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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

#201

Post by dboreham »

harry8 wrote: post #20

1.5 Terabytes? (Assuming 6Mb/photo which is what I'm getting from an old nikon in raw format, dunno what everyone else is using - enlighten me please if necessary). Less than USD$50 for a 2TB disk. So buy 3, post one to a family member when its full. Double the price it for SSD? How much Amazon Photos storage do you get for $150? Ok for this guy, none, and I get connection refused from the link above so I got no deta…

Data point: I have 7T of "photo data". I think some proportion of that is video, but probably no more than 10%. I am quite old and it does include scans of all the film images I've taken since birth, and all of one side of my family's film media scanned, and backups of all the cell phone images from family members' devices. From memory however most of the data comes from digital-era DSLR images which can be 30-40M each.

None of this data is stored in a FAANG company's DC.

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

#202

Post by duffyjp »

tokamak-teapot wrote: post #183
exitb wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was doing just this for a while but stopped because my Mac Mini was too old for the last few OS releases. I then switched to using the Windows iCloud client but a bug from ~2 years ago that consumes tremendous CPU cycles made that less than ideal. (The best you can do is lock it to a single thread, which will then use 100% 24/7)

Now I just don't backup my iCloud, though I do remove everything older than one year every new years to my home server which follows a good 3-2-1 backup strategy.

TL;DR: If you go this route, try to get a Mac Mini that can run a supported macOS for some time to come.

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

#203

Post by remote_phone »

I have 4 backups (and growing) of all my important digital things especially my photos. I have two separate overlapping backups and every few year I buy a new hard drive and put the old backup drive in storage. I will continue to do this until I die.

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

#206

Post by jwineinger »

nicoburns wrote: post #162

Amazon have been sending me repeated email telling that it’s photos service is shutting down for over a year now. Have you not been getting those?

From what I can find, Amazon Drive is shutting down at the end of 2023 but Photos is not. So you've got until end of year to download non-photo/non-video files from your Drive before they're gone.

https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23943055011

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

#207

Post by vel0city »

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 look at them a good bit. Having a good tool like Google Photos or similar makes it easy to jump back to the photos from that one trip a decade ago, that holiday together with the family no longer with us, the dreams I had for myself in highschool. I find it interesting to see the changes in my life objectively by looking at myself, the places, the people, and things around me at various points in my life. I find it helps me continue to keep perspective of my life in the same way some might keep a journal. It can help me jump back into the shoes of who I was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and reflect on who I am today and where I'm going.

If I don't have any real reference points, its hard to measure things. Its hard to improve things you cannot measure. And sometimes it just feels good to help remember the good times with people no longer with us.

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

#208

Post by serbanTeodor »

Is there a way now to pull all the data. This is scary and I’m right now buying USB for storage, but I don’t know how to bulk retrieve all my photos. I imagine they probably close any ways to export the data to not migrate to other service. All I can think is to do a Selenium program to go through all the entries but I think it will be a bitch to have it resume from a certain point and not miss something

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

#209

Post by vladvasiliu »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #189
vladvasiliu wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm fairly confident that if I actually opened the support request with Amazon first, the ending would have been the same. At no point did Logitech say that their online support was only for items bought through their online store.

Sure, Amazon could have said "yeah, call us" instead of saying that I should see the manufacturer, and it would have saved me half an hour.

But I was quite disappointed with Logitech's reaction.

I've had an issue with a bag and when I took it up to one of their stores for repairs, they just took it in for repairs for free without any question asked whatsoever. Not even where or when I'd bought the item (I didn't buy it from their name-stores, but from some generic department store). Didn't ask to see any receipt. Just "It'll take around a week. Can you leave it now?"

Note that this wasn't some fancy boutique bag or brand, it was barely pricier than the mouse.

Since I'm complaining about Logitech, I should name the brand with great service: Le Tanneur, a French leather goods company.

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

#210

Post by mindslight »

debacle wrote: post #139

My wife just purchased a 10tb ssd as a "backup" for Amazon Photos. I think it's likely worth it considering the value of basically the history of our lives.

wat? SSDs aren't quite to 10TB yet, at least consumer ones. Do you mean multiple SSDs in an enclosure? Because I sure hope you didn't end up with a fake. Fakes have hacked firmware that makes it report the wrong capacity, and you only find out when you go to retrieve your data.

Additionally, I've heard SSDs aren't great long term backup mediums, compared to mechanical hard drives. I personally use both.

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