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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?

#361

Post by eb0la »

abrookewood wrote: post #350
waste_monk wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. IIRC ZFS is more trouble than it's worth on tiny systems due to the RAM requirements... generally speaking if you care enough to want ZFS specifically you'll get a slightly larger QNAP / similar NAS (I think the smallest ZFS capable qnaps are 4-bay), or…

Please stop talking about ZFS having excessive RAM requirements - that only applies if you turn on De-Duplication. ZFS will happily run on a box with 2GB of RAM.

Wow. Do you have any pointers to this information? You can get easily 2GB with a SBC for less than $60. The expensive part is the case, and power supply.

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

#362

Post by rhamzeh »

atoav wrote: post #317
adfm wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to say "Encrypt everything," but how do you go about it? For folks looking for an "easy" cross-platform solution to encrypt your sensitive bits in the cloud, check out Cryptomator [^1]. [^1]: https://cryptomator.org/ (no affiliation)

Restic. If you create a restic backup it asks you for an encryption password, you enter it, co fogure the folders etc. Sadly it has no gui (that I know of) but something like runtestic can help with automated incremental and encrypted backups, where you only want to keep the last n versions (and for example a weekly snapshot)

On Gnome, DejaDup recently rolled out restic support, and I must say, it's looking really good!

If you use Gnome, I would encourage you to use it and give feedback here [1]

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/deja-dup/-/issues/192

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

#363

Post by reflexing »

sasl wrote: post #176
lwerdna wrote: post #175

Every time our phones reach capacity, I download all pics/video to my laptop. Then I plug in a portable SSD and copy them there in folder name "media until ". When I get to work next, I copy them to an identical portable SSD stored there, at which point I free the space on my laptop. This whole process happens about 3-4 times per year. I'm currently using returned/refurbished Samsung T5's at about $100/TB.

I do this, alongside a tool for finding duplicate files: https://github.com/adrianlopezroche/fdupes .

I use Czkawka recently for dupes (it has GUI and well-maintained): https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka

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

#364

Post by Terretta »

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…

I did this, NAS to NAS as storage density improved, with rsync checksums on. Years into this I noticed a thumbnail that didn't render, found I couldn't open the original. Looked around, there were quite a few.

Ran a RAW + JPEG error detection script: on the order of 10^1 - 10^2 of photos were no longer valid out of on the order of 10^5 - 10^6 photos.

Turns out rsync verifies on the way, not after write.

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

#365

Post by ksec »

eb0la wrote: post #361
abrookewood wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop talking about ZFS having excessive RAM requirements - that only applies if you turn on De-Duplication. ZFS will happily run on a box with 2GB of RAM.

Wow. Do you have any pointers to this information? You can get easily 2GB with a SBC for less than $60. The expensive part is the case, and power supply.

You can google it as there should be plenty of discussions. Even on HN using 1GB of memory for ZFS. [1] The two ZFS memory intensive feature is ARC ( Cache ) and De-Duplication.

The 2nd thing is that you are not using the NAS / DAS frequently in this scenario. The memory only get you extra performance. The only reason why you want ZFS is file integrity.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11897571

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

#366

Post by gavinmckenzie »

spiantino wrote: post #161
dmje wrote: post #123

Synology NAS, using Synology Photos (installed on my phone + wife's phone for photo backups). The NAS is backed up nightly using Synology C2. I also have a local standalone disk. We also both use Google Photos - although not all photos on here and ideally I wouldn't use it, the utility is so strong it's hard to say no to it. I did used to use Mylio [1] which is a really lovely solution that uses a sort of internal P2…

I also use Synology, but with apple photos. There's a mac mini on my home network that syncs the photo library automatically, and then Synology Drive syncs the local folder to the Synology. That is in turn backed up to backblaze weekly

How do you sync your Apple photo library to your Syno, given the Apple library is a package file containing a maze of machine-generated nested folders and many nearly duplicate image files (at least for those images you’ve edited)?

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

#367

Post by shepherdjerred »

karjaluoto wrote: post #349
shepherdjerred wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me know if that happens! I'd love an easy way to make sure my data is safe in the event Google randomly bans me :) I'll check out Pixaver soon to see if it'd work as a backup for my Google Photos!

Nice! If you do try it, please let us know how the experience goes for you. I think the onboarding process is a bit intimidating given the (necessary, yet lengthy) permissions we request. I’ll mention that you’d be interested in more options around backups to @shelkie. Like I said, I don’t think we can make this happen now, but it’s good to have a sense for what others might find useful.

Hi! I just tried it out and signed up for the 25gb plan. It was incredibly easy. I really appreciate that your prices are reasonable.

Just curious -- where are photos stored for Pixaver? Are you using cloud storage?

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

#368

Post by karjaluoto »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #367
karjaluoto wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! If you do try it, please let us know how the experience goes for you. I think the onboarding process is a bit intimidating given the (necessary, yet lengthy) permissions we request. I’ll mention that you’d be interested in more options around backups to @shelkie. Like I said, I don’t think we can make this happen now, but it’s good to have a sense for what others might find useful.

Hi! I just tried it out and signed up for the 25gb plan. It was incredibly easy. I really appreciate that your prices are reasonable. Just curious -- where are photos stored for Pixaver? Are you using cloud storage?

Awesome—thanks for signing up! If you run into any issues, do let us know. :-)

We’re using Wasabi for cloud storage. So far it has worked pretty well for this project.

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

#369

Post by wesleyd »

Another side to this problem is that so many online services are structured as a contract between one person and the company, when what I really want for family photos and documents is something much more family-focused. In particular, if I die, it should make zero difference to the relationship.

I sometimes wonder how much of the way things are is because that's just how the US legal system is, and how much of it is because that's the worldview of the childless twentysomething singles who built these systems. (No judgment: I know when I was a twentysomething childless single building things, I had a person-centric world view, not a family-centric one.)

(An extreme example of this problem is the oculus quest, a device that is begging to be shared between family members, but it requires a Facebook account to use. Further, it is a breach of the terms to have a family facebook account. Nobody in our family with a facebook account - i.e. the older people - wanted to sacrifice theirs to the quest.)

It's weird/sad that a family doesn't have any sort of legal personhood, but a corporation does. A joke solution here might be to incorporate my family and have all these digital assets belong to the family corp. I'm not even sure if I'm joking.

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

#370

Post by WalterBright »

Terretta wrote: post #364
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…

I did this, NAS to NAS as storage density improved, with rsync checksums on. Years into this I noticed a thumbnail that didn't render, found I couldn't open the original. Looked around, there were quite a few. Ran a RAW + JPEG error detection script: on the order of 10^1 - 10^2 of photos were no longer valid out of on the order of 10^5 - 10^6 photos. Turns out rsync verifies on the way, not after write.

Propagating errors is indeed an issue. That's why, for example, my backup program never copies different files back from the backup. The backups form a tree, always writing down, never up.
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