but they'd make a ton of money off me in no-overhead sales.

In my book, that makes it worth looking at from a pro standpoint...it's an ecommerce solution, and keeps my clients from making three or four transactions in different methods. (Check for sitting fee, CC for prints, another check if they want a CD, etc).

claudermilk

Art Scott wrote:

If your hooking them up externally well go with the P-ata drives for somewhat less and still ahve good speed with usb2........I just can't see how it can be cost effective.....but it is a choice......

I am currently using removable trays in the 5 1/4" bays--native SATA II. The other option when talking this many drives is a NAS like the Infrant or Buffalo units. OK, checked, Infrant uses SATA, Buffalo uses PATA. Anyway, either interface is much cheaper and more effective. PATA is just a bit cheaper than SATA; depends on your interface to the computer as to whether the interface speed difference matters. My preference would be the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+, uses 4 SATA drives in hot-swappable trays with their trick X-RAID. OK, so you blow that $1k pricetag initially ($615 for an empty unit plus whatever your drives cost), but seems like a better deal to me.

bham

I just got a 500GB external drive for $140 so I could have had 1TB for $280 or 2TB (one for original, other for backup) for $560. So I guess that the $1000 is quite high. Does it say for what time period that is.

Amazon S3 is .15 GB for storage / month. That is $150 a month for a 1 TB. So you hit over the $1000 mark at 7 months. That doesn't include the data transfer in and out costs.

denisegoldberg

bham wrote:

Amazon S3 is .15 GB for storage / month. That is $150 a month for a 1 TB. So you hit over the $1000 mark at 7 months. That doesn't include the data transfer in and out costs.

Excellent point. With the data volumes that are being tossed around on this thread, that's probably not a good solution.

I have nowhere near that volume, so Amazon S3 works for me for now. I'm using it to backup all of my photos - although I suppose I could created some backup (but not public) galleries on smugmug. That doesn't handle the non-photo files though, which certainly could go to Amazon S3 for significantly less money since there are less of them, and they tend to be smaller.

But - I was using two external drives for backup and had one fail. No problem, I still had one. A second issue for me is that I really wanted offsite storage. Call me silly, but all I could think about is losing everything in a fire (or some other environmental disaster).

--- Denise

bham

Checked the link at Photoshelter and the $1000 / 1 TB is for one year, they have a 500 GB for $600 also for a year.

So for a year the photoshelter is cheaper than S3.

Cost for S3
$150 (.15 per GB x1000) a month for S3 x 12 = $1800 a year to store 1 TB
$75 (.15 per Gb x500) a month for S3 x 12 = $900 a year to store 500 GB