I try to keep it as simple as possible. I back files up to a hard drive. No exotic filesystems either, usually just fat
Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
261–270 of 380 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#262Redundancy - Google Photos for integrations/ease of use, Amazon Photos since it's free with prime w/ unlimited storage, HD backup, occasional bluray backup, photo books of the best photos. All of it
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#263Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#2641. 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
I don't Encrypt my family photos. I don't understand why anyone would?
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#265I 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…
Are there any tools to automate this process? I know you can schedule Google Takeout, but I want the backups to be automatically downloaded and saved somewhere, e.g. S3 or my local NAS
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#266My friend and I built https://pixaver.com . It doesn’t address all of the points you note here, but it does offer some piece of mind if we get locked out of Google Photos.
Do you have any plans to support backups of other Google content, e.g. gmail?
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#267I have 3 NAS systems based on Freebsd + ZFS where all system are over 10 years old on 3 different locations. My home, my parents home, and at my co-location. It is just ZFS snapshots with replication. I wrote my own shell scripts for this that takes daily/hourly snapshots. This scales well with multiple TB's, bandwidth is no issue as only changes from last snapshot(s) are replicated. After 10 years, I've replaced onl…
My problem with this approach, and many of the other ones (including my own, at the moment), is that 99% of my relatives wouldn't know how to access such a system in case of death or emergency. This is why the trustee for post-life access to my info is actually a friend who works in IT like me; but I've not sorted out pics yet.
This is a problem I'm trying to solve as well. My main repository is ZFS, which IMO is a no-go for postmortem access. I don't trust that online accounts, especially paid ones, will not be locked out due to inactivity or lack of payment. It may be several years between departure and access.
I have 3 separate use cases: casual access to shared memories for which I'm the family steward (photos, videos), motivated access to personal important documents, and motivated access to other personal files.
I'm not about to leave an unencrypted drive full of personal info in a family member's house, as the risk of theft is strictly greater than just having one copy. My current plan is to use EXT4 + Luks to satisfy the last 2 scenarios, which I think stands a reasonable chance for anyone slightly techy (most modern Linux distributions will simply prompt you for the container password when you try to access the encrypted drive) and is likely to enjoy long-lived support for at least a decade or 2. I have a techy person in my family, not sure I'd do this if I didn't... For casual access to shared memories, I plan on leaving an unencrypted partition. While it lasts, these media are also available on a family-only photo album I put up on AWS.
I'm considering using a laptop as the vessel for the encrypted drive, with a suitable Linux distro pre-loaded and instructions on the desktop/printed out and kept in an adhesive document pocket stuck to the machine.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#268Parallel question: formats
I keep all my photos in the "native" format, which is basically JPEG and whatever my iPhone is spitting out these days. They are currently editable (which for me is mainly crops, with occasional other fix ups). I scanned all my old negatives, APS, and slides and just had them all issued as the lowest compression (highest resolution) JPEG (I didn't have a huge choice of formats).
But I have a bunch of videos from film tape, and cards. What's the best equivalent (supporting simple crops and edits) that might reasonably be editable in future?
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I am nitpicking but there are some very important steps missing: Encrypt everything Check drives (health etc) Etc
I don't Encrypt my family photos. I don't understand why anyone would?
Perhaps some family photos would include sexy time memories? Ideally those are password protected though or not included with general family photo storage..
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#270For me the most important part is to keep it simple and not dependent on the one tech person of the family paying for some cloud storage. Unlike other mentions in the comments what you don't want to have is custom scripts, git, backups tools, strong encryption, cronjobs running on some server that will go away eventually. A labeled, unencrypted HDD in a closet in two different locations will most likely do the job ju…
I want to agree but find even this is too complicated some times.
Where the HDD approach usually falls apart is merge conflicts. And by that I don’t mean only in the git world. This is an inherently difficult problem.
Someone extracts a subset of the hdd collection onto their laptop to do some editing. Then forget to store back the result on the hdd for the next 6 months. Next time when doing backup, mix up the hard drives, only saving the photos on the second one. And so on. Even basic stuff like deduplicating photos or filtering out only the good photos can leave a lot of confusion. Quick resolutions like “just keep everything” completely reverts such a cleanup (1). A strict master-slave scheme helps but requires access to the master hdd for any writes.
Cloud doesn’t solve this entirely but shortens the window of conflicts by convenient and always in sync access to both read and write.
Someone really need to invent a git for photos, for humans. That can deal with the longer partitions which loose hard drives usually lead to.
(1) on the topic of cleaning up photos. Doing this before backing up is strongly recommended. The smaller your data the easier it is to manage. You also will enjoy your old photos a lot more. Nobody wants to click through the 100 angles you shot of some food from a local cafe 5 years ago. Keep only what is truly relevant.