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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

#161

Post by clevedotoner »

agotterer wrote: post #151
8fingerlouie wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use Insync since this seems to be one of the few softwares that works on both Windows as well as a Linux box. But it has crazy privacy concerns. I have been able to view documents uploaded on someone else's account on my Insync app! I have no idea how many folks have seen my documents/data.

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

#163

Post by ghaff »

Toutouxc wrote: post #80
worldsavior wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. If you have backups locally, why store them on the cloud?

One backup is no backup. Two backups is one backup.

However great you think your backup strategy is, it probably doesn't seem so great when you lose your primary.

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

#164

Post by theNJR »

exitb wrote: post #152
8fingerlouie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’d like to hear this too

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

#165

Post by PaulHoule »

onphonenow wrote: post #146
PaulHoule wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be true about some other big tech companies but AMZN is exceptionally obstinate.

I’ve had good support experiences at amazon actually

I have too, but when they have a bad policy they’ll defend it to death.

Specifically I contacted them about a product listing that, at best, was word salad right out of Blueler’s book on schizophrenia. They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product.

Of course, that kind of listing is endemic on AMZN, and I’d have no problem reporting several of those each time I go shopping.

Actions have consequences though and AMZN is now the last place I look when shopping for things since shopping there is somewhere between visiting Mariupol and the South Bronx in the 1970s. It is a matter of time before I pay my last recurring bill of any kind to them.

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

#167

Post by Arch-TK »

password4321 wrote: post #133
8fingerlouie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't bother archiving documents Isn't that 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less space though? I do understand where you're coming from for sure.

You have to fuck around with the storage format because by default scanning sofware, even when scanning documents, will basically just take poorly compressed high resolution images. Maybe there's some service which sorts that out for you but so far I have a little webapp which stores an index of paper copies. Once I figure out how to automate scanning, compressing and OCRing documents then I think it will be worth storing digital copies. But for now it works.

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

#168

Post by ghaff »

password4321 wrote: post #133
8fingerlouie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I don't bother archiving documents Isn't that 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less space though? I do understand where you're coming from for sure.

I do occasionally want to retrieve older documents. As you say, they're smaller and the effort to put individual docs into a "I might want this someday" folder seems more trouble than it's worth. Of course, having a vast sea of basically write-only docs does make finding things harder especially as I don't put as much effort into organizing things any longer.

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

#169

Post by skipnup »

coldpie wrote: post #157
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?

All the time actually. I have monthly folders, automatically backed up by my phone to the NAS. Each month my wife and I sift through the photos and delete all duplicates and boring stuff and then we have around 150 photos per month that we sometime just have on as a slideshow.

Yearly, we create printed photo albums that we look at regularly and show to our kids.

But all this only works after lots and lots of hours of manual work filtering the photos.

Still, over the last 15 years or so for two people we have way more than 100k photos stored on the NAS.

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

#170

Post by thedanbob »

wh33zle wrote: post #71
capableweb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. I'm also looking for something FOSS that can do basic face recognition + maybe even more, but last time I checked DigiKam's detection didn't work so well, or maybe I got spoiled by the detection in Google Photos. If you do give it a go, would be nice if you reported back on your experience :)

Not sure if it has been mentioned already but photoprism added face recognition a few releases ago and it is working well for me: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism The quality of this software is overall extremely good. It is a solo-developer as well so you might want to consider sponsoring them if you end up using it. I am not affiliated, just a happy user :)

Seconding photoprism. The face recognition was pretty meh when it was first introduced, more of a gimmick than anything. But (I assume) a recent update pushed it into "wow, this is actually really good" territory.
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