So, a year ago I started backing up to HubiC after my previous backup service decided to stop servicing retail customers. At the time, HubiC seemed on paper like a great option — potentially offering the simplicity and utility of DropBox with effectively unlimited storage capacity.
In practice, HubiC is useless. I’ve had a 2012 Mac Pro constantly connected to HubiC via a fast cable connection for 12 months and managed to back up only about 1/4 of the files I’ve pointed at it. The damn thing breaks down constantly. Every time I log in it wants me to change passwords. They just billed me for renewal, but I’m two days late and I can’t cancel my account without paying for another year. Good luck with that, guys.
Now, I haven’t been sitting on my hands while I watch HubiC fail to deliver on any of its promises. Most of my stuff continues to be backed up locally via Time Machine. The stuff I work on is stored in the cloud (iCloud, GitHub, Google Drive, and/or DropBox).
My big problem is photographs and video.
Now, when Flickr raised its “free” tier to offer 1TB of cloud storage for JPEGs, I jumped on that. It may not be RAW storage, but it’s better than nothing, and 1TB is enough space for a huge number of JPEGs. The big problem, Flickr’s (since discontinued) auto-uploader was so stupidly designed that it successfully rendered my Flickr account borderline useless (it created an album for every folder it found an image in, and it uploaded every image it found, including things like UI images inside applications and development trees, so I have “albums” comprising sprites from sample game development projects and logos for PHP templates) and Flickr’s account management tools look and work like something an intern abandoned in 2005, so just deleting stuff is an exercise in frustration. It looks to me like Flickr’s abandonware API isn’t really up to the task of even supporting a third party application to untangle the mess.
And of course, since Yahoo changed hands and various security scandals unfolded just logging into Yahoo accounts is a pain, and you need to navigate ads to even get into your account. Yahoo is the GeoCities of 2018.
Recently, Google raised the “free” tier of photos.google.com to unlimited storage of photos where RAW files are JPEGs are processed into high-but-not-full-quality JPEGs on-the-fly. I’ve tried it and it’s pretty damn good. The uploader is smart enough to skip files that are clearly not important photos (e.g. too small, wrong format) and ignore obvious duplicates. The problems are (i) that the uploader application periodically just hangs and needs to be manually killed and restarted (ii) the web app seems to be weirdly slow and unreliable (I can log on with two machines side-by-side and they’ll see different subsets of my photos), (iii) no Apple TV support, and (iv) online photo editor seems to need one or two extra clicks to accomplish anything (but it’s a lot better than nothing). I’m pretty confident that my stuff is there, just not in my ability to see a given photo from a given machine on a given day. It’s certainly the most complete, easy-to-navigate, and shareable archive I’ve ever managed to create of my photographs. And if I can find a photo there, I can locate the original RAW image pretty easily.
Now, the absolute best system for dealing with my photographs thus far is iCloud. If I could simply rent 10TB from iCloud for a reasonable price (let’s say, $25/month) and get my Mac to automatically sync multiple volumes to iCloud, my problem would be solved. Obviously, I’m a happy Apple customer. If I were a more-than-casual Windows or Linux user then this would not be a useful option to me, and I’m not sure what I’d do, because I’m pretty sure there’s no equivalently seamless option for people who don’t want to pay the “Apple Tax”. Google Drive isn’t even a tolerable substitute for DropBox (although I think it has Sharepoint beaten).
Here’s where iCloud beats all other options:
- I don’t need to think about it or do anything. (Well, on a desktop device, I need to NOT avoid storing my data in iCloud) If I take a photo, then it ends up in the cloud pretty quickly (basically, when the device gets recharged while on a LAN, if not sooner).
- By default, full-resolution images are not propagated to all my devices (as would be the case for DropBox, or Hubic if it actually worked). Instead, as with everything in iCloud it’s available on-demand. (Indeed, it’s a bit reminiscent of the way iTunes deals with movies… superficially less convenient than pure streaming, but a lot more flexible and useful in practice).
- If I ingest a RAW photo from a camera onto a device, then it’s in the cloud and available from any device on-demand (but it’s not wasting space on all my devices).
- If I want to work on a photo, I can use the best native tools that are available on the device I’m using — seamlessly (although I’m inclined to actively avoid Adobe applications because Adobe’s workflow involves use of Adobe’s barely functional Cloud ecosystem).
The big problem — of course there has to be one — is that Apple’s highest storage tier is 2TB. I’m currently on 200GB which is plenty for the stuff I need that isn’t photos and videos, but hopelessly inadequate for photos and videos. 2TB (the next tier up, and it’s competitively priced) would be sufficient for my photos and videos if I were to curate them, but I don’t want to curate shit. I want to dump it in the cloud and not think about it.
Missing in Action
All of this adds up to a bunch of pretty disappointing non-solutions. Even though Apple provides a file sync system that works pretty well for personal photographs, it wouldn’t work for say a small photography business. (I guess you could use some kind of “family plan” but I’m pretty sure that would run you into weirdness pretty fast.) And it’s not like we’re talking advanced workflow support here — I just want my photos backed up and available.
Where is a tool that automatically detects blurred, underexposed, or overexposed photos and flags them as less worthy of backup? (Google’s photos app does a pretty good job of automatically correcting exposure, I wonder if it’s smart enough to task the uploader with going back to the RAW and reprocessing and re-uploading the photo?)
Where is the tool that remembers which photos have been opened or zoomed in and flags them as more interesting or worthy of backup?
Where is the tool that correlates the GPS location data of your iPhone photos and tentatively applies them to your corresponding camera photos?
Aperture used to collect photos from bursts into a single set and represent them with what it guessed was the best one. Where did this idea disappear to?
There’s a ton of low-hanging fruit here. Someone, please do something. I’m busy.