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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?

#181

Post by kevincox »

aarondf wrote: post #134

I use Google Photos and once a year I do a Google takeout to a hard drive and put that drive somewhere safe. I tweeted about this a while back and several people had good replies: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1445408384472211464 For context, this was after facebook was down for a day. I think the odds of Google deleting all my photos is pretty low, but the odds of me losing access to my Google account for…

The problem I had is that the takeouts always failed with "some data could not be exported, please retry" no matter how many times I retried.

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

#183

Post by lwerdna »

sasl wrote: post #176
lwerdna wrote: post #175

Every 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 .

Thank you. I'm also looking for a tool which will find when one file contains a scaled image in another file, or is a crop of another.

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

#186

Post by robertoandred »

bryanp2021 wrote: post #153
voisin wrote: post #131

I use iCloud, and would pay for a solution that allows me to automatically archive on a monthly basis to Amazon Glacier. Anyone know of such a solution?

I wanted to use icloud. But I always got confused as there are different versions of the same media contents (on cloud, on the laptop, exported or non-exported? duplication between devices). And the cost. So I gave up. Unfortunately I still have to do manual export all media from i$$$ devices, move them to linux/android-based system. "move" really means that, because I never pay icloud again.

What different versions were you seeing? Everything just gets uploaded to iCloud automatically.

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

#187

Post by znpy »

NetBeck wrote: post #168
UIUC_06 wrote: post #141

(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 certific…

The lease agreement on those boxes usually states the customer assuming all risk. Sometimes boxes randomly go missing, and natural disasters can make them inaccessible. "She sued the bank in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking $7.3 million. Bank of America sought to have the case dismissed, citing language in its lease agreement stating that the renter “assumes all risks” of leaving property in the box."[0] [0] https…

You bring up the lease agreement, but you should look also to the terms of service of the various cloud storage services.

Chances are the deposit box are way better.

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

#188

Post by UIUC_06 »

NetBeck wrote: post #168
UIUC_06 wrote: post #141

(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 certific…

The lease agreement on those boxes usually states the customer assuming all risk. Sometimes boxes randomly go missing, and natural disasters can make them inaccessible. "She sued the bank in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking $7.3 million. Bank of America sought to have the case dismissed, citing language in its lease agreement stating that the renter “assumes all risks” of leaving property in the box."[0] [0] https…

> Sometimes boxes randomly go missing

citation?

and nothing ever goes wrong with cloud backup schemes, over a very long time period?

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

#189

Post by digisign »

lwerdna wrote: post #178
warner25 wrote: post #152

For 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% a…

Not really a need for big external drives any longer. Terabyte thumb drives are under $40 on Amazon and can be put on a hub or otherwise tucked away. SD card is a more expensive option but gets out of the way more effectively.

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

#190

Post by ilamont »

warner25 wrote: post #152

For 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 am heavily involved in genealogy, practitioners of which have a huge interest in maintaining data, documents, photos, and other research for the next generations.

I have a copy of a handwritten family tree and other notes written by great-grandmothers, cousins, and great aunts, some of which survived close to 100 years. If they had computers back then, I doubt any of the data would be available now. The photo books I have shared with relatives contains copies of these letters and charts and family photos, and even if half of them are destroyed or lost in the next 50 years, the remainder will survive, hopefully for much longer.

It amazes me how much faith other genealogists have in cloud storage or paid services like Ancestry, owned for the past 10+ years by a series of profit-focused private equity firms. Policies change (for PE's benefit), subscriptions lapse, people delete accounts, or online services get shut down, as some Ancestry users discovered the hard way:

https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/myfamily-shuttered-ance...

Another problem with these services: Even though I can share a link to an online tree or a shared cloud folder, more than half of the recipients hate to deal with them because they are forced to learn a new UI or get prompted to death to sign up for a paid service they don't need. The other half eventually forget the links or the information that was in them. Paper or books is the only proven long-term storage medium for genealogy data.

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