The SmugMug Blog

It’s Christmas in May! You can upload, store and retrieve virtually any file in your SmugVault for a fraction of the old cost.

Oh, yes. The measly $1 monthly service charge remains the same, but now:

• Storage is only $.14 per month, per GB. (Old cost: $.22)
• It costs only $.11 to upload each GB into your Vault. (Old cost: $.30)
• It costs only $.16 to download each GB back to your computer. (Old cost: $.51)

What’s this mean for you? If you uploaded an 8G CF card full of RAWs into your Vault and then retrieved them one month later:

Your old bill would be $9.24 .
Your new bill will be just $4.28 .

Best of all, this isn’t a limited-time promotional offer. Thanks to price drops from Amazon and a shiny new uploading infrastructure at SmugMug, we expect this lowered price to be permanent – until we drop it again.

That’s right.  Over time, we’re going to do our best to keep the pricing as close to Amazon’s S3 pricing as we can.  More technical info about SmugVault is right here.

Why SmugVault is Awesome

The SmugVault gives you safe, reliable, flexible and unlimited storage tacked right on to your existing SmugMug account. You’re already familiar with our interface and galleries so it’s a breeze to use. And remember that your archives are not visible (or downloadable) to anyone except you, the logged-in gallery owner.

The SmugVault can hold virtually any file up to 1GB apiece, and if you upload a TIFF and JPG version of the same image into your account, we’ll archive one and display the other to your visitors. But they’ll be bundled together for easy access in your Vault.

And when we call it a Vault, we mean it.  Thanks to Amazon’s S3 service, which powers the storage part of your SmugVault, anything you archive in your SmugVault has 99.999999999% durability.  In other words, if you store 10,000 files in your SmugVault, on average, we’ll lose just one every 10 million years. More details.

In fact, you can even skip the JPG part and just upload your RAW file. We’ll automatically generate a full-sized JPG that you can share – and sell – on your site.

Listen Up, Pros!

Hot tip: After a shoot, just drag your RAW files into the uploader and call it a day. Your client can browse the gallery and buy the prints she wants. When the order hits Proof Delay, you swap them with edited versions. This way you only have to edit a few required images, not the whole set.

Whatta timesaver! And you’re backed up, to boot.

Grab Your Vault Now

This is a perfect time to give the SmugVault a try. Get one right from your Control Panel, under the Settings tab where it says “SmugVault”.

Your regular galleries are great for our standard JPG, PNG and GIF files but if you’d like a little extra oompf, it’s easier (and cheaper) than ever to get your whole life backed up.

Yanno, just in case.