I've said before that O'Reilly's Inside Aperture and Inside Lightroom blogs have been getting a bit tired lately. Folk evangelize about how their chosen program has revolutionized some aspect of their work, when either program - or indeed earlier DAM programs - would have done so. This is just one where you could just as well swap over the product names - “You need to present your photos. With a multimedia projector, and with your Mac and Aperture, you can create a quick showcase.” Hey, with a multimedia projector, and with your PC or Mac and Lightroom, you can create a quick showcase. It's all rather like “Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!”

But one of the better writers there is James Duncan Davidson, on the Lightroom side but who had switched from Aperture, and his latest post The Economics of Online Backup looks at the costs and practicalities of online storage as they are right now:

As I see it, I need a much bigger pipe to the Internet to make these kinds of backups work well long term. Until Verizon FIOS shows up, or I score some really choice client gigs that really add to the bottom line and can put in my own dedicated T3, I'm a bit too bandwidth constrained to make it work out. This, however, is how things stacks up for me. After running the numbers yet again, I'm going to stick with my current program of rotating drives to a safe deposit box which has a nice cafe next door in which to get a cappuccino in. But, I'll keep running the numbers every so often and at some point, maybe the equation will change answers.

“In the cloud” storage cost remains too high, and the bandwidth and the time demands are even more prohibitive. But does anyone doubt the time will come?