I use both Google Photos and Amazon photos. Both, because I'm afraid of being one of those cases where Google's automation decides to suspend my entire account without recourse.
Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
171–180 of 380 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#1722x4TB WD reds[1] in RAID1 on an old (ca. 2008) desktop I turned into a low-spec Linux box. These days I just keep it powered off most of the time, so I don't even really pay for electricity. Unfortunately even though I'm using reds, which are designed for NAS use cases, I've had two drives fail since I set up this rig in 2015, which I suppose puts me at ~$30/year, though I use the 4TB for lots else as well. It's durable enough for me since it's easy enough to notice when a drive fails and very unlikely that the other will fail before you can replace it.
[1]: https://www.microcenter.com/product/634744/wd-4tb-red-plus-5...
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#173Currently I have an old NAS with 2 1TB drives in RAID1. At some point my drives will be full and I will migrate to a new system that will be slightly cheaper but requires a partner.
At some point I will buy a simple Raspberry PI (or cheaper system) with one multi TB drive using USB. A friend of mine will do the same. A cron job will run a sync on the drives at night. 50% of the drive will me mine, 50% of the drive will be his. So the system has redundant storage and it is off-site.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#174We create physical photo books, sometimes two copies. These are a (small, curated) subset of all the digital photos we have.
We keep the digital photos backed up on an external SSD and on iCloud (auto-synced from several devices), too.
Bottom line: we stopped trying to obsessively 'preserve' digital hoards. It's such a waste of our time, and is a questionable goal anyway.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#175Every time our phones reach capacity, I download all pics/video to my laptop. Then I plug in a portable SSD and copy them there in folder name "media until ". When I get to work next, I copy them to an identical portable SSD stored there, at which point I free the space on my laptop. This whole process happens about 3-4 times per year.
I'm currently using returned/refurbished Samsung T5's at about $100/TB.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#176Every time our phones reach capacity, I download all pics/video to my laptop. Then I plug in a portable SSD and copy them there in folder name "media until ". When I get to work next, I copy them to an identical portable SSD stored there, at which point I free the space on my laptop. This whole process happens about 3-4 times per year. I'm currently using returned/refurbished Samsung T5's at about $100/TB.
I do this, alongside a tool for finding duplicate files: https://github.com/adrianlopezroche/fdupes.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#177I simply burn the photos in 100GB M-disc blurays. Then I bury them next to a tree in a zip lock bag.
I hope you bury a reader unit as well :) I bought two units of different makes and do small tests like once a year after computer/os updates, just in case...
There's plenty of bluray drives still manufactured, mostly on each modern console. I hope I can find a working in 20-30 years, my PlayStation 1 is still working strong :D
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#178For posterity and "the test of time," I really think you need to create physical photo books. My wife and I have used Blurb for that. It's not cheap, and it's a lot of work, but I'm skeptical that our digital photos will outlive us for very long, for the reasons already mentioned. I've found that the greatest benefit of cloud storage is not as a backup, but as our primary place to keep and look at photos. We started…
> I've found that the greatest benefit of cloud storage is not as a backup, but as our primary place to keep and look at photos. We started uploading and organizing everything in Flickr a few years ago, and now we spend more time enjoying our photos with Flickr's web and mobile apps than we ever did when they were scattered across our laptops and backed up to an external hard drive.
This is a good point. I was 100% anti-cloud for my photos, but have to admit the barrier of bringing out the external HDD and hooking it up to a PC means we hardly ever look at them.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#179Spent roughly 1k on a nas system at home which gives me 6tb of redundant storage. It's raid 0 (2x6tb) with 2 separate backups done nightly/weekly, one in the house and one done in the garage. The speed of access is unmatched to any cloud system, in the long run it'll be cheaper than online (assuming £10 per month for 6tb of storage). I made the plunge after trying a few cheaper options plus cloud. I'm happy with the…
I use a NAS for backing up my photos I take on my camera (i.e. my Lightroom catalog.) I also back these photos up to Backblaze B2. I use Duplicati for this. On my phone however, I simply send my photos to Google Photos. Actually, Lightroom exports end up there too. This makes it easy to see and share photos with family and friends. I would love to hear how you view and share your photos using your NAS. Are you using…
Synology has a built in app called Photos. It's relatively new (DSM 7), it has facial recognition which to be honest works half well at best. It might be the shear number of family photos we have but it does struggle to 'learn' as we tag people.
Provided the app is installed you can easily share the photo through WhatsApp or others on your phone. In terms of public access / link I have disabled this however its possible to expose through a cloud service (Synology cloud).
The photos app works well when exporting however I wish it has a backup feature however the flip side is my family wouldn't want all their personal photos sitting on our family nas.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#180Spent roughly 1k on a nas system at home which gives me 6tb of redundant storage. It's raid 0 (2x6tb) with 2 separate backups done nightly/weekly, one in the house and one done in the garage. The speed of access is unmatched to any cloud system, in the long run it'll be cheaper than online (assuming £10 per month for 6tb of storage). I made the plunge after trying a few cheaper options plus cloud. I'm happy with the…
RAID0? Assuming that’s not a typo, RAID0 could not be a worse choice for backups. You’re at least doubling your chances of losing all the data, when you typically want to have something more resilient than a single standard disk for backups.
My mistake, RAID 1.