Hey everyone, I'm a part-time photographer like many of you, and one thing I've always struggled with is finding a cloud backup system that I can afford. I know this method isn't perfect for everyone, and I'll probably get some flak for it, but in case you are a hobbyist or part-timer who relies on physical hard drives for your backups, this is an affordable method I found to keep your work safe.

Just to be clear, I say nice things about these services in this post, but I'm not paid or sponsored by any companies mentioned here. I've learned the hard way that proper backups are important and I just want to help people out if I can.

Cloud storage has been part of my workflow for years now in the form of Dropbox, Google Drive, and other services that help me deliver photos. These services are excellent for client delivery and other uses, but I have struggled to find a solution for cloud storage of my RAW images and high-res JPGs in addition to my hard drives that I do physical backups on.

What I need from a cloud storage service as a photographer

• Inexpensive
• Handle multiple terabytes of photos
• Can sync locally to my computer for offline access
• Can access my archives anywhere I have internet

Pairing Amazon Drive and odrive fits all of these criteria. Amazingly, Amazon Drive comes at the cost of an Amazon Prime membership (currently $11/mo or $99/yr), while odrive is free.

Amazon Drive

As of now, Amazon Drive offers unlimited photo storage for certain file types, including both raw and jpg photos for personal use. The service comes at the cost of an Amazon Prime subscription.

The problem with this service is that it's clunky, hard to upload, download, and navigate through the web interface. It's not useless on its own, but it's annoying. This is where odrive comes in.

odrive

odrive is a pretty slick little application. It allows you to hook up all sorts of cloud storage services to harness their space together, but the one I care about is Amazon Drive. When you install odrive, it creates a local folder hierarchy on your computer, similar to Dropbox's application.

But the magical part of odrive is that it creates placeholder folders that take up zero disk space on your computer. Meaning not only can you see everything you have on the cloud, but you can navigate through all of your Amazon Drive folders straight from your local folder, but also sync and unsync files and folders up and down from the cloud. Uploading files is as easy as copy/pasting a folder into your "odrive" folder, waiting for the files to upload, then right-clicking and unsyncing it.

When you combine them, you essentially get unlimited cloud photo storage which is easily accessible from your computer, no need to even launch a web browser.

Here are a few screenshots of my setup:

Syncing folder

It's important to remember that just because your data is in the cloud doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be safe. We know Amazon isn't going out of business anytime soon, but it's not impossible to think they could discontinue the Amazon Drive program at some point in the future, or remove it from Prime's offerings, or simply install storage limits for photos. Make sure you have other backups of your data and don't rely on this method alone.

A word of warning… Amazon Drive's terms of service limit your use of the service to personal, non-commercial use. How do we interpret that? I'm not certain. The way the ToS is phrased may be to prevent people from using Amazon Drive as a client delivery system, but allow us to store images for "personal archives," but use this setup at your own risk.

I wrote this short overview for Reddit, but I have a more in-depth version of this post on my blog if anyone is interested — ask in a comment or PM me and I'll send the link… not sure if it's against the rules to include it in this post.

Hope this helps someone!