3d Content Storage on Onedrive
3dOutlaw
Posts: 2,481
in The Commons
Overlooking issues that Microsoft can see your data, and privacy concerns....
Has anyone setup their content directory in Microsoft OneDrive? I've got like 100+gb of content, but I've got a Terabyte of storage on OneDrive. Seems a good way to not worry then about hard drive failures and losing years of Content. (...yes, I make backups already)
I am curious if anyone has done this, and had any technical issue?
(...or Google Drive or Dropbox, etc)
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Comments
I'm not familiar with MS One Drive but you can save all your content to an external or secondary internal drive. You just need to point DS and DIM to it. If you put your content on a secondary drive then MS can;t monitor it I don't believe.
Isn't onedrive cloud storage? Isn't there EULA restrictions for that?
How fast is your internet? What do you do when the internet is out? What kind of storage/transfer charges do you get hit with if you go over the "free" limits. Or when your terms of service change? Not to mention, what do you do if the cloud storage has a thundersorm and eats your data?
A one Terabyte USB 3.0 external hard drive goes for around 70 bucks these days and even the slowest one will be faster and more reliable. You can get a 5 Terabyte external drive for under $130. Cloud storage is great for keeping a backup copy that's not in the house or for transferring huge files without postage, but unless you get free internet via optical fiber, it's not really a practical solution yet.
I wouldn't use it for storage, but backup is fine. I use crash plan to backup my computer, but again it's not a storage device, its in case of hard drive failure, disaster, etc.
At least in the US, (where Daz supposedly comes from) digital backups have been upheld in court. So backup services are completely legal. I think FirstBastion's concern is sharing, cloud !=sharing.
That comment isn't true, at least not universally. I have two, 1 terabyte drives. I back up about 1 terabyte of my data via crash plan.
Do I update 1 terabyte of data a day? No.
Do I have free internet? No.
Do services such as Crashplan exist because backing up data remotely is viable and pratical now (years ago really), Yes.
Granted your first backup may take several days to complete. Weeks potentially. But one thing about many of the services is you get to choose when they back up, the bandwidth used, which folders, etc etc. They also compress data when they upload so it's not a 1:1 transfer. Anyone serious about their digital assets should have at least one copy outside of their office/home. Whether it's more convient to send trustworthy family hard drives or use an online backup service is up to you.
I have a 2TB C: and 1 2TB and a 4TB internal backup and 1 1TB external that I use as my backups
I use onedrive, dropbox and google drive for some important but not sensative data; anything financial and passwords etc are encrypted. I back up regularly and have disk images to restore windows when it gets slow - quicker than running the various tools.
I don't trust anyone's assurances that their encryption is safe, or that they don't have access to it. Corporations and governments lie as a matter of form.
I have multiple local backups, but you may want one outside of your house or place of work in case of the worst. Not that I wish my house to be flooded or catch a fire, I would be more hurt if I lost 17+ years of work.
Re-read what I said and the question I was referring to. The cloud is fine for backups but lousy for regular storage use. Pretty much exaclty what you said in your first sentence.
Most cloud services are sync services, not just remote storage. They keep a copy "in the cloud," but all your data still resides locally on every machine connected to the account. I'm not familiar with OneDrive in particular, but I see no reason you couldn't keep your content library on such a shared drive beyond possible permission issues. Extended file attributes have a tendency to be stripped unless the synchronization protocol explicitly takes them into account. As a Windows user, I'd say your chances are somewhat better with OneDrive since MS is more than likely going keep your data on a Windows file system than one of the other services (who probably all use Amazon S3).
Anyway, why not test it? Make a copy of one of your content directories and repoint DS at it. While you're testing, save everything in two locations and let us know how it performs after a couple of weeks.
I'm not sure about OneDrive, but I can't use Dropbox for my DAZ and Poser libraries. It has a physical limit on the number of files that my library far exceed. My whole computer ground to a halt when I tried to sync.
So...a correction to the bits about the cloud backup solutions. They are (mostly) designed to back up your "data", not your system, application, or content files. Backing up 3TB on my workstation alone would require 139 days, given my upload speed of 2 Mbps. My laptop's 2.5 TB would take another similar amount of time. Cloud backup systems were not really designed to do that. My "data" (documents, scene files, song project files, etc; probably only amount to a few hundred GB, however.
But to me, the only backup worth considering is one that captures EVERY partition; one that allows me to recover any (or all) partitions from a partial or total disaster, including my system and application partitions, and including some of the huge orchestral libraries I have installed over the years. Some services address this by letting you ship them a "seed" hard drive for that first backup.
Once your service has your seed data, then the backup app copies only changed files. Be aware, however; if you are using a drive defragger, any files that get moved by your defragger's daily/weekly/monthly runs will then be marked as "changed", so your next backup cycle will end up copying those files, driving more data across your network and ISP.
More and more of us are moving toward SSDs, and we are (hopefully) stopping the practice of traditional drive defragging on those partitions that we move to SSD. Most defraggers such as the built-in Windows "optimizer" and Perfect Disk will automatically detect partitions that reside on SSD and will self-configure to only perform a "TRIM" defrag (aka, "SSD Optimize"). But this can still move "some" files around, causing your next backup to include them. Just be aware.
For my own purposes, cloud backup is not really viable. The backup time required is only one part of it. Sure, I could ship a seed backup as mentioned above. But then on that flip side of that, you still have to get the data back down the pipe if you need to do a recovery. ISP download speeds are a lot faster than upload speeds, but a total system recovery (my worst case scenario) would still require 290 hours, or 12 days (at my current download speed of 23 Mbps). And that's just for ONE computer, not both. This is STILL not acceptable.
For some people, an encrypted drive stored in a Pelican case can be kept at a relative's or friend's house, but that's not really a good choice for me, so I am thinking of storing an encrypted offsite backup in a local bank vault, because even considering the drive to the bank, it would still be a lot faster than trying to transfer data over the internet. I've been meaning to get prices on safety deposit boxes, with the idea of storing one full-backup there and maybe replacing it every 2 to 3 months. I'd still have my normal backp drives at home, and then could even consider a cloud backup service for my day-to-day document files (or even just keep them on Dropbox or in Microsoft Onedrive).
I'm guessing that a bank box would probably be comparable to the annual cost of one of these cloud services; but of course you have to remember that using a bank deposit box has its detractions. Even though you might need to restore some data at "oh-dark-thirty", you can't get hands on your offsite backup drive until "banker's hours", so it would always be smart to have local backups available at home and consider the bank backups to be "for tornado/hurricane/fire" disasters where the whole house is gone.
Backup and restore is an important topic, but is often ignored. I know that most of my family members don't take any backups with any sort of regularity...
Hmmm...somehow got unsubscribed to my own thread. :(
Amyway, thanks for the discussion! I may give it a try, but will probably stick to local backup for the time being, until I am more comfy with Windows 10 and how it handles OneDrive.