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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?

#321

Post by CommanderData »

brandonio21 wrote: post #249
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…

I have a similar setup (also Synology), but only backup to Backblaze nightly. What's housing your garage backup? Another NAS or something else? If it's another synology, did you get the same model as your primary or something less powerful?

It's an old laptop that turns on with a plug timer and shutdowns after it's finished copying hyper backup off the second server over SMB.

The timer runs every Sunday at 5am. It's never failed.

I should probably add it as a secondary destination in hyperbackup however need a nice way to autorun an rsync server on Windows. Then I could combine the alerts in Synology should something fail.

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

#322

Post by sliken »

UIUC_06 wrote: post #141

(Very) old school: you get a multi-TB disk of some sort, doesn't have to be fast or high quality. Back up the media to that disk, and then take it down to your safe deposit box. No absurd monthly fees, no Terms of Service, it's off-site so if your house burns down, you're covered. "Your what ?" Yeah, the banks still have those. Mine costs $15 a year. If you die, your next-of-kin will have to bring in a death certific…

First of all safe deposit box, despite impressive security measures shown in movies, aren't all that secure. Google "safe deposit box news" for extra details. Even ignoring the LA issue where the FBI seized a bunch of safe deposit boxes, seems like just loss is pretty common.

Disks are not designed to be usable after 5-10 years of sitting on a shelf. Portable drives aren't particularly robust either, I've worked with many people with lost data on a USB attached drive. I'd use at LEAST two drives, ideally in two places if that's your only store for anything important.

I'd recommend using a cloud service (amazon.com/Amazon-Photos/, https://www.flickr.com/, https://photos.google.com/) or similar AND keep a local copy on a disk. Plan on replacing the disk every 5 years and paying whatever monthly/annual fees for enough photo storage. Include in your will full details on the online and offline access to the data. Sure it's a pain, sure there are costs involved, but it's not some insurmountable task. Much like your taxes, will, deeds for property, bank account info, etc. In all cases you want the original documents and pointers to the company/account.

Bitwarden (among others) handles designating a successor for accounts in the case of death, you can include username, password, and any encrypted volume info there.

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

#323

Post by joe200 »

uzakov wrote: post #256
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

What encryption are you using ?

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

#324

Post by joe200 »

parasec wrote: post #23

First, I'd recommend thinning out - multiple terabytes sounds very extensive and can be thinned by removing duplicates and by using better compression like webp or x265, removing unnecessary raw-files, etc. My personal backup is the usual 3-2-1: 3 backups, 2 places, 1 offline. I have one copy on my local harddrive (that I work with), one automatically synced copy via seafile on one of my dedicated servers (which also…

Are you encrypting every file or create some virtual encrypted volume and copy all file over ?

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

#326

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

For posterity, there is forever.com, they guarantee 100 years storage for one-time payment. It's like $150 for 12GB, so you must choose which pictures to store.

The sad part is that nobody will ever look at all those terabytes ...

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

#327

Post by brandonio21 »

CommanderData wrote: post #321
brandonio21 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a similar setup (also Synology), but only backup to Backblaze nightly. What's housing your garage backup? Another NAS or something else? If it's another synology, did you get the same model as your primary or something less powerful?

It's an old laptop that turns on with a plug timer and shutdowns after it's finished copying hyper backup off the second server over SMB. The timer runs every Sunday at 5am. It's never failed. I should probably add it as a secondary destination in hyperbackup however need a nice way to autorun an rsync server on Windows. Then I could combine the alerts in Synology should something fail.

Ah, interesting - and what's the second server?

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

#328

Post by shostack »

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…

How do you handle organization of the massive amount of day to day photos taken on phones? It seems really tough to keep up with the increased volume the reduced friction has created.

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

#329

Post by grvdrm »

cedricd wrote: post #276
grvdrm wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My answer to maintaining a minimal set of photos on a local machine isn't great unfortunately. The desktop holding all the photos acts like a file server and I connect my laptop to that when browsing images. There's a way to do it that I find somewhat risky: pay a bit extra for permanent storage. Normally Backblaze will remove deleted files in 30 days (I pay for a year). If you do permanent then you can delete your o…

Interesting. Wasn’t aware of that option. And I agree that it feels strange to sign that data over to someone/something in that manner.

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

#330

Post by jayFu »

Hard drives with multiple copies in different places, and you need software to manage those photos and video for you, google Picasa was good in the old days, until google kills and replace with google photo. All major players provide photo cloud service, and for some people think the problem is solved, while some believe the digital assets should be taken care by themselves, store locally, backup locally, that is the primary, and cloud backup is the tertiary backup, a good complementary.

The price of existing cloud storage is too high, and some of the companies(Shoebox, Canon Irista) doing the business gradually shutdown the services, this is a money losing business, it’s not the efficient way to manage huge amount of assets centralized (flicker CEO’s open letter sent last year confirmed this), they have to either make it more expensive, or make you the product. Cloud service is convenient for the user, people don’t need to buy expensive hardware, don’t need to be the professionals to maintain that, don’t need to worry about the energy fee to keep it run 24x7, but things are changing, single board computers are getting cheaper, more powerful and more energy efficient, storage are getting cheaper with larger capacity, software are getting more intelligent, people are having more and more concerns about the privacy, it’s now viable to host the Photo service, your private cloud, at your own place.

There are tons of open source alternatives there, but non of them provide competitive features like google photo, even though there are some backend services like photoprism that does a very good job on indexing the photo with AI, however the mobile APP is missing, and google also has the ecosystem to show photo/video on google home and chromecast.

We've been building Lomorage (https://lomorage.com) trying to fill the gap, it's easy to setup a self hosted service(Still need a lot of work to make it easy for non tech users), cross platform, has iOS and Android mobile APP, can setup multiple accounts, some basic AI search(not polished and need more work), there are other features missing, but it's stable enough for daily use. Would appreciate you try it out and give some feedback.

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