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Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?

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Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?

#1

Post by reisr3 »

My extended family has several terabytes of family photos and videos from over the years. We've mostly digitized everything, but some segments are just sitting on external hard drives in closets - waiting to eventually break or become corrupted.

My current methodology for our immediate family is aligned with the common back up advice - one local copy, one off-site copy (at grandma's house,) and one in cloud storage. We're using Google Photos for cloud storage. The easy integration with Nest Hubs makes for nice digital picture frames around the family homes.

What is your system for backing up family photos and videos to stand the test of time? Is it adequate to put everything in cloud storage and forget about it? Do you reassess every couple years and adjust to the new landscape of storage services? Is it unavoidable that we'll be paying $100+/year forever for a [presumably increasing] few terabytes of cloud storage?

Is there a good solution for posterity? For example, once I die, and if my family were to become unable to pay the hosting bill, is there any way to guarantee these heirlooms remain intact and available?

Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?

#2

Post by yuppie_scum »

Basically iCloud plus AWS S3. Every so often I dump old ones into S3, zip them and put them in the glacier instant retrieval tier. Super easy to use (drag and drop) and cheap as hell. I pay less than a dollar per month right now.

You’ll obviously need to leave keys, instructions etc for your next of kin. Or put a hard drive in a safe deposit box.

Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?

#3

Post by decrypt »

At this time, I have a local copy split across a Windows and a Mac. Both are backed up to Backblaze Personal plan. When someone from my immediate family wants to view an album, they have to download it. Not ideal at all, but that's our process today.

I don't use Google Photos for privacy concerns.

Now that I use Tailscale, I could consider setting up a NAT at home and make files easily viewable using NextCloud, but I worry I won't backup properly to Backblaze B2. Need to figure out how to schedule backups before I make the switch.

Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?

#4

Post by reacharavindh »

It may be a good product idea to build a box PC with redundant hard drives and ZFS set up in paranoia mode to scrub every so often in order to refresh the data it guards, and configure it with safe defaults such that it works as a vault(not having provisions to run Docker etc.). Want to access photos, hook it up with an ethernet cable and access it like this... Once done, leave it in the closet with power supply. I wonder how many would buy such a box..

Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?

#5

Post by tlb »

reacharavindh wrote: post #4

It may be a good product idea to build a box PC with redundant hard drives and ZFS set up in paranoia mode to scrub every so often in order to refresh the data it guards, and configure it with safe defaults such that it works as a vault(not having provisions to run Docker etc.). Want to access photos, hook it up with an ethernet cable and access it like this... Once done, leave it in the closet with power supply. I w…

Don’t overlook the probability of a fire or burglary or flood causing the loss of everything in the closet. RAID and file system redundancy won’t help in that case. You need multi-site backup anyway, and then file system failures are also covered.

Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?

#8

Post by austincheney »

I am working on a fully decentralized application to solve this problem. The application is a cross-OS Nodejs app that provides an OS like GUI in the browser to display the file system of the local machine and other trusted machines. Network file copy is currently broken pending completion of a major refactor.

https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems/tree/master...

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