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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?

#201

Post by clawoo »

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…

Since we're talking about takeout, it's always a good idea to export your Gmail inbox once a year, encrypt it with GPG (or something similar) and store it offline somewhere on a drive.

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

#202

Post by wizzwizz4 »

kevincox wrote: post #181
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.

If you're in the EU, you can start annoying them with “this is my legal right, pls fix”-type complaints. If you're polite, persistent, and keep escalating, you might even get all your data.

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

#204

Post by probotect0r »

rock_artist wrote: post #58

Seeing the OPs question, I'd might add another feature which I feel is tricky. Backup of data is pretty simple (I guess most HN user could easily make an simple upload/backup app for photos quite easily). - But what about searching... That moment when you're looking for a specific moment or latest photos of your dog? or pool to find a specific pool. - Dupe detection. Those unique features that for example, Dropbox is…

No post body was provided.

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

#206

Post by daveslash »

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 recently started building a few Blurb books. I haven't had one printed yet, but I'm working on curating a "best of" collection from my photos (e.g. Best of 2020, 2019, trip to XYZ, etc...) and carefully arranging them all. It does take time, but I'm looking forward to the result. But as you said, not cheap.

I also use Adobe Lightroom, not just for editing, but for storing photos. It's a great way for me to look at, organize, and even publish-to-web, from either my desktop, laptop, or mobile. As for it being a cloud solution, I'm more comfortable with handing my photos to Adobe's cloud than to Google's (or Facebook's!) Although it contains far far more photos than I plan to put in my Blurb books, it too is a "best of" sort of thing.

My "source of truth" is a local hard drive dedicated to photo storage. When I shoot, my camera is set to RAW+JPEG, and I save both copies. The thinking is: RAW has the most data, but do I know for sure that someone digging through these photos in 100 years will have proper Sony RAW Codec to view them? Probably, just JPEG is a nice fall-back.... I organize photos using the following file structure

  /{celestial_object}/{continent}/{country}/{state_or_province}/{city_or_locale}/YYYY.MM.DD__album_title 
  .. e.g. /earth/north_america/usa/california/los_angeles/2021.01.18__visiting_steve
  .. e.g. /moon/mare_tranquillitatis/2021.01.18__first_shoot_with_new_celestron_lens
  .. e.g. /jupiter/2021.01.18__galilean_moons
Once a year I plug in a second hard drive and use Macrium Reflect to mirror the image. Then unplug that second hard drive an put it somewhere "safe", which at the moment is a storage unit down the street.

I'm looking to get a NAS and set up RAID, but even then I'll still mirror the disk periodically and keep a copy in a safe place.

But I do encourage everyone to consider printing photo books.

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

#207

Post by ilamont »

boringg wrote: post #198
ilamont wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I use a desktop software program to organize and save data (Reunion for Mac) and export a backup GEDCOM from time to time which can be imported into other applications if need be:

https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/GEDCOM

GEDCOM has many drawbacks, but it's the de facto standard, it's been around for nearly 40 years, and it's plaintext.

Core data and pictures and family stories gets put into photo books and widely shared with relatives, including some cousins I barely know. I've done three so far for different branches, and will do some updated ones as well as new research is completed.

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

#208

Post by grvdrm »

cedricd wrote: post #121

I'm surprised how technical and homegrown all these solutions are (well, it's an HN crowd so maybe I shouldn't be). I'm a techy too and pretty into photography, but I've gone the other way. I store all my photos on a desktop computer and use BackBlaze to automatically keep everything backed up. It violates the 3-2-1 rule but in the 10ish years I've been using this approach I've had tons of harddrive failures, had to…

Question about your approach: are you able to partition your Backblaze back-up in order to maintain just a minimal set of photos on your local machine?

Would love to do this: - Back-up local machine via Blackblaze - Periodically delete all local photos, save somewhere in BB - Turn on regular back-up again - keeping both the local stuff (now much smaller) but also the previous bulk save in BB.

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

#209

Post by willis936 »

I have a TrueNAS machine that hosts Nextcloud. All datasets are backed up to B2 with E2EE. Nextcloud has wonderful iOS integration. No other photo backup app I've seen backs up live photos and can restore to the camera roll. Monthly cost is low and no one else has the private keys.

I'm not close enough to the end to worry about posterity. If I die tomorrow then my keys are lost and all of my data is entropy. I expect to be motivated to have my data pass on in legacy but that will only happen if I have a kid who is willing to accept maintenance of familial digital archives. We're the first generation.

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

#210

Post by warner25 »

boringg wrote: post #197
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…

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 id…

You make a good point about context and information. Part of the work in making a book is writing all the captions to tell the story. I think we've all looked through a box of old photos from our childhoods and wondered, "who is that?" "where was this taken and when?"

The books we've made through Blurb look high quality to me. They offer several choices for the type of paper at different price points, but I didn't do any research on that. We went with Blurb because it has some relationship with Flickr for pricing and an interface to import our photos from those already organized albums (see "Prints" from the drop-down menu on Flickr). It used to have a decent web app for creating a book. Now you have to download and install their Windows-only desktop app, but it's good.

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