Anybody know of any kind of online service that does large amounts of storage and allows for internet upload?

What I basically need is a kind of virtual U-Stor-It Self Storage.
A secure backed up location where I can store my photos. Not just snapshots but art photos. I do backups here on my local PC to CD but I wouldnt mind paying a fee for a couple of GB somewhere safe and secure that is regularly backed up.

My photos are large. Very large. And I've got quite a lot of them. My needs certainly exceed the usual 200-500MB offered by most hosting services. A casual glance at my larger storage drive shows 4.2 GB of data. I would guesstimate that 7-10 GB would probably last me a year or so.

Anybody know what I mean?
If something like this does exist it'll probably end up being too costly anyway, but I figure its still worth taking a look.
My thanks in advance.

There are lots of place that do what you want. Search for online backup in Google.

It's definately not going to be cheap however. You may want to consider clubbing together with some other people and just buying a coloc box and shoving a large HD into that. It'll be cheaper per MB than the online backup places but you'll lose the ability to have it backed up regularly.

The bandwidth issues shouldn't matter even though you've got a large amount of data as you're using it as backup and you're not going to transferring 10GB every week.

I would go to a realtive who had dialup internet and offer to pay the difference for broadband. Then, build a cheap box and host it off their service.

It would be at another location, (should be) cheaper than hosting, and the data is somewhere you can get to it easier than data center. This is how I would probably do it.

www.connected.com
Have you thought about sticking cdroms in a banks safety deposit box?

How long are CDRs rated for these days? the old gold Kodak ones were specified to last at least 10 years or something.
All of the CDRs I've got now don't say anything at all about how long your data will last. They'll replace the disc if it breaks but that's about it.

Yeah, that could be a concern. Although it would be trivial to mitigate that risk - assume that they'll only last 1 year and replace them annually. That would be a bit of a pain for 10GB, although migrating to DVDRAM would reduce that too.

Actually, that's how I backup my photos - I take a copy on CDROM to my parents whenever I visit. Admittedly I only have about 1G of photos so it is fairly easy to do. But at least I know that short of all-out nuclear destruction, or a huge asteroid strike that wipes out mankind, my photos are safe. Off-continent storage rocks.
(I'm not too concerned about whether they survive those events!)

That was exactly my concern.
Also I have my photos databased, and the database, and storage scheme changes everytime I do a shoot. So my Backup CD's become obsolete more quickly than I would like.

Hadnt thought about DVDRAM.
How much can a disk hold, and what do drives run?

DVD-RAM stores about 4.7GB per side. You can get double sided discs as well. I think the drives are around $150 - $200.
I've no idea how long those are rated for as well. You're avoiding the issue about the sheer number of discs but not the reliability issue.
What you want is this. Guaranteed to last a thousand years!

HD Rosetta... now that is damn cool.

Yeah. It's pretty cool. It's like high tech microfiche.
Anybody vain enough to want their email preserved for future generations to gawk at

I would go to a realtive who had dialup internet and offer to pay the difference for broadband. Then, build a cheap box and host it off their service.

It would be at another location, (should be) cheaper than hosting, and the data is somewhere you can get to it easier than data center. This is how I would probably do it.

This is how I do it. I have a $400 fanless, silent Linux box plugged into a friend's DSL line. Every night at 04:00 a script kicks off that uses rsync over ssh to sync both my Linux and Win2k servers.

There's a very short article on The Register about the estimated life of CDRs actually. It doesn't sound good at all!