A couple posts ago I wrote about my struggles to make some sense of all the cloud storage I have, and what to do with the spaces that are scattered around the Internet. As I’ve been working through this I’ve started to make some final decisions. I’ve upgraded a couple things now that should bring some stability for at least the next year.
My motivation for doing all this, and my hesitation and nervousness as I’ve worked my way through this process, has been my pictures. I am incredibly paranoid about losing the photos I have on my phone of my children, in particular. One of the major reasons I purchased my 128GB iPhone 6, other than to be able to store every single MP3 I have locally on the device, is to make sure I have room for my pictures. All my pictures.
I have pictures of my children on my phone that were taken with an iPhone 3G. I like having those photos there on my phone always accessible. I have them backed up in several different places, both locally on my hard drives at home (both internal and external to my desktop) as well as in several different cloud locations. I do not want to ever lose any of them, and I take those insane steps to ensure that doesn’t happen.
The root of this problem is that I have not been able to fully trust iCloud and how Apple treats pictures. For example, Apple seemingly arbitrarily separates out photos on the Camera Roll from other types of pictures. Why? If I take a picture it should go with all the other pictures on my phone. One spot. Easy. The iPhone has never done this–or at least done it very well.
Apple is trying though–at least I think so. Enabling the iCloud Photo Library is a step to make sure that all pictures go into one place, and can be accessible anywhere. But again, when I went to turn on the Photo Library on my iPhone I was presented with a message that doing so would remove 3,000+ photos and videos from my phone. What? Why? If I turn on the iCloud Photo Library it should automatically take every picture and video on my phone that isn’t stored on iCloud and upload it. There is no reason for this. This is also not the first time changing a setting on my iPhone has hit me with a warning such as this.
That is a perfect example of why I haven’t been able to fully trust Apple and iCloud with the well-being of my pictures and videos. Because of this, I took Microsoft up on their offer of a free year of Office365, which includes 1TB of storage space on OneDrive. It’s ironic the one service I’ve come to trust to securely store photos and videos from my iPhone is a Microsoft app.
Since signing up with Office365/OneDrive for a year, I triple-checked that every photo, video, slo-mo, burst, and panoramic image on my phone was backed up in several different locations including fully imported in to Apple’s Photos program on my MacBook, and then copying all of the files out of Photos and into a separate folder elsewhere on the Mac’s hard drive. Then…reluctantly…hesitantly…with both fingers crossed…I took the plunge, and enabled the iCloud Photo Library warning and all.
As it stands now, a couple days after agreeing to have a few thousand image and video files wiped off my phone…things seem to be OK. Everything that was in Photos now shows up in iCloud and on my iPhone. I’ve also added many more pictures taken with a digital camera dating back to 2006 to the iCloud Photo Library, and those images are now available on every device I have connected to iCloud as well.
So now, after all of that (largely self-inflicted) grief and consternation, I return to my original premise of what to do with all of the cloud storage options I have. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
- iCloud: Primary home for all digital photos and videos, and Apple device backups
- I currently have more than half of my 50GB allotment free, so this space should last a while.
- OneDrive: Primary photo and video backup
- The one issue with iCloud I want to guard against is a mistaken edit or file deletion cascading across all of my synced devices I before I could stop it. OneDrive will serve that role for now. I’ll be revisiting this decision in a year’s time when Microsoft wants $70 to continue my subscription.
- Google Drive: Personal file sharing across all my devices
- Since I use Chrome as my primary browser this will be the easiest place to transfer personal files around to each device.
- Box: Work file sharing
- My institution has an enterprise license for Box, so I’ll store work-related files and documents in it. This will let me be more mobile in where I work, and make sure that my personal and work files don’t become intermingled. My personal Box account will now lay fallow.
- Dropbox: Abandoned
- I’ll keep my account, and likely even keep the sync client installed on my desktop at home. However, with it’s comparatively tiny space allocation verses the other options I have available it will likely stay unused and empty.
We’ll see how long this lasts.