Upgrading to a Pro account offers you unlimited storage of photos and unlimited uploads. Because you can set privacy levels on your photo’s you can also upload photos you don’t want to share but just store (backup). It only costs you $ 24,95 a year!

By upgrading to a Pro account you have an ideal backup system for all your photos. It’s ONLINE and OFFSITE so you have a backup even in case your house burns down (hope it never happens though!).

Flickr offers a standard upload tool making it easy to upload many pictures at once and set privacy levels and categories on them. It’s available on the Flickr website at: http://www.flickr.com/tools/. Creating a backup of your photos is a piece of cake now.

Restoring your photos is a different story. Flickr doesn’t offer the ability to download all your photo’s at once so it will take you a lot of time to restore the photos manually. A solution is created by using: FlickrEdit. (Before it was a utility called FlickrBackup) This utility is free and offers you the ability to download many photo’s at once to your harddrive. The new FlickrEdit utility offers even more possibilities than FlickrBackup did.

My ideal backup stragegy for your photo’s would be:

- Create a backup of your photo’s on Recordable DVD’s

- Upload all your photos to Flickr (Pro Account) (and set your privacy level!)

The professional cam’s start at about 500 euro’s. I’ve found a nice IP camera with Infrared nightview, wired and wireless (wifi) network connection and it’s compatible with Synology Surveillance Station and browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. You can even watch the images on your Java enabled phone.

Just search the internet for Foscam FI8904w IP camera, prices should be just below € 100,- for the 24 IR-Led version. Don’t expect HD quality, but you will be able to recognize people and use nice features like FTP and Email alarms (sending you multiple snapshots of the motion detected!). The camera’s have a good user interface which can connect also to multiple camera’s (of same type). This means you can login to your ‘master’ camera and not only view images of that camera, but also view images of your other camera’s within the same user interface.

I’ve seen several warnings for imitation Foscam camera’s meaning the firmware from Foscam is not usable on those camera’s which might lead to issues.
In the Netherlands you can buy it at this official Foscam dealer.