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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?

#51
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you're fine with a burglar having the images and you cannot be ransomed with them (e.g. due to nudes), just write what is on the harddrive clearly and you're fine. For the most part, just using an unusual filesystem e.g. ZFS will foil the vast, vast majority of attempts to read the data from a drive stolen from a home burglary (e.g. where the data was not the target).

That's security by obscurity - either do it right (if your data demands it) or don't put any effort in it at all, IMHO.

  > That's security by obscurity
Exactly. And in instances of securing physical objects, depending on the threat model, obscurity can an effective barrier.

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

#54
I have a 4 Tb disk in my main PC with every media on it. It's mirrored to a 1-disk local NAS. I rotate the disk on the NAS about once per week, putting the other disk in a big old safe that was already in the house when we moved in.

So at any one time there are almost complete 3 copies of everything.

There is no off-site backup. The safe is probably not super theft-resistant nowadays but it should provide some protection in case of fire.

I'm reaching near capacity on 4 Tb and don't exactly know where to go after that. I could upgrade all 3 disks to 6 or 8 Tb but I resent discarding the 3 4s that are in perfect condition. So IDK.

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

#55

To save the environment in terms of redundant storage, I just upload them directly to the NSA cloud service. The free tier plan is pretty good.

lol! I think we're all uploading to the NSA's cloud service, whether we want backups or not!

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

#56
post #27

I 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…

Currently I run a freedbsd zfs nas as well. I had planned to do something similar but I wanted to allow the places I store backups, some access to the storage. In your example, it would be your parents. I figured it would be a nice way of saying thanks. I was thinking syncthing or something. How do you do NATing?

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

#57
Tangential discussion: my daughter recently asked to look through our family videos and we've been getting through them the last few nights. It's wonderful. Both kids are enjoying seeing themselves being ... themselves, embarrassingly unbound by the learned shame and anxieties that come from moving into teenage-hood.

I'm glad my backup and storage setup has stood the test of (thus far a relatively short) time.

Most videos are from mobiles, and I use syncthing on each device to automatically back them up to NAS. The NAS has an external USB drive to which back ups are directed, plus another NAS in the shed as a secondary on-site backup - which also has an external USB HDD that gets backed up to. All of the backups other than mobile device to NAS via Syncthing are done with crontab'd rsync scripts.

I then irregularly rotate portable USB-caddied HDDs from my parents and in-laws houses and backup to them as well. This rotation is well overdue, thanks for the reminder.

I don't do cloud. It feels too ephemeral in the context of my history with online services - I change my mind and switch around a bit, and lose interest here and there. I'm the kind of person who would host their own email server if I wasn't already gigabytes deep in a grandfathered free custom domain plan from Google. (I do actually host my own email server using Citadel, but it's a domain that's very rarely used and entirely non-critical).

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

#58
Seeing the OPs question, I'd might add another feature which I feel is tricky. Backup of data is pretty simple (I guess most HN user could easily make an simple upload/backup app for photos quite easily).

- But what about searching... That moment when you're looking for a specific moment or latest photos of your dog? or pool to find a specific pool.

- Dupe detection.

Those unique features that for example, Dropbox is an inferior tool for the job.

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

#59
I (well the whole family) use iCloud and Google One & Photos as a backup. I stopped using Amazon Photos, well, paying for it given that it syncs the photos just fine too and I have the videos in the other 2.

Every 3 or 4 years I get paranoid and I make a backup in a random HD drive that it takes me days to find, which for a backup it is not ideal.

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

#60
post #32

I simply burn the photos in 100GB M-disc blurays. Then I bury them next to a tree in a zip lock bag.

I hope you bury a reader unit as well :) I bought two units of different makes and do small tests like once a year after computer/os updates, just in case...
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