If you ask 3 photographers how they store and backup their photos, you’ll likely get 3 different answers. But maybe even that is too generous. If you ask the same photographer how they store and backup their photos over the course of 5 years, you may still get 3 different answers. I recently needed to offload some of my files from my main desktop to free up some space and that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole in terms of revamping my storage process. Over the course of a couple PC builds, I have some hard drives laying around but they’re all quite old and honestly, I don’t know that I would trust having data on them for the next few years. I also don’t have that much data to store currently (~200GB) and so going out and buying another hard drive that I might fill up before needing to replace it seemed like a waste. And of course, I could keep my old hard drives and supplement but that would likely require a RAID or similar set up in order for me to feel comfortable in the data’s integrity. 

 

 

All in all, I was looking at laying out at least a few hundred dollars to set up a home system that I trusted and integrated well into my workflow. It also meant I was going to have to upkeep the system (both physically with components as well as with software and similar) and so I started looking at some other potential options. One that stuck out was AWS because they offer a way to use both frequent access storage as well as cold storage. Most of the data that I need to store doesn’t need to be accessed often and when that is the case cold storage is particularly attractive. Pricing for S3 data needs to take into account both the size of the files being stored as well as the frequency of access. 

 

 

Standard S3 storage is the cheapest in terms of accessing your data but it’s also the most costly in terms of price per GB/month. This storage for me is most useful for my most recent photos where I may want to re-edit, export, et cetera and so it makes sense to keep it accessible. Of course, I don’t immediately delete my local copies and so many times, I wouldn’t be accessing the cloud storage anyway but it is still useful if I’m working on my laptop and want to modify anything while the local copy is on my desktop. 30 Days after uploading, my files will automatically go to infrequent access storage. This is a kind of middle ground – it’s about 45% cheaper per GB/month than standard S3 but most accessing operations cost about double. Finally, 60 days after upload, my files will go to Glacier Instant Retrieval (GIR). GIR storage is a whopping 82.5% cheaper than standard S3 but most accessing operations are about 4x the cost of standard.

 

I’ve now moved close to 200GB from old hard drives into S3 and so far, have been extremely pleased with it. I’m currently paying about $0.03/day for storage costs and get a lot of peace of mind by not having to worry about my own hardware failing or keeping track of when things need to be replaced. Plus, I’m not paying for empty storage space on a drive of my own!

Featured image is a Great Blue Heron in Maryland, taken on one of my first outings with my Fujifilm X-T5. Unfortunately, due to not fully being prepared for the file sizes and a low bar for culling, I no longer have the raw files for some of these earliest shots that I’m fond of.