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Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

#21

I have the primary store on a RAID-Z2 zfs volume on a FreeNAS server in the basement. That backs up all photos to Amazon Photos ("free" with Amazon Prime, which I have anyway) and important things (family photos, family videos, and legal docs) to S3 with lifecycle policies defined. Family photos are additionally rsynced nightly [one-way] to a Synology server (just because I had it before I built the FreeNAS storage a…

You might want to look into duplicity [1] for client-side encryption and as a general incremental backup solution. I've been using it for a while, and had to restore a couple times, and it's both pretty intuitive and works as expected. It's essentially just a wrapper on GnuPG and rsync/tar with a bunch of storage backends.

[1] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Re: Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

#22
A while back, I've tried building a solution that does encrypted storage with locally managed keys, with a cloud backup.

Unfortunately, it did not go to production: the majority of people are ok with sharing their digital artifacts with google, dropbox, advertising and insurance companies, and any other entities who manage to have an agreement with of hack into the cloud provider. (See, for example, how many people talk about google photos in this thread). The market for a truly secure digital archive is, in my opinion, too small.

A prototype can be still seen at [0].

0: https://goryachev.com/products/secure-archive/index.html

Re: Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

#23

Unfortunately, Google Photos. It's very convenient, but there's this background fear that if my account gets unexpectedly closed, as it happens with Google, there would be no way to recover my photos. I try to download the Photos data regularly via their takeout tool, but the process is cumbersome. I wish there was an automated way of doing that. I'd even pay for that. I moved from Gmail to Fastmail, but I still have…

I get around that by enabling the "Show photos in Google Drive" switch and syncing them to my Synology NAS with a Drive client.

Re: Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

#24
I use iCloud to store, backup, and sync my phone photos. I use a couple of 2/4TB drives to back up my photos taken on my DSLR/Film cameras. I manually copy over directories to redundant drives. I keep one 4TB drive that's the final backup, and it's unplugged and kept in a safe in my house. Every couple months, I pull it out, backup the newest photos to it and return it to it's safe. I know it's a little extreme, but I have tons of photos and want to keep multiple backups.

Re: Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

#26
Dropbox has treated me well. I think it hits all the boxes you're asking for. The app automatically backs up my photos from my phone, but because it's not photo specific, I'm able to backup all my other files (music, documents). I've also not hit a video limit.

Re: Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

#27
I use sftp+lftp [1] (faster and more secure than rsync) to transfer them to one of my backup servers. That server uses rsnapshot to keep diffs and also backs up to multiple external USB drives. The same method of sftp+lftp can be used to back files up off-site.

Sftp can't touch the snapshots which protects against malicious access (cryptolockers and such)

[1] - https://tinyvpn.org/sftp/#lftp

Re: Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

#28
Gsuite with unlimited data and google photos with original quality enabled. Photos are backed up once a month to aws in lower but still acceptable quality. (Might be changing that as storage costs are starting to get really brutal). Also generate quite a bit of video for a side project of mine and that also goes right to google drive in a team share. Don’t have the space or funds to store those elsewhere. Talking ~7tb of video and premier pro project files.

Re: Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?

#29
I have my photos and videos on a ZFS personal NAS at home, backed up independently to two external hard drives(secondary backup). The plan was to use recline to backup the ZFS NAS to Backblaze B2, but that bit is not setup yet.

I have also been eyeing a project called photoprism to serve as a front end for my media, and perhaps Filebrowser as well as a secondary interface to view them as "files".

https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

https://filebrowser.github.io

Another project in the same "Google photos alternative" space that I have bookmarked is Ownphotos.

https://github.com/hooram/ownphotos

Some day, I will find time to set it all up ;-)

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