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PSA: Google’s free cloud photo storage ends in 2 weeks – Here are eight alternatives

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Last November, Google announced that its free unlimited photo backup was going to end and it would all fall under the free shared 15GB get you with Google’s other services, like Gmail and Google Drive. Now, it’s almost upon us, with the service set to shut down on June 1st. You can, of course, upgrade to Google One (although there’s no “Unlimited” package), but what are your alternatives?

Well, none of the alternatives are really free, either. Not for unlimited storage, anyway. But with Google shifting over to a paid-only option with minimal free storage, the advantage they once had is now gone. Here we take a look at a few of the competing services for you to check out and see which best fits your needs.

5 alternatives to Google Photos cloud storage for backing up your work

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Google Photos has been one of the best photo hosting cloud services out there, offering storage for an unlimited number of your photos absolutely free – as long as you didn’t mind a slight hit in image quality. But that is coming to an end and Google is abandoning its free tier. You still get your free 15GB (shared across all Google services, like Gmail, etc), but if you want any more than that, you’ll have to pay now.

It was a sweet ride while it lasted, and there aren’t really any great free alternatives out there now. But now that you do have to pay, what are the other top paid alternatives out there? Let’s take a look at five of them.

Backup Workflow using BitTorrent Sync and Crashplan

Backups! We all need them, we hardly make ‘em!

Over the years, as a digital artist, I have on occasion lost bodies of work. I lost them when building a new PC, I lost them when my drive crashed, fell, burnt, and I even lost them while watching in horror as I mistakenly said yes to “are you sure you want to format drive D”?.

Data keeps piling up, and to keep everything archived we need at least double the amount of drive space.

Luckily I don’t do animation anymore so my projects aren’t that super large anymore, but I have been photographing and editing work for a couple of years now and the data pile keeps growing. Next to that I kept running out of space locally, and kept buying new drives for my Drobo to accommodate my expanding archive. The problem with new drives to store your projects is that you need to copy your data over and over, you get sloppy, you forget projects, you ignore folders, and in the end you lost some precious pictures in the transfer process.

I’m a creative artist, and even though I have OCD tendencies, I get bored with tedious tasks and mistakes are easily made.  I needed a better backup plan to safeguard my body of work, without having to spend too much time on this task.

Now there are numerous ways to maintain a backup, but I’m going to share one that has been working for me the past few years, and makes me feel secure about my data.

here’s my hardware setup:

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