The message always reads the same. “Hey, quick question, my drive is making a noise and Lightroom won’t open the catalogue, is there a way to…” Usually there isn’t. And the same person was paying $9.99 a month for a cloud plan the whole time, and it held their phone photos, their invoices and a folder called “misc”, and not one RAW file from the last four years.
Cloud storage, cloud backup and client delivery are three different products that all get sold as “the cloud”, and a photographer needs the second one first. So this is a backup guide that happens to price storage: six services, one job each, every plan read off the vendor’s own page. The local half of the setup is the working SSD and the two copy drives, and it is in the external SSD and backup drive guide. This post is the off-site half.
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TLDR
Put Backblaze Personal Backup ($99 a year, unlimited data, one computer) on the machine the catalogue lives on and let it run. If your archive is a fixed size and you hate subscriptions, pCloud Lifetime 2 TB is $499 once, which pays for itself against pCloud’s own $99.99 annual plan in five years. If you deliver galleries, SmugMug Direct ($240 a year) holds unlimited JPEGs and its Source add-on keeps the RAWs for $10 a month per terabyte. Dropbox Plus ($9.99 a month, 2 TB) is for working with clients. The phone layer most of you already pay for is iCloud+ 2 TB ($9.99 a month). Neither of those is a backup. When the archive lives on a NAS, Backblaze B2 at $6.95 per terabyte per month is the off-site copy. I run both: Personal on the edit machine, B2 for the NAS.
Three copies, two kinds of media, one somewhere else
Three copies of every file, on two different kinds of storage. That means an SSD and a spinning drive, or a drive and the cloud. One copy lives in a different building from the other two. The working drive and the local copy are a $540 pair of hard drives in the drive guide. The copy somewhere else is this post. A drive at your parents’ house counts, and I still recommend one, but it only gets updated when you visit. The cloud copy updates every night without you.
Backup, sync and delivery are three different bills
A backup service copies what is on your drives to its servers and keeps the old versions. Delete a folder by accident on Tuesday and it is still there on Wednesday. Backblaze Personal, IDrive and B2 are backup products; you pay per computer or per terabyte stored, and you do not open the files there day to day.
A sync service keeps one folder identical across every device. Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, OneDrive and pCloud Drive all work this way. The same mechanism that puts a file on your laptop removes it from every device when you delete it on one. Most keep deleted files for a window (30 days on Dropbox Plus and on pCloud), and after that the file is gone everywhere. A sync plan sized to your drives, with a long retention window, can stand in for a backup. Most people are not using it that way.
A delivery service is a gallery your clients log into. SmugMug, Pixieset and the rest hold the finished JPEGs, and a few will hold the RAWs for extra money. The gallery is a fine third copy of the edits and no copy at all of the catalogue, the presets or the frames you did not deliver. The delivery comparison is in the client gallery guide. Most photographers need one backup bill and already have a sync bill; studios that deliver every week add the third.
How the six compare
| Service | Plan | Storage | Price per year | RAW handling and retention | The job |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backblaze Personal Backup | Yearly | Unlimited, one computer | $99 ($9 monthly, $189 per two years) | Any file type, any size; old versions kept for 30 days, one year at no extra storage cost; free mailed-drive restore | Backup |
| pCloud | Lifetime 2 TB | 2 TB | $499 once (or $99.99 a year) | Any file; deleted files restorable for 30 days; Encryption add-on $150 lifetime | Sync and archive |
| SmugMug | Direct + Source | Unlimited JPEG galleries + 1 TB RAW | $240 + $120 (Source is $10 a month per TB, then $6 per extra TB) | RAWs only with the Source add-on; galleries stay as long as you pay | Delivery, with a RAW copy |
| Dropbox Plus | Plus | 2 TB | $119.88 ($9.99 a month) | Any file; 30-day version history and deleted-file restore; transfers up to 50 GB | Sync with clients |
| iCloud+ | 2 TB | 2 TB, shared with up to five | $119.88 ($9.99 a month; 6 TB $29.99, 12 TB $59.99 a month) | Phone photos and iCloud Drive; a sync service, not a catalogue backup | Phone and Mac layer |
| Backblaze B2 | Pay as you go | Per TB | $83.40 per TB ($6.95 a month per TB) | Any file; your NAS or backup app sets the versioning; free download up to three times what you store | Studio and NAS off-site |
The picks
Best backup for one computer: Backblaze Personal Backup
$99 a year, unlimited data, no file-type or file-size limit, and if the worst happens Backblaze will put your files on a hard drive and mail it to you for free. The mailed drive is why this is the pick: a 3 TB download over a home connection is days of your life, and a drive in the post is a week and a signature. The monthly plan is $9 and the two-year plan is $189, and the two-year plan is the one to buy if you have ever let a subscription lapse.
