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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

#181

Post by BLKNSLVR »

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?

When you have kids, and when they turn into teenagers, you'll want to remember them as they were before.

;)

My daughter loves looking back at home videos of the family. So embarrassing, so beautiful, so many little things about their personalities that would otherwise be forgotten.

Just a few hours ago I was checking backups and stumbled into a nest of folders that had some more home videos in it, and of my son just being his quirky little kid self. Gives my life meaning, shows me I did stuff ok.

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

#182

Post by throwaway173738 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #129
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.

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

Yeah I usually have bad experiences calling Amazon and have stopped buying anything from them, preferring wither other online stores or driving to a physical store depending. The CSRs usually don’t speak english well enough to respond to anything other than the issues the app also lists. One CSR insisted I send back an item that fell out of the package in the delivery driver’s car.

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

#183

Post by tokamak-teapot »

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?

Old cheap Mac Mini with USB drive attached. Put Photos library on it. Set it to keep all photos locally. Back up that drive elsewhere.

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

#184

Post by ghaff »

Arch-TK wrote: post #167
password4321 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 st…

And don't forget adding metadata.

I do scan some paper but there's increasingly less of it and I'm likely to need future access to so little of it that it's mostly not worth the trouble.

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

#185

Post by tyingq »

This space is frustrating with any of the cloud vendors as they originally offered a lot of storage for free, then had to resort to various strategies to claw that back after it got expensive.

Google is especially frustrating for me. By default, an Android tries to sync all videos and photos up to Google photos. You can turn that off, but not in any sort of granular way. For example, you can't say "sync photos, but don't sync videos". You USED to be able to do this, but it's all or nothing now. Which I suppose drives revenue for the paid storage plans?

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

#186

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #134
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…

> possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not. Oh, one solar flare can solve global inequality in an instant! There money in all bank account would dissapear and the recently rich would have to pull themselves up by the bootstraps!

Not the ones who wrote 12 magic words on a piece of paper ...

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

#187

Post by sirius87 »

Stuff like this terrifies me. I'm personally reaching a point where I'm considering investing in an offline NAS with a RAID array and replacing disks every few years to be safe (or based on SMART tests).

Imagine uploading all your photos to a cloud provider, then having 5% of your files disappear. How would you even know your photos are missing if its a small %? At least when your local filesystem is corrupted, you know what you're losing.

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

#188

Post by hbn »

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?

I have photos backed up on Google Photos for the last 10 years. I go back to find old photos all the time. There's different reasons, sometimes I'm just feeling nostalgic for a time in my life and want to see photos for them. Sometimes I want to find a specific photo of someone to send to them.

Here's a practical example of it coming in handy: back in university I moved to another city for an internship and took some framed photos I had on my walls. When I moved back into my parents' house when the internship was over, the nails were still in the walls and I wanted to hang them the same way I had before but couldn't remember which photo went where. So I went into my Google Photos, typed "photo frames," and was able to find pictures in my library with the framed photos in the background, and piece together which photo went where to get everything back to where it had been before.

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

#189

Post by throwaway173738 »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #176
unxdfa wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried getting through to a human recently on Amazon retail support? It's quite difficult. First you have to negotiate with a bot with an IQ and service level of an angry wasp, then you get filtered through to someone who usually can't help. So you have to try 2-3 times to get stuff sorted. The whole thing is designed to put people off and make it difficult to get problems resolved. I'm fairly good at being a…

How "recent" are we talking about? Last November, my Logitech mouse's scroll wheel started acting funny. Tried to check on Amazon the warranty situation, the docs said: take it up with the manufacturer (note: the mouse was sold by Amazon, wasn't a marketplace item). This was like two weeks before the 2-year warranty was up. So, I headed on over to Logitech. Man, their site sucks. My mouse was a "gaming" model, so it…

Most every manufacturer uses the retail store for returns. The fact that Amazon gave you the run around is actually terrible.

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

#190

Post by dboreham »

fallingmeat wrote: post #60

This is why you should always synchronize you cloud with your other cloud, and the NAS in your closet, and floss after every meal, and take daily vitamins.

Quick note that "synchronize" may not be quite right -- if Amazon deletes all your photos you don't want to sync those deletes anywhere else.
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