If I wanted to store, say, a 100 GB of photographs (jpeg and raw formats), roughly how much would it cost me per month just for the storage? Let's say I would upload one big archive of photos in the beginning, and then re-archive the photo collection whenever I add significantly more photos to the collection (after a vacation or a birthday).
To go just by the stated pricing of Tarsnap, this would cost me $25 per month for the storage. But then I also see mention of users with terabytes worth of archives who pay less than $10 a month. I read the FAQ entry which explains how this happens, but that does not really tell me whether I can hope for such savings when it comes to photos. Do photo collections (raw/jpeg/both) "shrink" significantly from the deduplication and compression of Tarsnap? I think they don't (and that the savings apply to incremental backups), but it would be great if you could make this clear. Thank you!
Tarsnap won't be able to shrink your photos by using deduplication and/or compression. I guess users paying 10$/mo with terabytes of data stored, have massive advantages of both, but it all depends on your usage.
If you are going to store 100GB of photos with Tarsnap, I'd guess it would be close to 25$ as you said. If you just want your photo collection for disaster recovery, you could check out Glacier instead, which is a lot cheaper.
I'll start with my disclaimer that I'm founder of Trovebox and this isn't a sales pitch because we've focused Trovebox for business use.
Great, that's out of the way. Storing and archiving photos & videos is near and dear to my heart [1] and I believe that cloud storage is one piece of answering yes to the question of "will I have my photos in 50 years?". My entire Shuttleworth Fellowship is based on this.
Here's my $.02.
Cost - we haven't yet but have all the pieces to use Amazon Glacier for storage of high resolution originals. That means storing 100 GB will cost you $1 / month. There's additional costs to keep thumbnails in S3 for immediate access -- my estimate is <$3 all inclusive for that 100GB.
Ownership / Portability - a big part of my fellowship is to see how a hosted service (ala Flickr) can provide 100% ownership and portability. The solution is to let users (optionally) bring their own storage. So you can use the Trovebox software connected to your own Glacier and S3 bucket.
Functionality - I think organization, viewing, sharing and archiving should be merged together. Instead of having your sharable photos in one place and your archives in another --- why aren't they combined?
I work with wedding & portrait photographers who shoot 100GB or more in a single weekend. So, within a couple years they could be looking at $100/mo+. And it just grows from there.
This is the fundamental problem I've always seen with cloud storage for photo/video pros (or hobbyists): they need long-term storage but the bill just keeps growing. Should they be expected to pay $1k/mo after they've been in business 10 years?
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On a separate note, how are you doing RAW <-> JPEG conversion on the server?
The bill would keep going up, yes. But that's the nature of any growing collection - even if you're using a drobo at home.
The only hope is that cloud storage goes down over those same 10 years at a rate which makes it continually affordable. But it won't always be a fixed cost since the number of photos keeps going up.
The RAW -> JPEG conversion is done using ufraw [1]. We originally tried extracting the thumbnails so the JPEGs would use conversion settings from the camera but most of the thumbnails are too small to do anything useful with.
That also assumes we've reached "peak megapixel" ... it seems to have plateaued recently but I'm not convinced a RAW file in 5 years will be about the same size as now.
To go just by the stated pricing of Tarsnap, this would cost me $25 per month for the storage. But then I also see mention of users with terabytes worth of archives who pay less than $10 a month. I read the FAQ entry which explains how this happens, but that does not really tell me whether I can hope for such savings when it comes to photos. Do photo collections (raw/jpeg/both) "shrink" significantly from the deduplication and compression of Tarsnap? I think they don't (and that the savings apply to incremental backups), but it would be great if you could make this clear. Thank you!