111–120 of 357 posts
One of my worries that keeps me sleeplessly awake at nights sometimes is the possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not. A sufficiently strong solar flare can essentially put us back a few centuries electronically, and a few millenia socially, instantly. Wonder if there are stress tests on cloud storage that account for this possibility by means of adequate insula…
Just to add context - I do have backups, but they're spread across a myriad of different hard drives. I had used Amazon Photos to consolidate, and benefit from the facial recognition to be able to quickly locate pictures of family members quickly. I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. Thanks for the comments!
That ARM machine also has the responsibility of making backups, local to a USB drive, as well as to another cloud. Not mirrors, but proper versioned backups (as in Restic, Borg, Arq, Duplicacy, Kopia, etc).
I also maintain a couple of USB drives with yearly updated mirrors of the entire photo library. The drives are stored at geographically different locations, and surface scanned, updated and rotated yearly.
And finally, as a "last ditch recovery", i maintain an archive of M-disc Blu-Ray discs that contain a complete copy of our family photo library. Every year i make an identical set of discs containing the past years photos, and these sets are stored alongside the USB drives.
I don't bother archiving documents as everything that is important is stored on government servers anyway, or exists in hardcopy. Also, if every step in my normal 3-2-1 backup scheme has failed and i need to recover from the archive, i probably have bigger issues than retrieving my budget for this years finances.
It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread. I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.
Knowing Amazon retail / services support, their data is gone and they'll be lucky if they raise anyone at all. If you pay $15k a month for AWS enterprise support, you will find someone who may or may not be able to help you within 6 months after misinterpreting the problem and having to raise your account manager and wave your hands around.
55 photos a day, every day, for 12 years, does not sound "carefully curated" to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smells like everyone in github I got told I was insane for backing up github. I clone all our github repos daily, zip them up and stuff them in S3
At least for code, git being distributed means that there's always multiple copies with typical workflows. For example, in addition to the copy on GitHub whoever pushed last should have a completely current copy. And everyone else working with the repo should have something pretty current.
This is why I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously on all my devices. If one of them screws up I've always got the other one. What I need to do though is get them all copied to my home backup server (the HTPC) on the regular...
> This is why I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously on all my devices. If one of them screws up I've always got the other one. That's insufficient. If one of then screws up, deletions will likely propagate to the other.
So, yes, they could propagate but you have time to correct the mishap.
One of my worries that keeps me sleeplessly awake at nights sometimes is the possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not. A sufficiently strong solar flare can essentially put us back a few centuries electronically, and a few millenia socially, instantly. Wonder if there are stress tests on cloud storage that account for this possibility by means of adequate insula…
Besides that i keep USB drives and M-disc archives of photos, identical sets stored in geographically separate locations. Optical media should be resilient to most natural phenomenon like flooding and solar flares. They're not resilient to fires, which is why i keep duplicate sets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Knowing Amazon retail / services support, their data is gone and they'll be lucky if they raise anyone at all. If you pay $15k a month for AWS enterprise support, you will find someone who may or may not be able to help you within 6 months after misinterpreting the problem and having to raise your account manager and wave your hands around.
I'm surprised, Amazon is well known of having the best in class customer support for their store (I mean: "Customer: My kindle broke, because I sat on it. Amazon: no worries, let me send you a replacement, no need to send back the old kindle" level of good support) - oh and human support, not google botocracy.
I love my Synology NAS. It handles photos great: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/photos
There is only one significant issue that I found: Backing up large videos fails If I put the Syno behind Cloudflare. Because the photo backup app uploads it as one large HTTP form data and CF does not like it. So now I need to make do with basic firewalling at my place.