With the recent changes to my choice of catalogue being Capture One, my attention then turned to long-term online storage. I already have multiple backups:-

• A Two terabyte Hard Drive in the PC.

• Two terabytes of Solid State storage in the Laptop.

• Sixteen terabytes of storage in the TerraMaster USB-C unit.

• Two, Transcend 4 TB Rugged Portable Hard Drives, one blue, the other purple.

Bit of a headache to keep the backups the same and not lose anything but so far it’s been ok. The issue is that all of the devices are on one site. God forbid anything to happen to them but it is possible and I have no online storage.

Step forward, the online storage service, Dropbox, which thankfully for the environment is not the one-use cardboard box that the icon depicts.

I have signed up for a 30-day trial for two terabytes of storage. If its upload speed is anything to go by I might need that time to upload the 122k files in 2639 folders totalling 756 GB of data that I currently have! This is over ten years’ worth of archived data created since I started photography.

I tried a few experiments to see if my idea was viable. The Laptop and PC have identical folder structures, the main catalogue resides on the secondary D: drive. If I make a change to a file on the PC, back it up to the external units and sync with the Laptop then I continue with an identical archive.

Would Dropbox do the same? In theory, once the catalogue is synced online and I have Dropbox running on the PC and Laptop, would any changes be synced too? I moved part of the Catalogue to the Dropbox folder on the PC and waited till it was fully synced online, then waited till it had synced to the Laptop location too. I made a small change to an image in Capture One on the Laptop.

I immediately saw Dropbox had noticed the change and uploaded the file. I used Remote Desktop to jump to the PC, I saw that copy of Dropbox had already downloaded the update, on opening Capture One on the PC I could see the change. So this is near real-time updates? Ok, the settings file in the Capture One folder is very small but in theory, I could be in the studio taking shots direct to the hard drive, in a folder within the Dropbox folder, and using the facilities WiFi it would begin to upload the files plus any settings I choose to change. If my PC was on and logged in it would then get all the updates as they came in. Not only would I immediately have a backup of the work on my laptop that would also have any changes.

Another advantage would be when I get asked to deploy shots from a show, either due to missing files or personal circumstances, I can now use my mobile to share links of shows and shots where ever I am. Currently, I have to wait till I am at home to do so.

I would not think there is any advantage to having the Capture One Session file in the same location. I don’t make use of the Albums and I cannot make nested Groups like I could if I was using the Catalogue version.

Once the full sync with Dropbox, the PC and the Laptop has been completed then I can experiment further and decide if I want to keep this set up. It would mean Dropbox would be the main backup, while the Terra Master USB-C unit and the two Transcend portable hard drives would be secondary and tertiary backups.

Two days later….

So it seems to work… I now have the whole archive up on the cloud and both my PC and my Laptop pointing at it with identical local archives on both secondary D: drives.

If I edit one file, be it a full PSD/TIFF image or make the slightest change to an image in Capture one then I can see the Dropbox icon upload/download the changes.

So what are the advantages? Well, let’s see what happens if I…

• Delete a file: It gets deleted online and on the opposing device.

• Move a file: It gets moved, not uploaded again.

• Copy a massive while that is already uploaded: It creates a copy, it does not upload another. Tested with a 1.8 gig video file.

• Copy a folder, (330 files / 668 meg) and rename the files something silly: Takes a while, but it makes copies and then renames them, it took about a minute, far faster than copying them back up to the cloud storage.

So this is really like an instant change, as much as instant as both my internet connection and Dropbox can do.

So what does this mean for my existing backups? The online Dropbox, the Laptop and the PC archives are now the master copies provided they connect to each other at some point close to when a file has been updated.

The USB-C Terra box and the two Transcend drives will become written to only. They will be mirror copies of the central archives and can be read from only when needed.

Do I have too many backups now? You can never have enough and it all starts from the first time you lose a file or a large backup, you only do it once and from then on you will have something in place be thinking about it.

The Transcend devices are easily portable compared to the Terra box so they can come with me on a remote studio group if I want a quick backup if the local WiFi is not fast enough to upload the files in the time required.