Stored on a Synology NAS, and indexed by PhotoPrism. I backup the entire NAS to a Google cloud encrypted bucket every night, and once a quarter or so update a backup on a solid state drive I keep in a safe.
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?
#92Stored on a Synology NAS, and indexed by PhotoPrism. I backup the entire NAS to a Google cloud encrypted bucket every night, and once a quarter or so update a backup on a solid state drive I keep in a safe.
Do family members know how to access said system if something were to happen to you?
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#93For me the most important part is to keep it simple and not dependent on the one tech person of the family paying for some cloud storage.
Unlike other mentions in the comments what you don't want to have is custom scripts, git, backups tools, strong encryption, cronjobs running on some server that will go away eventually. A labeled, unencrypted HDD in a closet in two different locations will most likely do the job just fine. If you want to throw in your cloud backup that you take care of that will be a nice bonus but I wouldn't rely only on a "tech" solution.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#94For me the most important part is to keep it simple and not dependent on the one tech person of the family paying for some cloud storage. Unlike other mentions in the comments what you don't want to have is custom scripts, git, backups tools, strong encryption, cronjobs running on some server that will go away eventually. A labeled, unencrypted HDD in a closet in two different locations will most likely do the job ju…
You need to periodically check those HDDs for any corruption though, which requires some tech knowledge.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#95In 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…
I ran all my old photos through a script that renamed them all based on the exif date. This made it way easier to organize.
I have a server at home with a 4tb drive shared out with Samba and of course sftp (xfs). There is a 2nd internal drive formatted with btrfs. Once a day the btrfs drive is mounted, drive 1 rsyncs to drive 2, and drive 2 creates a snapshot, then unmounts. Later that night, I run an borg backup and rsync (depending on sensitivity of data) to a time4vps (https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=1881&_ga=2.199835630.1135648...) 1TB storage server. Currently, that's enough for the stuff I want to backup.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#96print the ones you care about the most
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#97First, 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…
Having to archive environments and toolchains along with backups is unpleasant.
What is the plan: when decryption fails (and before you identified that it's a versioning issue with openssl, in your case) you'd reinstall an old linux to a random computer and work from there? How many config files and settings are even involved in your backup process and how can you be sure you haven't missed anything?
I hope there are dependency-free solutions for this - a winzip-encrypted .zip file that asks for a password should work everywhere even in the future?
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#98I 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…
My problem with this approach, and many of the other ones (including my own, at the moment), is that 99% of my relatives wouldn't know how to access such a system in case of death or emergency. This is why the trustee for post-life access to my info is actually a friend who works in IT like me; but I've not sorted out pics yet.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#99All computers in the house backup regularly with borgbackup on a small servers (a 2010 Macbook with an attached USB drive). This is done by hand, but there is a script that periodically checks that no backup is falling behind.
Then I have a custom script that encrypts and replicates all the borgbackup repositories on Google Drive (where I have unlimited space because my previous university still hasn't deleted my account).
Ideally I would also replicate everything on a drive at some relative's house, but I haven't had time to set up this yet.
Overall I am rather pleased with this setup. This is for general backup of everything. Specifically for photos, I have a script on both my and my wife's Android phone that copies all photos and videos to a shared directory on the MacBook, and she periodically organizes all the photos there. Then they fall in the main backup.
Re: Ask HN: What is your system for backing up family photos and video?
#100> is there any way to guarantee these heirlooms remain intact and available
Are they actually heirlooms? If the goal is to keep these safe so generations can continue to not look at them, what's the point? If you haven't looked at something in years, odds are nobody wants to look at them.