It’s awesome how many options we have at our fingertips now for storing and backing up our content and raw digital assets. Storage and backup solutions are more abundant, secure, and affordable than when I started shooting content and building sites at the turn of the century.
Despite all of the improvements, choices and access in data storage solutions, as yet none of them are perfect, easy, fast, or worry-free for most webwhores, though. Even when optimally taking advantage of multiple methods to sync, back-up and store content it takes more time, resources and expertise than the average independent content creator can afford … all without much clarity, lifetime guarantees or even easy access should something go wrong (and something ALWAYS goes wrong eventually).
We’ve got “the cloud” now, though! We’ve got sturdy portable hard drives capable of storing many terabytes of data! We’ve got tons of hosting options with redundant backups! We’ve got platforms like OnlyFans publishing our content and maintaining our “vaults” using their huge infrastructure! We’ve got super-cheap “object, file and block storage” via Amazon’s AWS services! We can set up our NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices in a closet at home!
But as I try to upload and backup one small-ish paysite on Dropbox today and upload just over a gig of unedited video (not very much by today’s 4k and HD standards) to Sync (after failing to locate it in the “camera upload” phone sync folder), I’m reminded of how much this fucking SUCKS and is hardly adequate, fast, or fool-proof.
If you shoot your own content that you appear in and do all (or even just half) of the IT, editing, publishing, customer service and admin (on top of trying to stay healthy and look picture perfect while maintaining a clean and photo-shoot-ready home office and studio), all of these way-better-than-Y2K options are still NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
Your backups will not run themselves. Nobody will value and care about preserving your content the way you do, no matter how much you pay them or for how long. And if IT and asset management are not your full time job, operating systems will become outdated, platforms will go out of business, and shit will go down very inconveniently or fail to respond while you still need to be making money and have forgotten the details and specifics of HOW you set up that NAS device in the closet. All while running a business deemed “high risk” and/or politically and socially dangerous leaving you vulnerable to being deplatformed, surveilled, shut down or even having your data seized by the government, your kids taken away from you, and/or your mainstream livelihood, education, or residency threatened if you yourself don’t make your content DISAPPEAR from public view or LE access in a heartbeat after receiving a threat or even just falling victim to a local zoning ordinance change.
Whether you’ve got decades of photos. videos, blog posts and websites, or your first super-awesome cloud-synced phone is just now getting maxed out with high-def files, I’m willing to bet you’d like to be more confident all of that content is securely backed up.
Don’t you wish you had a better, easier, faster, system for organizing, safeguarding, and having fast access to all of the priceless work you’ve done? And that it would stay up to date?
I know I do as I sit here being told by Dropbox to leave my browser open for another 29 days to back up one site.