The licence covers one computer, so the catalogue drive and the archive drive need to be attached to that machine. Backblaze also only keeps external drives it sees regularly. A drive that lives in a drawer and gets plugged in twice a year is not a backed-up drive. Check the current window on their help pages and plug the archive in on a schedule. The default version history is 30 days. One year of history adds no storage cost, and forever retention is an added fee. For a photo archive, extend it to one year; the mistake you want to undo is the one you notice in March, and 30 days of history will not reach it.
If you have three computers and a fixed archive under 5 TB, IDrive Personal 5 TB is cheaper in year one. It is $6.99 a month, $83.88 for the year, and it covers every machine you own. You get one free ship-a-drive restore a year, and each one after that is $59.95. From year two the price goes to $9.99 a month, $119.88 for the year. The cap is 5 TB, and overage is $0.25 per GB per month. For one computer with an open-ended archive, Backblaze stays $99.
Best pay-once archive: pCloud Lifetime 2 TB
$499 once, for 2 TB. The same 2 TB on pCloud’s annual plan is $99.99 a year, so the lifetime plan breaks even in year five. The 2 TB tier shows a struck-through price of $709. The tier below is 500 GB at $219, or $49.99 a year. The tier above is 10 TB at $1,499, or $299.99 a year. There is a 14-day money-back window, and deleted files are restorable for up to 30 days.
pCloud is a sync drive. Nothing is in there until you put it there, and if you drag a folder out of pCloud Drive it is gone from the cloud 30 days later. Use it as the archive shelf: finished jobs get copied in once and never touched again. “Lifetime” also means you are betting the company outlasts your archive, and I would not put the only copy of anything in a lifetime plan from any vendor. As the third copy of jobs that already live on two drives, it is the cheapest off-site shelf on this page. The client-side Encryption add-on is $150 lifetime on top; worth it if the archive includes anything under NDA.
Cheaper is the annual plan at $99.99, to try the workflow before committing $499. Sync.com is the other name in this bracket, at $9 a month for 1 TB in the first year and $12 after. It does nothing for a photographer that pCloud’s 2 TB does not do for less.
Best for client delivery that also keeps the RAWs: SmugMug Direct + Source
SmugMug Direct is $20 a month billed annually ($240) or $29 month to month, and it holds unlimited full-resolution JPEG galleries. The Source add-on is what puts it in a backup guide: $10 a month for the first terabyte of RAW files and $6 a month for each terabyte after, stored alongside the gallery they came from. Portfolio ($23.50 a month annual) adds print and download sales and Pro ($37) adds multiple price lists; all three have a 14-day trial.
The bill grows with the RAWs. Two terabytes of Source is $192 a year on top of the $240, which buys two years of Backblaze with money left over. The right buyer is a working studio that delivers every week and wants the last year of RAWs reachable from the same login a client uses. Anyone who delivers by Dropbox link should skip Source, keep RAWs on drives plus Backblaze, and pick a gallery on features in the gallery comparison.
