Here’s a brief update on my experiment in backing up photo files to the cloud.

In an earlier post, I explained my choice of the Amazon Cloud for this effort.

In the first week, I’ve uploaded 354 GB of digital files to the Amazon Cloud Drive. These files were on two portable hard drives and a high capacity thumb drive.

That includes about 44 GB of video files, 286 GB of photo files, and another 25+ GB of miscellaneous other files. I had to shift to a $5 per month data plan to accommodate the video files, since the free storage for Amazon Prime members maxes out at 5 GB.

This comes to about 43,000 digital or scanned photos, 700 video files, and 7,300 other files.

I’m getting used to the upload process. It’s relatively easy to organize files into a folder structure. And Amazon automatically sorts them by date when accessing via Amazon Cloud Photos.

The upload has been slow, hampered by a slow USB 2.0 portable drive. But since I’ve devoted a laptop to the upload process, it’s relatively painless.

And accessing a particular folder, or searching for a single photo (by name or date) is pretty fast. I’ve shared links to particular photos with several people, and that seems to work smoothly. I have not explored bulk downloading of files from the cloud backup. That’s for a future experiment.

So far, I don’t think I would give Amazon Cloud storage an “A” grade, but certainly a solid “B” or even “B+”.