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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?

#251

Post by jliptzin »

javajosh wrote: post #247
WalterBright wrote: post #235

1. 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. wil…

Do you actually do this? Or is it theory?

It doesn’t really seem that hard. Buying a new hard drive and cloning data from the old one can be done pretty easily once a year.

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

#252

Post by twiddling »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #182

Keep doing what you are doing. Also, from now on, at the end of each year, look through all your photos for that year, choose about 100, print them, and delete the rest.

This.

We horde so much and trap ourselves in nostalgia.

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

#253

Post by b3lvedere »

travisporter wrote: post #88
b3lvedere wrote: post #64

We all have iPhones, so we use an app to automatically upload our pictures to the central nas. At the central nas a 24/7 sync runs to an external usb drive and other backup schematics to two other nas systems. Once in a while i copy (and encrypt) everything to another external usb drive. That usb drive then goes to another location.

Which app if you dont mind sharing?

QFile for Qnap NAS.

Synology has DS file or the newer Synology Photos for that.

For regular iDevice to Nas things i recommend File Explorer Pro. It isn't free, but gets nice updates. Haven't found automated uploads/sync in it though.

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

#255

Post by b3lvedere »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #163
travisporter wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which app if you dont mind sharing?

Something like Photosync[1] does it and I had used it much easier during Flickr days. Unfortunately, in my recent tries, it keeps crashing on large libraries. 1. https://www.photosync-app.com

I agree. Qfile also has its limits. My wife has a gazillion pictures so it regularey locks up.

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

#256

Post by uzakov »

WalterBright wrote: post #235

1. 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. wil…

Maybe I am nitpicking but there are some very important steps missing:

Encrypt everything

Check drives (health etc)

Etc

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

#258

Post by zeagle »

I posted about my homebrew solution for photos/documents/scan archiving with a local NAS + encrypted offsite backup on a VPS last week at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29863822#29888273 . My use case is 300-400GB of photos which is affordable on a 4TB VPS.

In short, I have an old desktop-turned-NAS with ZFS that will tolerate 2 physical drive failures and access my photos over a network share. It runs a weekly cron script to copy an iterative, encrypted borg backup of the photos offsite over sshfs to my VPS. I can mount specific date's snapshots over sshfs back to the nas/another machine if I ever need to recover anything without having to enter the password on the VPS.

It's a good question on what would happen if I died. Thanks for getting me to consider this. My spouse wouldn't have a clue with the VPS or how to fix the NAS but could pay someone to easily copy the data off. I should leave a note taped inside the case. For now I'll plug an external ntfs drive into the NAS and if needed she could plug that into any other device.

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

#259

Post by yboris »

For video files - a little off-topic - I created an app for dealing with huge number of video files: Video Hub App which lets you see previews from your videos (even if the files are scattered across many offline hard drives). Might come in handy for someone.

https://videohubapp.com/en/ - MIT open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

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

#260

Post by robertlutece »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #182

Keep doing what you are doing. Also, from now on, at the end of each year, look through all your photos for that year, choose about 100, print them, and delete the rest.

I also don't understand the necessity of having all these images. "Remember that? I'd tell you about that day, but as it happens we actually have 1214 photos and 2 hours of footage from that event!"

Or start shooting film, also gives the photos some character.

relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1832/

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