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

(Very) old school: you get a multi-TB disk of some sort, doesn't have to be fast or high quality.

Back up the media to that disk, and then take it down to your safe deposit box. No absurd monthly fees, no Terms of Service, it's off-site so if your house burns down, you're covered.

"Your what?" Yeah, the banks still have those. Mine costs $15 a year. If you die, your next-of-kin will have to bring in a death certificate to get access to it. They'll have lots of other hassles, believe me.

Forget being trendy and having it in the cloud. How often are you going to access it? "Never", right?

You do have to go in every few years and replace it with the latest & greatest, and you'll probably have more media to backup anyway.

With the electricity, hardware, space, and time cost it might be cheaper to have just one and sync to a hosted ZFS service. Of course, those didn't exist 10 years ago, I don't think.

Regarding posterity...I think when we die no one will care much about our data. I recently wrote a will and this included documenting my bank accounts. A death notice is sent to the banks when you die and and whoever specified on the will can access these funds. This ticked a big box in my mind and resulted in me dropping some unecessary tech.

You have got me thinking though about my backup of family photos/videos. My backups are all too clever, encrypted and inaccessible at the moment. I feel inspired now to make sure photos/videos are easy for my family and future generations to access.

I’m looking to improve, simplify, and more efficient but here is my present setup for our family (no extended family yet).

We use Apple Photos as the primary, of which I export a backup once a while (at-least yearly for sure). Because Apple has’t solved what everyone ask — a way for two or more users to merge Photos, I use Dropbox[1] on the other devices (wife, daughters) to collect into “Camera Uploads”.

I split the content into “Screenshots” (PNG), Videos, and Photos with Hazel[2]. Photos to imported to the Primary Photos Library, Screenshots, and Videos are either deleted or sorted weekly (few minutes), monthly (30-min-ish), quarterly(30-min-ish), and yearly (about 3-5 hours on a day around the end of the year, with the other digital clean-up task) during my digital chores that I do. My daughters produces a lot of them that I need to throw out. She can position her iPad and video-shoot while she talks her way cleaning her desk for an hour.

The photos and videos are now in my primary device iMac (for now), with a second backup on a 2012 MacMini running many other digital errands. The 2TB iCloud+[3] is good enough for now.

I would definitely love to clean this steps and move to a more non-proprietary format (read non-Apple) to Open Source tools/process.

I tried Google Photos because it was easier to combine and I even had one of their large plan but it turned out to be one of the messiest thing I tried. Stopped using them[4].

I will be reading and learning from the other interesting comments in this thread. Thanks to all.

1. https://www.dropbox.com

2. https://www.noodlesoft.com

3. https://www.icloud.com

4. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...

I do this and I put the takeout zips into AWS as well. The odds of losing access to both at the same time are sufficiently low.