Photographer Backup Storage & Drive Cost Planner
Forecast RAW photo and video storage, redundant local drives, and estimated cloud costs across 1–10 years without uploading files.
Plan a photo archive
Sample selection reads only file sizes in your browser; no upload. Select a few representative files, then choose “Use sample average”.
Archive capacity forecast
Year-by-year unique storage
| Year | New TB | Total TB | Cloud/mo |
|---|
Capacity is not backup. Keep independent copies, including one offsite, and test restores. Prices are your inputs, not live vendor quotes. TB uses decimal units (1 TB = 1,000 GB).
Estimate photo backup storage before buying another drive
A photography archive grows differently from a phone photo library: RAW files, edited exports, video and redundant copies add up. PhotoVaultPlan forecasts yearly unique storage and then separately estimates how many physical drives are needed for a user-chosen number of local copies.
What this forecast does not do
The cloud estimate is a storage-only hypothetical based on the rate you enter. It excludes transfer charges, minimum billing, retention policies, drive replacement, NAS enclosures and restore costs. Unlimited-computer backup products and object storage have different rules; compare the vendor plan before purchasing. Choosing a file sample never uploads the files.
Use a 3-2-1-style backup plan as a starting point, and verify recoverability with restore tests. RAID redundancy alone does not protect against accidental deletion or site loss.