Verizon’s New “Unlimited” Plan For Photo Backup Isn’t Bad
News | By Stephan Jukic | November 17, 2023
Verizon may not be the first choice that comes to a photographer’s mind for cloud storage of photos, but it has something interesting to offer.
The company has revamped its cloud storage offerings (yes, it offers cloud storage) to include a plan that tries to compete even more aggressively with Google Photos.
While the company has been offering cloud storage since 2020, the newest version of their plan lets subscribers to Verizon Wireless attach a fully unlimited cloud storage option for $14 per month.
The crucial catch here is that the plan is only available if you’re a subscriber to Verizon’s wireless plan, but if you are, this might not be a bad option for both mobile phone photos and other images.
Other, fairly modest, limitations to the plan include individual file size limits of 10GB and maximum uploads of only 50GB per day.
If you’re just a photographer, neither of these is likely to be a major problem, but for filmmakers, they could easily be deal breakers.
Also, the claim of this being an unlimited plan is something you should take with a grain of salt.
Many cloud services claim this, only to throttle or shut down a serious image-hoarding photographer’s account if they really start filling it up into the multi-terabyte range.
With those warnings mentioned, as a purely photography-oriented storage choice that lets you easily back up your photos, the Verizon Unlimited Photography plan is worth considering.
Even if it’s not truly unlimited (we don’t know, maybe Verizon really does honor that claim right to the letter), it might be functionally unlimited for most users who only need a few hundred gigabytes or a few terabytes.
The company is offering its Unlimited Individual plan (as it’s called) for $13.99 per month. This gives you access to a single user account but with an allowance for unlimited devices and backup from both your phone and desktop or laptop device.
Verizon is also offering a much more economical 600GB plan for just $6 per month, or if you need robust sharing options, there’s a broader Unlimited Group storage plan for $20 per month that lets you add up to five users to your Verizon backup account.
There is of course also an option for restoring your files in case you lose the devices you originally had them on.
I personally recommend storing all of your photos and videos inside your devices as one copy, inside external backup devices of your own as a second copy, and in a cloud platform of some kind as a third copy in case of total personal property loss.
The above, by the way, is called a 3-2-1 backup strategy, and it’s something that any photographer who takes their work seriously should implement.
As a choice for the remote storage part of a 3-2-1 backup plan, the Verizon Unlimited Plan doesn’t seem any worse than what Google Photos or Dropbox offer.
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