Introducing Giraffe Upload–the perfect backup for your photos

As I wrote in my previous post a good backup has to be both fully automatic and off-site, this means backing your files over the internet.

There are many companies that offer internet based backups and they are a wonderful solution for general files, but pictures are different, they are huge, there are a lot of them and their number tends to grow quickly – this means they take lots of space and for internet based backup you either pay per GB (that can get very expensive quickly) or the upload of large files is very slow (and that means multi-gigabyte uploads are out of the question).

After not being able to find a good solution I wrote my own - Giraffe Upload.

There are two parts in my photo backup strategy:

• An inexpensive place to store your pictures on the internet that can be used for backups (reliable and doesn’t downgrade image quality) – for this I’ve chosen SmugMug ( Free SmugMug Trial ) at just $40/year they are one of the cheapest options available to store photos.
• A way to automatically upload your images to SmugMug – and that’s what Giraffe Upload is for, I’m pricing it starting at $1.5/month.

The cool thing about Giraffe Upload is that it’s completely set-and-forget service, you install it, set some basic settings and forget about it – we monitor your uploads and if there’s nay problem we will e-mail you.

Giraffe Upload is now in private beta, currently it is only used by friends and family but I’ll start opening it up to a wider audience over the next week or two – if you want to join the Giraffe Upload beta just send me a message (I’m sure you can find my e-mail address or the contact links on this page), first come first served.