Storage Options Beyond iCloud

I am the organizer for our Family Sharing. I recently maxed out our 2TB iCloud storage…I’ve been shooting a lot of 4K videos lately. My Photos library is taking up 1.1TB of the 2TB storage.

I’m looking for a way to keep the Family Sharing, protect the Photos library, and free up some iCloud space.

What are your excellent ideas?

Thanks!

Is it necessary to make all 1.1TB of photos/videos available all the time? Can you prune and store 10, 20, 60% or whatever offline?

I can think of costly options like Vimeo, but anything that offers 1TB+ and growing is going to be expensive.

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Any chance you are a gmail user? Do you own or want your own email domain? 10TB of storage on Google Drive is $100/month but last time I checked if you have 5 G Suite Business Accounts you get unlimited storage for 5 x $12/month = $60.

Still not cheap and I wonder how long it would take to upload all that video. Personally I would purchase some external drives and keep my video offline in two or more locations. In years past our only choice was to keep a local copy of our data and another at work, or grandma’s house, etc. or both. That would free up a lot of room for your photos.

tw: subscription

From what I can find, Adobe Creative Cloud storage is $500/yr for 5TB.

Might be worth setting up your own Synology NAS and sharing from there. They have photo apps, etc. though I don’t use them.

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You can have up to 4TB iCloud storage.

See: 4TB storage in iCloud

I haven’t tried it myself yet.

iDrive.

For photos from your iPhone only, it’ $10/year for unlimited storage.
https://www.idrive.com/photos/

For desktop data, the prices are higher but still reasonable.

Another option is MS365. The family plan is $99/year and in addition to keeping up to date with all of the office apps (which obviously isn’t important to everybody) each user gets 1TB off storage. That’s 5TB for $99/year.

I primarily use it to back up folders from my Synology (my Plex library and photos and other folders) which I can do with the built in Cloud Sync app, but you can use it for anything.