Just to be clear here... Your Lightroom catalog is very important but is not backing you your Photos. (which I know you said at the end. I am just emphasizing)
Your LR catalog contains your photo edits, metadata and history... but is not your original files. Backing it up is very important but is only part of the story. Putting your Lightroom catalog backups on Dropbox is a great and should be done by everyone. (Again just not your active catalog.)
We have certainly thought about giving direct access to customers Glacier accounts and behind the scenes each customer has their own glacier "vault" for potentially this reason. But for many customers they would prefer a set-it and forget it type of service. We didn't want a barrier of first create an glacier account then call us...
We also then didn't know what to do if a customer then changes their glacier files... if we are syncing with Lightroom and this gets out of whack... then it defeats the purpose of the automated sync with your local files. If it just "read only" access, we are already providing this with our App.
I think the difference in what we are providing in online backup is that we are not a pure cloud where we encourage you to delete your local file - We actually want to sync with your local files. Our philosophy on the workflow side is that changes that you make to your files on the App, should be reflected locally in your Lightroom catalog file. This way you always own your own data.
I agree with you on the site redesign... have had our head down on this. Good news is that the design is approved and being implemented as we speak (although won't be out for a couple weeks.)
Thanks again and happy to answer any other questions. Best, Gerard
I am the CEO/Co-Founder of Mosaic. We are a company that helps serious photographers backup their photographers. I am happy to share what we have learned in the past 2 years. www.mosaicarchive.com
We are now growing at about 5%-7% a week. We recently peaked in the top 100 grossing US iPad Photo/Video Apps in iOS - although most of our revenue comes outside of iOS. (As they take a 30% cut.)
We target serious photographers (pro's and prosumers) who use Adobe Lightroom. For pure backup customers our sweet spot are those who have outgrown BackBlaze and Crashplan. (Both great services but geared at consumers.)
On the backup side, we help photographers manage their backups by using Adobe Lightroom metadata. Customers can choose to backup everything in Lightroom automatically. However, many photographers use metadata like stars or flags to designate their best photos. We allow users to automatically backup these "best" photos. This provides the automation of the best backup tools with more precision for larger customers.
We use Amazon Glacier behind the scenes to store the original photos. (Yes, WMF the restoration costs even out for us over all of our users.) (Sidebar - we actually ran our data center for months before switching to Glacier...very glad to have made the switch.)
However... we are not an online backup company. Online backup is a feature is our service... but not the entirety of it.
Once we have have photographers photos, we also want to help photographers better use, manage, share, and enjoy those photos. At one point I would have said we are a backup company, now I call us a workflow company.
We also offer a web and iOS App to privately view and share your Lightroom photos. (We take JPG snapshots of the RAW files so they load quickly and have the Lightroom edits. This part of the service runs in Amazon S3 not Glacier) This gives you access to your photos in the same way you are used to experiencing them in Lightroom. (Lightroom users try this for free - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mosaic-archive/id627973694?l...)
The next step which we are working on now is adding two-way sync where you can manage your photos in the App and it populates back to your desktop files and Lightroom. We are also working on more collaborative features so photographers can share this culling and editing process with their clients or family members.
The bigger problem we are solving is that photographers have loads of large files... backing them up is painful yes... but managing them all is more painful. Sifting through 000s of images to find your best stuff frankly stinks. This problem is only getting bigger as we shoot more and more.
Your LR catalog contains your photo edits, metadata and history... but is not your original files. Backing it up is very important but is only part of the story. Putting your Lightroom catalog backups on Dropbox is a great and should be done by everyone. (Again just not your active catalog.)