Picturelife update: I've now moved everything to my own S3 bucket

Thank you for all the emails and comments I’ve had from readers berating me for being so stupid. It’s in reaction to this post: I’ve got 200gb of photos on Picturelife and they’re not backed up: Am I nuts?. 

The overwhelming view is yes. Yes I am nuts, especially when we’re talking about irreplaceable photo (and video) memories. 

I engaged the Picturelife customer support team about the possibility of them offering a dual backup option where my data is stored in their huge Amazon bucket and also ‘backed up’ or duplicated via another bucket or service. 

It’s something they’ve said they’re going to look into. This is good news. I don’t want to have to manage my own 300gb photo data store myself, but I do want to ensure I’ve taken the right approach for protection. I really don’t subscribe to the view that I need to have the data physically located in my house, on my own computer. Absolutely not. I want it managed by someone who knows what they’re doing.

But yes, dear reader, I recognise I have been flying by the seat of my pants depending on Picturelife alone. I don’t even think the team at Picturelife would like to be responsible — exclusively — for my data. 

So I’ve moved everything to my own Amazon S3 bucket that Picturelife is still interfacing with. Here’s the status: 

I’m not sure what happened to those 2 outstanding files. I’ll sort them out shortly. 

So I now have direct control of the data. And I can get it downloaded and backed up.

I still remain a Picturelife user and I’m hopeful they’ll implement an addition to the service shortly to guarantee backup.