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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?

#71

Post by pavlo »

It took me several years in pursuit of a self hosted solution, that I don’t need too much time to maintain. I think the current solution is working very well for me.

I have a raspberry pi with a USB drive attached. The OS is ubuntu, so I can use ZFS. The drive is backed up to backblaze S3 using restic in a cron job. The backup and ZFS health is monitored with healthchecks.io

The data sync across all the devices including the raspberry pi is done using resilio sync.

I view my photos when I am home using an app written by myself: photograf (https://github.com/ptek/photograf) It runs on the same raspberry.

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

#72

Post by telxosser »

shireboy wrote: post #9

Also interested in this, but hijacking to ask what folks scanning solution is. My dad has tons of slides, and prints. He’s hesitant to send them off, but we have analysis paralysis on scanners etc.

My dad was going to do this himself but it is a massive job. He ultimately sent them to a company and received them back on DVD.

My family even has reel to reel from the 50s or 60s. The problem though is everyone in them has passed on. I am never going to watch video of my great uncle fishing in 1960. Then he is basically a stranger to the next generation.

All this is quite a bit of work for things that will most likely never get watched.

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

#74

Post by donclark »

acjacobson wrote: post #43

While it won't yet solve all your backup needs (still early days), a few friends and I have been working on a privacy focused competitor of sorts for Google Photos, but a bit easier to share your albums with friends and family. It is free for the time being, but it will be a paid solution as you're not paying with your data. It's also E2E encrypted. While all photos are currently hosted by us, we're also exploring le…

Some of my fantasy thoughts about a photo storage service: Can I ask Siri, Google, Alexa (or any smart assistant) when was the last 3 times I saw ____?

Can it show me emails, photos, tweets, etc of the related meetings/events?

Can I take a photo or upload a photo of someone and provide as many details as possible? In relation to me personally and them alone as a person?

Can it be a celebrity or a person from the past (no longer living) and it could try to see a connection, related things, etc?

Would this also be helpful for parties, weddings, funerals, and more?

Could I ask it to try to find a relation between two people?

What if you connected it to something like Lexis Nexis? Be able to display connections in different chart types? bubble, connected graph, or graph commons: https://neo4j.com/blog/creative-network-science-graph-common...

Can a timeline or photos help to tell a story? Act as a guide or reference? Add more clarity to situations/events? Could we offer this as an addon to weddings and other events? Can we create a linear timeline of photos, dates, times and locations? Could we also show related influences? Like songs, albums, family history or tree. Topics to disable: lyrics, alcohol, ?? How to access/merge other apple photo accounts? AI photo collage, web based, download as video or PPT

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

#75

Post by xboxnolifes »

parasec wrote: post #39
dotancohen wrote: post #36

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.

Sure, and don't lock your door since a smashed window is always an option.

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

#77

Post by jasonpeacock »

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 albums. I'll print 2-5 copies of each album, depending if I expect to send copies to other family members or not.

Having physically-printed photos works both as a last-ditch backup and as easy access for anyone to browse. I nostalgically remember spending time as a kid flipping through my parent's and grandparent's photo albums - sometimes with them, but many times on my own. I want to ensure my own kids can have the same experience.

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

#78

Post by acjacobson »

donclark wrote: post #74
acjacobson wrote: post #43

While it won't yet solve all your backup needs (still early days), a few friends and I have been working on a privacy focused competitor of sorts for Google Photos, but a bit easier to share your albums with friends and family. It is free for the time being, but it will be a paid solution as you're not paying with your data. It's also E2E encrypted. While all photos are currently hosted by us, we're also exploring le…

Some of my fantasy thoughts about a photo storage service: Can I ask Siri, Google, Alexa (or any smart assistant) when was the last 3 times I saw ____? Can it show me emails, photos, tweets, etc of the related meetings/events? Can I take a photo or upload a photo of someone and provide as many details as possible? In relation to me personally and them alone as a person? Can it be a celebrity or a person from the past…

Thanks you for sharing - these are interesting ideas.

At the moment we're focused on how we can tie together shared events and memories of your personal story (hence the name) into one place. Currently this is primarily from photos, but as you've suggested there is a lot one can do with how those photos are connected to time, location, each other, and other possible connections. This is what I see missing in most photo backup tools, since they're primarily archival and aren't designed to tie ephemera together into a permanent catalog of your experiences.

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

#79

Post by dave78 »

pavlo wrote: post #71

It took me several years in pursuit of a self hosted solution, that I don’t need too much time to maintain. I think the current solution is working very well for me. I have a raspberry pi with a USB drive attached. The OS is ubuntu, so I can use ZFS. The drive is backed up to backblaze S3 using restic in a cron job. The backup and ZFS health is monitored with healthchecks.io The data sync across all the devices inclu…

I have a very similar setup. An old SFF desktop PC running Debian with a USB3 disk attached, though mine is just running ext4. SMB sharing allows easy access to everyone in the house, plus I have Syncthing configured on our phones and the Linux box which we use to automatically sync our phone pictures and videos. Then this box is backed up using Restic to Backblaze B2.

I know there's some holes in my plan (ext4 isn't foolproof, etc.) but it's been an ongoing process.

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

#80

Post by mcjiggerlog »

Hallucinaut wrote: post #49
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #18

Use Google Photos on my android phone, then use gphotos-sync[0] to sync the files to a hard drive on my DIY NAS. Contents of hard drive are periodically backed up with restic[1] to B2[2]. My reasoning is that I don't trust Google to not lock me out of my account at some point, so having both a local and a remote backup gives me piece of mind. I periodically check the offsite backup to check that it's still all workin…

Doesn't Google reduce the quality of them all when they're uploaded? Not that it's really material in most use cases but I find myself having to do manual backups from my phone.

Nope - you can switch between "Original quality" and "Storage saver".
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