Upload them to Google, Flickr and iCloud. Also have two local copies.
Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
231–240 of 380 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#232For 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 love Blurb. We use it to make photobooks every year. It forces us to pick the 200-300 photos from the year that really mean something to us. The rest of the 50,000 photos go into our Google Cloud drive. Not that they don't mean something, but there's no way we can enjoy 50,000photos/year.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#233For 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…
My family has used Blurb for many years. Once you've created your book, just wait a few weeks and a 50% coupon usually comes around.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#234I 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.
There's also a fantastic tool by Jay Lee that will do it in an automated fashion
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#2351. copy to hard disk
2. buy a new drive every year and copy it forward
3. store a copy with relatives
Note that a cloud provider:
1. can shut off your access at any time, by accident or on purpose, and you have no recourse
2. will sell your data to anyone at any time
3. will give it to any government for the asking
4. will leak it to any hacker
5. will allow employees of said cloud provider to browse your data
6. will scan it to use it to sell you ads
7. will scan it looking for anything they don't approve of this week, and take "corrective action"
8. if you've got terabytes, good luck trying to download it
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#236For 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…
> For posterity and "the test of time," I really think you need to create physical photo books.
Didn't work out for my dad. A leak in the roof poured water on the albums, and all the emulsion ran away.
A friend of mine had her family home burn down, all photos/films gone.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#237I use google drive + Sync to an s3 bucket in cold storage.
The most important ones (e.g wedding pictures) are also stored on a local disk.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Easy way to remember: It's called RAID 0 because that's how much data you get back if something goes wrong.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#239Photos and videos are thrown into a multi-drive RAID 6 NAS with TB's capacity as the main central storage. RAID 6 offers redundancy against disk failure and easy plug & play replacement. An external USB backup drive attaching to the NAS does incremental backup daily. Periodically the data are snapshot to other USB backup drives and kept off site.
The NAS server has apps that offer backing up to various cloud services, but I choose not to use them.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#240I use a combination of Google Photos and Dropbox. GPhotos is great for searching photos, sharing, and viewing on Chromecast. But I don't like that they can transcode your data. Supposedly they don't if you have the storage space, but an accidental app setting can still mess things up.
Then there's Dropbox. It automatically uploads all my raw data, and syncs it across multiple devices. So at least I have local and cloud backups of all my raw photos/videos. A picture taken on my phone camera will immediately appear on my PC desktop hard drive, as long as it's on. The downside is searching through photos can be a slog compared to GPhotos, but that's why I use both.
I used to use Picasa many years ago, but haven't reinstalled it on a newer computer. I've been meaning to run it through my Dropbox collection again to make it easier to sort through locally. IMO, it's still the best photo management software. As far as I know, it's still the only one that does facial recognition locally and without a subscription.