Synology NAS, 2 6TB HDD with RAID1. Plenty of space, can customize to work with any use case.
Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
191–200 of 380 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#192We are a no-google/apple house. My photos come from various phones and two cameras. The phones all have the same Mega account on them and the photos get synced to "Phone 1", "Phone 2", "Phone 3" folders, and the whole Mega account syncs to a desktop.
The cameras have Wifi cards and sync to the desktop that syncs to Backblaze.
On new years day each year, the desktop gets archived to a external HDD and put in a safe.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#193I use PhotoStructure for local management on external hard drives, BackBlaze for offsite backup, and a combination of Flickr and Google Photos for sharing the highlights.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#194Spent 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 did the same thing with a WD My Cloud (6 tb redundant RAID 1) man was that a terrible decision. One failed and then the other eventually did as well (within 3 years) - not to mention it was painfully slow and cost maybe 600 USD.
I've since been able to recover them through another external drive casing but I haven't found a replacement idea on what to do.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#195> What is your system for backing up family photos and videos to stand the test of time? In addition to the other good answers, a box full a printed photos will stand the test of time.
Sure, until your house burns down.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#196I 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'm the author of HashBackup. I'd advise against using Amazon Glacier for pretty much anything, because retrieval requires a lot of mental, financial, and procedural gymnastics (4-hour delays, spacing our retrievals to keep costs down, etc). I implemented it for HashBackup when it was first announced, it was a nightmare, and I deprecated it a year or two later because alternatives like Backblaze B2 are nearly as cheap and have none of the retrieval headaches.
When talking percentages, sure, Glacier is $4/TB and B2 is $5/TB, so Glacier is 20% cheaper. But if you have to actually retrieve your data, it will likely cost more than any savings you've accrued. If you take a look at the S3 pricing page and your head isn't swimming afterwards, you probably don't understand the complexity of it. For example, they have data "retrieval" fees that are sometimes per request, sometimes per GB, and sometimes free (they promote that of course). But there's still that pesky 9 cents/GB data transfer fee that's on top of the per-GB retrieval fee, putting you at 10 cents/GB to retrieve data. Glacier also needs special tools: S3 tools can't access data stored in Glacier.
If you really want to stick with Amazon, I'd suggest S3 One-Zone Infrequent Access. It's a little more expensive, but you can use standard S3 tools to get your data back. You'll still have that 9 cents/GB retrieval cost, vs 1 cent/GB for B2.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#197For 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…
So I am going through this process with my mother who is organizing photos. I asked her the intended audience and a lot of it is for posterities sake.
My next questions were then how do you arrange a project for the intended audience (context and information is important as random photos of people 100 years from now won't have much value). And then how do you create it so the paper book lasts for 100 + years.
Your idea on Blurb was was interesting to me. Do you know the quality of the paper of the book will survive a long time or did you look into that? Also what reasons did you settle on Blurb (if you don't mind me asking)?
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction - I was about to suggest printing out individual copies and putting them in classic photograph book with plastic covers and adding her own blurbs.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#198For 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…
What do you do to preserve your accounts? I share your concern about the services available today and don't subscribe to them. That said - my question for you, as you are heavily involve: what do you do and is it effective / costly / built for what time period?
Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#199For now using google one with family sharing. Thinking of buying a synology NAS to store everything locally.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#200I have a Synology's NAS for almost 9 years now. It has 2 4TB disks in Raid (SHR). Also I have a external 4TB HDD with a copy of everything in the NAS.
The system is extremely reliable. I don't know if I'm lucky, but the first HDD took almost 7 years to brake. I simply replaced it and the system is still working 24x7x365.
As I have the MS Office subscription, the cellphone photos are also backed up in the OneDrive.