There are 3 subscriptions that are used in my photography.

The first is the obvious – I have a legacy Adobe Creative Cloud Photographer’s plan.  This means I still only pay about $16/month after taxes.  I get Lightroom and Photoshop as well as some limited Cloud Storage (~20 GB I think).  Most people are mixed about Adobe – their products are really good and ‘industry standard’ but the company seems like they want to extract as much money from their customers as possible.  I’m also a bit bitter because they should have given me a job back in 2017, which would mean I’d have almost a million dollars of Adobe stock today.

Number 2 is also one you could expect.  I use Backblaze for cloud computer backups.  I’ve actually been using them since at least 2011, but possibly before that.  Backblaze saved my data back in 2017 when my MacBook died and the files were otherwise unretrievable.  When I started they were $5/month for unlimited storage.  Over the years it has creeped up and is now $9.  But I am now storing over 14 TB with them, so the peace of mind is worth it.

The third cloud is one you wouldn’t expect and one I like to use in unusual ways.  I have an Microsoft Office 365 account.  This gives you a bunch of things, but the import one for today is the 1 TB OneDrive.  This is the one we’ll be expanding upon today.  Standard disclaimer, I was a Microsoft vendor in the past and did work with the (at the time) Windows Live Marketing Team which was responsible for the marketing of SkyDrive, which was renamed to OneDrive.  On our team, I was the only person classified as a ‘heavy’ user and thus became the guinea pig anytime they needed to test new campaigns.

Is 1 TB Enough?

No of course not.  I just finished mentioning I have 14 TB in the backup system.

But this came with something I already had – a Family Plan for Microsoft Office.  I was already a fairly heavy OneDrive user so I figured, let’s really use this.

I have used the OneDrive to share files with people for over a decade.  Maybe I’ll clean up the old shares one day, but for today, it doesn’t matter.  I can share hundreds of files with a single link, and as one of the holders of the digital family archive, it is a handy thing to have.

Story Time!

On a recent trip to Iceland, my photos and videos became too much for my laptop.  It simply ran out of drive space.  So how did I abuse OneDrive?

I put around 400 GB of my files into my OneDrive sync’d folders.  I then waited.  Over a few days, and some late nights, I managed to upload all of this to my OneDrive.  Then, I right clicked and hit ‘Free Up Space’ and the files now took up almost no space on my computer and I could refill that space with more images.

When I got home, it was easier to copy the files down from OneDrive than it was to copy from my laptop.  In the background, Microsoft copied my files from the end point in Ireland (where I uploaded to) to an endpoint on the East Coast USA.

Something like this would not be possible in all locations.  Iceland is well known for having excellent internet, and I only ran this backup overnight to be polite to the others in the same hotel.  And unlike many of my recent trips, we were not outside of cell coverage very often.  If this had happened in Greenland, for example, I would have had to start taking cards out of service until I ran out of them.

I would also not do this stunt too often.  At some point, I’m sure the powers that be will notice and cut you off.  A 1-3 TB external USB drive isn’t that expensive.  But for a 1 time, saved my butt.  Yeah, it worked.  And I have all of our dash cam videos from two weeks driving around Iceland.

Let’s Address the Bad Behavior

Yes I know that Microsoft really really really wants you to replace your home documents, desktop, pictures, and some others, with OneDrive sync’d files.  And they are really good at tricking most people into doing this.  They even got me once on my desktop, and for a period of time I thought I’d lost a significant number of files (I’d even begun pulling them back down from Backblaze).  Just know that even if you say yes, and it will tell you the process is irreversible, it is 100% reversable for now.  If this ever changes, I will pull my recommendation for OneDrive.  Even as a cheerleader for this cloud storage, I don’t like this.

I also ran into an issue on the above Iceland trip.  If you have images in a folder that OneDrive syncs, Lightroom can’t open the files until the initial sync completes.  If you are on a slow connection, this could take a day or two.  And let’s not get me started on if your LRCAT folder syncs.  That thing creates so many tiny files that the sync just struggles.  I understand the idea behind this sync and for some less technical users, like my parents, it makes sense.  It also allows all of their files to be available on their various laptops that live in other states.  But I’m a very technical user and don’t need that level of handholding.  Once I’d figured out the trouble, I moved the photo drop spot to somewhere that was outside of the OneDrive sync.

I cannot comment on other cloud drive providers and how they work, I don’t use them very much and it has been a long time since I last used DropBox or Box.

I know right, two post in only a few weeks.  I’m on a roll.  Or a bagel.

-Brad