Best for syncing work with clients: Dropbox Plus
$9.99 a month for 2 TB, with a 30-day version history and deleted-file restore. You can send transfers up to 50 GB without the recipient needing an account. A photographer who sends a 20 GB wedding to a videographer or trades retouch rounds with an agency needs a sync and share service, and Dropbox is the one everyone’s clients already have. The Essentials and Professional tiers are gone from the plans page; Plus is the personal plan now, with Standard ($15 per user) for teams.
Treat it as a working folder. At $119.88 a year for 2 TB it costs more per terabyte than every backup product here, 30 days is a short window for a mistake, and sync propagates deletions. The page showed the same $9.99 whichever billing toggle I clicked, so I cannot tell you the annual discount. If you only need share links, Basic is free at 2 GB.
The phone and laptop layer you already pay for: iCloud+ 2 TB
$9.99 a month for 2 TB, shareable with up to five family members. The smaller tiers are 50 GB at $0.99 and 200 GB at $2.99. The bigger ones are 6 TB at $29.99 and 12 TB at $59.99. For a Mac and iPhone photographer this is where the phone shots and the desktop folder already live, and it is fine for that. It is not a copy of the Lightroom Classic catalogue or the RAW drives unless you have pointed those at iCloud Drive on purpose, and most people have not.
The other bundles work the same way at about the same price per terabyte. Google AI Pro is $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year for 5 TB. That was the lowest tier my signed-in account showed. 10 TB is $49.99 a month.
Best for a studio or NAS: Backblaze B2
$6.95 per terabyte per month, pay as you go, with free downloads up to three times what you store, no transaction fees and no minimum file size or storage-duration charges. B2 is object storage, so there is no app with a green checkmark. Your NAS’s backup app points at a bucket and does the work. On a Synology that app is Hyper Backup. Once the archive outgrows a desk drive and moves to a NAS, the point where the drive guide hands off to a DS225+, Backblaze Personal cannot see the network share, and B2 is the off-site copy that can.
The price scales with the archive. 5 TB is about $417 a year and 10 TB about $834. A Personal licence is a flat $99, and it happens to cover a 10 TB drive attached to a Mac. If a desktop with the drives plugged in can be the backup client, Personal is the cheaper answer; B2 is for the day it cannot. Wasabi is the comparable product at $7.99 per terabyte per month with no egress or API fees, a dollar more, and I run B2.
What a terabyte costs per year
The per-terabyte column is my arithmetic.
| Service and plan | Price per year | Per TB per year | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backblaze Personal (unlimited, one computer) | $99 | $99 flat; $19.80 at 5 TB | Backup. The more you store, the cheaper per TB |
| IDrive Personal 5 TB | $83.88 first year, then $119.88 | $16.78, then $23.98 | Backup. Several computers, capped at 5 TB |
| Google AI Pro 5 TB | $199.99 | $40 | Sync. Bundled with Gemini |
| pCloud 2 TB annual | $99.99 | $50 | Sync. Lifetime $499 breaks even in year five |
| pCloud 10 TB annual | $299.99 | $30 | Sync. Lifetime $1,499, same break-even |
| Dropbox Plus 2 TB | $119.88 | $59.94 | Sync. Monthly price; annual not confirmed |
| iCloud+ 2 TB, 6 TB, 12 TB | $119.88, $359.88, $719.88 | About $60 at every tier | Sync |
| Microsoft 365 Personal 1 TB / Family 2 TB | $99.99 / $129.99 | $99.99 / $65 | Sync. Bundled with Office |
| Backblaze B2 | $83.40 per TB | $83.40 | Backup target. Scales with the archive |
| Wasabi | $95.88 per TB | $95.88 | Backup target |
| SmugMug Source (on Direct at $240) | $120 first TB, $72 each after | $120, then $72 | Delivery plus RAW copy |
| Sync.com Personal 1 TB | $108 first year, then $144 | $108, then $144 | Sync |
Backup products cost $17 to $24 per terabyte a year at the sizes photographers hit. The sync bundles cost $40 to $100 and do a different job. Take a 5 TB catalogue on one desktop. Backblaze Personal is $99 a year as long as the drives are attached to that machine. IDrive is $83.88 in year one, then $119.88. With pCloud you need the 10 TB tier at $299.99 a year or $1,499 lifetime. B2 is about $417. And iCloud+ has to step up to the 6 TB tier at $359.88.
