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Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

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Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#151

Post by agotterer »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #118
clevedotoner wrote: post #101

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…

I keep my data in the cloud, with a local 1:1 mirror of which i keep a 3-2-1 backup (local + cloud). 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.

I keep everything in the cloud as well. Documents are either in GDrive / Dropbox and photos are in iCloud. For sensitive documents I created an encrypted disk image that I store in Dropbox and mount when I need access to it, which is pretty infrequent. I periodically backup content to a NAS and I backup the NAS to B2.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#152

Post by exitb »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #112
vocatan wrote: post #27

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!

Not that it helps you now, but i also keep all our family photos in the cloud (iCloud in my case), but at the same time i have a small ARM machine at home that keeps a mirror of the iCloud data. 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…

As a fellow small ARM machine owner, what's your strategy for getting the photos from iCloud? Is there a tool one shouldn't feel weird to give their iCloud credentials to?

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#153

Post by zamalek »

vocatan wrote: post #27

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!

This is my backup method:

* A nextcloud+recognize (for face recog) instance running on Hetzner. $20/month (I co-host other services on the VM). This is attached to a Hetzner storage box.

* Syncthing pushes all of nextcloud to a zfs.rent (great service BTW) machine, I purchased my disks up front, so it's $cheap/month. ZFS snapshots are taken.

* Local RPi NAS. Syncthing up to the other two.

About $40/month in total. How valuable are 240k photos to you?

Uploading photos is a matter of sending them to Nextcloud. Syncthing does the rest.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#154

Post by themitigating »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #85
EdwardDiego wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be freaking the fuck out too, tbh. These days you tend to get better support from the megacorps if you tweet or post on HN, it can bypass the obligatory outsourced support layer.

Oh I totally agree. I do wish I have such luck when posting on HN though, often ended up with zero upvotes and no replies.

The stories that get helped often start with the premise that a company has destroyed the person's life/business and the company is hated by a large portion of people here.

That will get the most upvotes, visibility, and sometimes a company will reach out.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#155

Post by bilekas »

patrakov wrote: post #69
riskable wrote: post #59

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.

> That's insufficient. If one of then screws up, deletions will likely propagate to the other.

That's not the setup described at least. It's both of the services withing in parallel. > I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously

Your scenario would depend on Google being a backup for Amazon or vice versa.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#156

Post by ghaff »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #130
ghaff wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A lot"? Sure, I guess. But as someone who stores multiple copies of everything both onsite and in the "cloud," I certainly don't have local tape backup and I doubt that Backblaze does either.

I mean "critical stuff" like banks and government data, not regular users.

I'm guessing a lot of "critical stuff" is not backed up on tape libraries these days. But I may be wrong. Do any cloud providers use tape at all?

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#157

Post by coldpie »

stepri wrote: post #16

This is just a reminder to take a backup of your cloud photos and store it locally (or other cloud provider). For example, with Google Takeout you can get a ZIP file with all your photos and videos from Google Photos.

So... what do y'all actually do with your hundreds of thousands of photos? I just bulk delete everything older than a month when my phone is low on storage. Do you ever actually go back and look at any of the hundreds of thousands of pictures? When do you do this?

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#158

Post by VLM »

From a scalability standpoint how does one accumulate, and then utilize, a quarter million photos?

I'm a bit older than most, but that would be a photo every other hour since the minute I was born...

Kind of a digital hoarder moment. Which is relevant because my entire archive fits on a flash drive and I have a couple flash drives and its no big deal at that small of a scale. But a quarter mil pics will take some serious storage.

Now I could imagine if you owned five security cameras and stored a snapshot every minute for a month, that's about a fifth of a million photos, but that's all autogenerated and if you lose your complete set you'll have a new set in a month anyway.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#159

Post by acidburnNSA »

clevedotoner wrote: post #101

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…

Big solar flares are one thing to worry about, and big EMPs are another.

https://spp.fas.org/starwars/congress/1999_h/99-10-07wood.ht...

Note: reader mode on Firefox Mobile makes this more legible for me.

Re: Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

#160

Post by delfinom »

VLM wrote: post #158

From a scalability standpoint how does one accumulate, and then utilize, a quarter million photos? I'm a bit older than most, but that would be a photo every other hour since the minute I was born... Kind of a digital hoarder moment. Which is relevant because my entire archive fits on a flash drive and I have a couple flash drives and its no big deal at that small of a scale. But a quarter mil pics will take some ser…

They could be a photographer. Often they'll take numerous photos in a very short time span to capture a bunch of movement and angles just so they can pick the best of the bunch later

Why do they keep everything? Idk, /r/datahoarder is a subreddit that exists though so the mindset is out there

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