Hacking the Cloud, with dropbox alternative Copy

I’ve recently gotten inspired to start actively taking photos again, mostly due to a friend of mine getting heavily into photography. As such, I felt it was time to finally solve my backup issues, namely that I didn’t have any. In fact, I’ve “lost” our family photos at least twice, and was able to recover them using hard drive recovery tools–but that is far from a disaster recovery plan!

First things first, I decided to commit myself to Aperture. I’ve dabbled in it once or twice since getting my macbook, but never really committed to it.

Having acquired Aperture, I needed a backup solution. “The Cloud” was the obvious answer (for me), but I’ve had little success with Google Drive in the past (the Mac app kept crashing on me), and found Dropbox’s prices to be more than I’d like to pay. Onwards to Google (searching)!

I found this.

Reading through the article, I was familiar with three of the four alternatives. Copy was new to me, so I investigated it further. The initial 15+5GB was a good place to start for me, so I signed up.

Having selected a new provider, I started to wonder if I could extend the referral plan using lifehacker’s tops for dropbox. So I looked around for Google Adwords credit. Not finding any, I went back to the drawing board.

Reading Hacker News, I wondered if Copy had been mentioned there. So I googled it, and I could find a recent reference. Thus, I posted this:

Copy – a dropbox alternative that starts at 15GB + unlimited 5gb referrals (that was the original title, or something like it, but the moderators edited down to just "Copy". I assume due to their terms of service, even though many articles violate that).

Within hours I started getting 5GB referrals, and it lasted into the next day. I now sit a comfortable 290GB (I’m hoping for those last 2 signups to get to 300GB) and my cloud needs will be met with Copy for the foreseeable future.

In fact, I’ve already uploaded 13GB of my 40GB Aperture library, and it hasn’t crashed yet, which is a great sign compared to Google Drive!

Update as of June, 2017 (actually, a lot more like sometime back in 2016 or earlier):

Aperture is toast, I now use Apple's new photos app exclusively.

Copy.com has closed down. I can't help but wonder if it was due to nerds like me. :)