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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?

#281

Post by ClumsyPilot »

CommanderData wrote: post #87

Spent 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…

> Most importantly it's not a full time job maintaining it, I spend maybe an hr a month if that checking up on it.

Exactly, I want my family to be able to get the photos if I suddenly get hit by a bus. Noone is gonna be able to deal with your custom server/cronjob/etc. crap in case anything happens to you.

Over the past decade I have migrated back and forth between cloud storage and a NAS. Both of them need upkeep, either to keep footing the bill or to check the drives and replace them if they die.

I think anyone who is serious about this needs something you can put in a closet/safe/bank vault and a decade later it will still work, and the best bet is optical disks, they were suppose to last hundred years +, but that industry is kind of on it's last legs and we were never sure how accurate the longevity claims are.

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

#282

Post by xupybd »

uzakov wrote: post #272
xupybd wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't Encrypt my family photos. I don't understand why anyone would?

Multiple reasons: 1) Someone can use those to train DeepFake models and scam your family 2) There could be private photos and videos there that you aren't aware of 3) Why not?

1 and 2 will probably make sense to some. It's not something that would overcome my why not.

For 3 the biggest problem with encryption is you introduce a single point of failure, if you lose access to the keys your photos are gone. On a simpler note I'm a big fan of keeping things as simple as I can. Encryption is not simple. It can be fun to work with and I don't want to ignore that but unless you want to do that for fun I don't think it's worth the complexity.

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

#283

Post by ksec »

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…

1. Bitflip.

2. Copying Error ( Not sure if that is still a thing on Windows )

3. HDD failure.

A cheap, ZFS, consumer friendly, Dual 2.5" HDD DAS would have been great. Unfortunately no one is making one. May be there is no market, May be they just dont care.

Or burn it to an Archival Disc. Apple could have make an iOS Time Capsule. But they are too busy to push their service revenue.

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

#284

Post by globalise83 »

I actually print out my favourite photos and put them in albums (mounted on little sticky tapes). Safe against all digital corruption, and provides a nice little hobby for evenings in front of the TV. Of course I have the digital versions on a couple of hard drives.

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

#285

Post by NewEntryHN »

jliptzin wrote: post #251
javajosh wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a lame backup frequency though. One year of data is significant loss.

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

#286

Post by theandrewbailey »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #77

In addition what everyone else has mentioned, my plan (yet to be implemented) is to slowly organize the photos into albums, e.g. "Family vacation to Hawaii, 1995". For pics that don't fit neatly into an album theme I'll group them by date, "Family pics 1995-1996" based on their quantity. Then I'll print photobooks, adding info where possible about location, date, and people. Basically, recreating physical photo album…

My photo organization is folders or albums named Year-Event or Year-Place, e.g. 2014-GrandmasFuneral, 2015-Berlin, or 2018-Kenya.

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

#288

Post by EvanAnderson »

jdgiese wrote: post #250
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…

How long have you been following this procedure?

I don't follow this exact procedure, but I do something similar.

I have a bunch of external drives. They go back to ~100GB parallel-ATA drives in external USB enclosures. I think I have ~10 generations of disks in play right now. I've spent less than $2,000 on drives in ~20 years. I probably should have purchased a few more disks over the years since I went >18 months between generations and sometimes 24-30 months.

I wrote some simple scripts to copy the contents to a new drive, compare hashes of the copy to the source, and store the hashes for any new files on the new copy. It's mostly automated. The only thing I've thought about adding is perhaps using PAR2 to add some bitrot protection.

I keep the most recent disk at home and copy files to it throughout the year. (I keep it unplugged most of the time.) When I buy a new disk I run my copy scripts then take the old drive to a relative's house and store it in their gun safe. (Lately I've been the oldest drive from the safe and marveling at the old technology. >smile<)

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

#289

Post by EvanAnderson »

NewEntryHN wrote: post #285
jliptzin wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a lame backup frequency though. One year of data is significant loss.

I add files to the new drive throughout the year. I keep the drive unplugged most of the time but periodically plug it in to add files. I still have a >1 year recovery point in case of fire, but less than that for more mundane data loss scenarios (accidental deletion, etc).

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

#290

Post by theandrewbailey »

durnygbur wrote: post #47

1. Encrypted external USB drive as a live copy 2. Encrypted external offline USB drive onsite 3. Encrypted external offline USB drive offsite 4. Upload of an encrypted archive to the cloud storage It's all manual so sometimes some backups are months old. Haven't lost a single digital photo for almost 15 years now, and have gigabytes of obsolete photos...

Mine is similar, but 1 is an internal drive, and I have almost no cloud storage.

> It's all manual so sometimes some backups are months old.

Do you at least have a script for backing up the live copy to onsite? Like plug in the drive, enter encryption key, then run script?

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