Digital storage ideas needed!

March 5, 2024 6:09 PM

How do you all store your digital photos and files?

What's a good way to store photos and files without breaking the bank or being too inconvenient?

I'm loath to spend more than $1.99 a month for extra Google storage but my Gmail is nearly at it's limit. I pay $1.99 a month and I'm nearly maxed out again and there's nothing I want to delete more of. I have photos and files that I don't want to delete. I use Google photos and Google drive but it seems like the entire Google suite storage doesn't change at all if I move things around.

Several years ago I opened new Emails thinking I would get more storage but at that time it didn't work that way... If I am missing something please let me know. Should I try to login to these other personal Gmail accounts and see if I get more storage in these drives connected with those emails?

Ideally, I want to continue saving photos and files in a cloud not just in a hard drive. Do I need to buy a subscription to something?

I've maxed out Dropbox as well. I'm ND and burned out on things that aren't intuitive to me so any insight others have would be so helpful!!

posted by mxjudyliza to Technology (9 answers total)

I've used additional Google accounts before. A couple years ago I created one just for my genealogy research and it has 15 GB of storage. If you need more than 15 GB at a time, there's a good chance you'll need to pay for it.

I also have paid cloud storage accounts with pCloud and with Icedrive. pCloud is $50 USD annual pricing for 500 GB (possibly for just the first year, then $60). Or you could pay more and get 2 TB. Icedrive has monthly pricing with $5 for 100 GB. With cloud storage, you basically get what you pay for, and sometimes you pay with something other than money, like in the case of Google.

I would start with your other Google accounts, go into Google Drive with them and look at how much storage they have. If it isn't very much, open a new one and look at the storage in that one. I would expect somewhere in the 10-15 GB range per account.
posted by Meldanthral at 7:19 PM on March 5 [1 favorite]

You're going to have to pay more than $1.99/mo for more hassle-free storage. But imo it's worth it.

Both Google and Apple will sell you cloud storage at a decent price for a pretty useful service. I've used both and have no problems with them, but if you're in the Apple ecosystem use iCloud; it works really well with Apple devices.
posted by zippy at 10:00 PM on March 5 [1 favorite]

Well, this may not help much unless you get desperate. I use Dropbox which is a lot more than $2 a month for 2TB. I also bought a Synology DS223 NAS and put 2 six Terabyte drives in it (which is 6TB due to pseudo-RAID). And I bought a couple "Western Digital 4TB My Passport Portable External Hard Drives" on Amazon so basically I have 14TB of space in my home and 2TB in the Cloud, but Dropbox is really only used for stuff I want available when I'm away from home. The DS223 is on my gigabit switch and the My Passport drives are on USB3. Just sharing what I did, FYI.
posted by forthright at 10:09 PM on March 5 [1 favorite]

If you like google photos, it's probably worth paying for the extra google storage just for the sheer convenience. Rolling your own local storage with redundancy is fun and safer against google closing your account but I'm not sure you can do it much cheaper (a single external drive would be fairly cheap, but it would be risky to trust all your data to a single device).

However you might find there's some stuff you can delete in google (maybe you've already done this), if you go to https://drive.google.com/u/0/settings/storage you can see which services (drive / photos / gmail) is using the most storage. Clicking the "Storage" link in photos or drive will show the biggest files on there that you might want to consider deleting. In gmail I think you have to use the search filters - you can search for emails > 100 MB to find any stupidly large ones.
posted by samj at 12:13 AM on March 6 [2 favorites]

I had a similar setup to forthright, but recently moved everything on HD into the cloud. HDs fail, and can do so with no warning. I'd rather spend a bit and have the peace of mind (not to mention physical space back!).
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:24 AM on March 6 [1 favorite]

I have unlimited photo storage on Amazon. I bought a few digital photo centric devices about 7 years ago for a trip, and they offered me this. I'm not usually lucky or special, so look into amazon and see what they're offering, I used one of my storage pics for my holiday card this year and was impressed with the quality. And yes they're giant and evil. I'm poor and I'm happy to take their charity. YMMV.
posted by evilDoug at 8:59 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]

I don't have my phone configured to auto-archive everything to Google Photos in the cloud. Periodically or after a day of shooting, I will download the photos I took to my computer via sharing through dropbox and move them onto hard drives for a light/long-term backups. I then go through the photos to determine which ones are keepers. I'll keep them on my phone and may even move them up to Google Photos if I make them part of an album. Others get deleted from my phone.

This may be more hassle than it's worth to you, but that's how I do it, and it keeps my photo roll limited to the best images while I'm still able to keep everything else in case I find I want it for some reason.
posted by willnot at 9:39 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]

I use Google Photos & Google Drive for the convenience of being able to access my files anywhere, face recognition, and search capabilities. For me, the price is worth it. I tried using Amazon Photos a couple of years ago, but the search capabilities were a deal breaker.

If I had more time and I was on a super tight budget, I'd consider creating multiple Google Accounts. Maybe a new one each year ([e-mail], [e-mail], etc) to keep things cheaper. But watch out for getting your account deleted if you don't log in for 2 years or more.

Unlimited Storage on Amazon Photos is an option (if you don't have videos), but it requires Amazon Prime (currently $139 per year).

There is also the option of getting an old Pixel phone, which offers unlimited photo storage. The Pixel 1 has unlimited photo and video storage on Google Photos in original quality, and the Pixel 2-5 has unlimited storage saver quality for photos and videos. Then you have to hassle with getting your photos/videos onto the older device and uploading them to Google Photos from that device (besides the cost of getting the pixel on eBay). I also don't trust that Google won't kill this option in the future since they recently killed unlimited storage for colleges.

NextCloud is another option if you want access to your photos remotely and are comfortable with setting it up. I did that a few years back but was never happy with the speed of things and the little quirks it had.

If you decide to stick with Google Drive, you might want to use Filerev, which will show you where most of your storage space is being used. This could potentially help you stay on Google's free offering. I used it previously to free up a couple Terabytes of data in my account. It helped me see my largest folders and the shocking amount of duplicate files that I had. They have a free offering, but I ended up purchasing it for a month (for my large account).

And...don't forget about backups. I personally download all of my data in Google Drive (using Google Takeout) once per month. I download my data onto a couple of external hard drives and then unplug them for cold storage. I've considered using S3 for this as well but never wanted to go through the hassle of setting it up.

I hope that gives you some ideas to work with. :-)
posted by tedwhite at 1:12 PM on March 16 [1 favorite]

If you're okay with some upfront cost, you could get yourself a NAS (from, for example, Western Digital or Synology and host it yourself. This would give you the same remote cloud access (I have a Syn which has a photos app with rudimentary 'identify this face' tech) with the flexibility of a server you could use for other things as well (media streaming, etc) and not giving Google more of your information.

Any multi-drive NAS is going to be more secure in terms of data safety than putting it all on a single drive that could fail.
posted by softlord at 3:20 PM on March 28