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

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

#111

Post by lmilcin »

NAS + USB HDD docking station plus couple HDDs in rotation.

While NAS has mirror on it, I do not consider it enough backup. I assume it will not save me from ransomware or a family member stupidly deleting a lot of data or from fire or from theft. It is mostly to give convenient access to it for my family.

HDDs are in rotation and one is always offsite with my family that I visit regularly. Whenever I travel there I make a backup on one of the HDDs and then bring the "old" drive back home to be reused on one of future trips.

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

#112

Post by chenxiaolong »

This is what I've been doing for the past couple years:

1. Pictures are either manually copied to a staging folder on my storage server (for DSLRs) or automatically synced there via Syncthing (for smartphone cameras). For the latter, Syncthing is set up to preserve deleted files in case of accidental deletion.

2. The storage server runs zfs and takes 10-minutely snapshots of all datasets, which are replicated to 2 servers using zrepl: one sitting upstairs and another I rent from Hetzner halfway across the world. Replicated snapshots are kept for 2 years. Everything uses zfs' native encryption, but the replication targets do not have the key.

3. For the really important pictures and other documents, I create 2 additional backups: an encrypted backup to Backblaze B2 via rclone and burning them to M-DISC blu-rays. This is sort of a last ditch thing in case a zfs bug renders the primary backups unreadable.

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

#114

Post by amerkhalid »

We pay for Apple iCloud 2TB plan. Sync all photos & videos to local external hard drive. And then periodically copy local Photos library to NAS.

Then I share my Amazon Prime backup with my wife. All our photos are backed up there but not videos.

For videos, I upload edited videos on YouTube as unlisted or private. And some of better videos as public on Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram.

And finally I try to share as many photos and videos in emails, Whatsapp, with friends and family. Sort of distributed back up in the worst case scenario.

(Also never delete any photo or video unless you really don't want anyone to see it ever. I used to extensively prune my library but wish I had not. Storage will likely keep getting cheaper. And AI will get better and it will be able to create better slideshows and edited videos.)

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

#115

Post by raffraffraff »

Wisdomlife wrote: post #16

I have more than 4 TB lifetime pCloud storage. Best option for storing photos and videos. Better than everything else out there.

Same. I bought their lifetime 4TB + encryption addon during Black Friday. It's enough for all of my personal data, music and some movies / TV series too. And I never have to pay again, which is nice.

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

#116

Post by red0point »

karjaluoto wrote: post #109

My friend and I built https://pixaver.com . It doesn’t address all of the points you note here, but it does offer some piece of mind if we get locked out of Google Photos.

Congrats on building such a nice tool! I‘d gladly pay for something self-hosted, or some tool that allows me to download it on my own hardware.

I don‘t want to solve the problem by

A) paying even more money every month, much less even more than for Google Drive & Photos storage itself!

B) uploading my personal photos to a completely untrusted provider (at least I can trust Google to some degree to not leak my photos to any stranger on the internet).

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

#117

Post by sreitshamer »

fudgy wrote: post #101

Since I am also an avid DSLR photographer, the first decision I made was to use Adobe Lightroom (Classic) as the "single source of truth" to manage all our photos. This means obviously importing all photos taken via my DSLR into Lightroom, but also syncing all photos taken on our iPhones via the Lightroom Mobile App. Lightroom Classic keeps all the (compressed) photos in the Adobe cloud for easy sharing and browsing,…

You could also make the Arq backups in your S3 bucket immutable, for more ransomware protection.

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

#119

Post by conductr »

Related question, how does everyone get the family photos grouped together in the first place?

My family are all taking photos on their own devices during a vacation, holiday, gathering, etc. and then someone creates a shared Album on Photos (iOS) where everyone just dumps all the photos taken. It's a complete mess in my opinion. WE have a shared album "Christmas 2018", "Holidays 2019", "Xmas'20", etc. depending on who named it.

Everyone else seems to like the ease of upload and ability to find past pictures. Getting the photos out of the apple app seems like a pain to me. I feel like there has to be a better way, but it has to work for the lowest common denominator (Grandparents, etc).

We have a couple people on Android and are essentially cut off from the family photo stream. When that happens everyone's mentality is, "get an iPhone".

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

#120

Post by sfifs »

Google Photos with family sharing and Original quality with paid Google One. I used to have a NAS based solution which was backed up to S3 etc. I even wrote a photo browsing server for my NAS but became too complex as we increase family devices among people with different levels of skill.

The ability to search photos easily over time and the weekly "this week X years ago" reels are great value.

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