Restore speed and the drive in the mail
A decent hotel connection manages a 20 Mb/s upload, and on that you move about 9 GB an hour. So a 2 TB catalogue takes around nine days of never-interrupted uploading to seed. At 100 Mb/s it is still two days. Every service here has this problem, which is why backup software runs for weeks after you install it and why you keep the two local drives while it does.
Restore is what decides which vendor you want on the bad day. Downloading 5 TB at 100 Mb/s is about four and a half days of a saturated connection. A mailed drive turns that into a courier. Backblaze mails one for free, and IDrive does it free once a year. B2’s free egress covers three times what you store, so a full pull of the NAS copy costs nothing in fees. pCloud, Dropbox and iCloud restore at whatever your connection does. In practice the cloud restores the files you cannot find anywhere else, and the local copy drive restores everything else in an afternoon.
What I run
The off-site leg for the NAS is Backblaze B2, and I wrote it up in the travel offload and backup workflow. On the road B2 gets proxies, selects and project files, because hotel upload cannot carry camera originals. The full 3-2-1 closes when a trip gets home and lands on the NAS or the archive shelf. The NAS is the local copy, built from the drives in the NAS drive guide, B2 is the third copy of what lives there, and wrapped jobs go to the shelf the way the archiving post describes. I shoot more video than stills, so my numbers are bigger than yours and the NAS came earlier than it would for a photographer.
Backblaze Personal runs on the edit machine as well and covers that computer and the drives attached to it. The split is the one from the B2 section. The Personal client cannot see the network share, so the NAS goes to B2 through its own app. The edit machine pays the flat $99 for everything plugged into it, which is still the easiest money in the kit.
FAQ
Is iCloud or Google Photos a backup for my photos?
For the phone, close enough. For the catalogue, no. Both mirror what is on the device, and a deletion on one end is a deletion on the other once the grace window closes. Neither sees a Lightroom Classic catalogue or an external RAW drive unless you move those into the synced folder, and at $9.99 a month for 2 TB on iCloud+ that is an expensive place to keep RAW. Use them for the phone layer and put a backup product on the computer.
Backblaze or pCloud?
Different jobs. Backblaze Personal ($99 a year) backs up a whole computer and its attached drives automatically, unlimited. pCloud ($499 lifetime for 2 TB) is a cloud drive you put files into, capped at the plan size, paid once. If you have to pick one, Backblaze, because it covers the files you forgot about. If you have a finished archive under 2 TB that will never grow, pCloud’s lifetime plan is cheaper over five years and you own it after that.
How much cloud storage does a photographer need?
Add up the drives. If the catalogue, the current year of RAW and the archive total 3 TB, you need a plan that holds 3 TB with room to grow, or an unlimited one. That is why Backblaze Personal stays the default: you stop doing this sum. For sized plans, buy about double your current total; a working photographer adds a terabyte or two a year, and the jump to the next tier is cheaper than running out in month seven.
Can Backblaze Personal back up my NAS?
No. Personal covers drives attached to one computer, not network shares. A NAS backs up to B2 (or Wasabi) through its own backup app, at $6.95 per terabyte per month. The workaround is a second copy of the NAS on a drive that is attached to the backed-up computer, which keeps you under the $99 licence; the editing server on a budget post covers the NAS side.
And that’s it
One backup product on the computer where the catalogue lives, the two local drives from the drive guide, and the sync plan you already pay for doing the job it is good at. For most of you that is $99 a year on top of the drives, and the clicking-noise email becomes an annoying week. Keeping the files findable once they are safe is the next post, the photo management software guide.
