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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

#261
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I specifically use "Secure Cam" from GrapheneOS (mine came from Google Play) for this, as it is close to the stock pixel camera and doesn't suffer the lag some other camera apps have. -- edit I originally called the app "private cam" and said it was from fdroid, apologies! Forgot I had aliased it.

Sounded good, but searching F-droid for "private cam" or "privatecam", etc, yields no result.

My bad! Original comment is corrected. Here's a link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.grapheneos...

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

#262

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 k…

Synology. Rsync images to it, upload to Backblaze at midnight and alerts set up to come through on failure.

Not cheap, but it’s a beautiful thing.

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

#263
Having used Amazon photos for a long time, I have had a bunch of issues. It is certainly (in my mind) not a replacement for Google photos, but is a possible second repository / backup.

Advantages: unlimited full resolution backup

Disadvantages: Poor facial recognition Unable to manually add tags Poor folder /album management Android app has stopped uploading photos and support hasn'tbeen able to fix it Upload from PC only using their app (which isn't great) Upload from PC has "lost" the database and subsequently uploaded at least 2 versions of the just under 1TB / 50k images / videos from my family

The result is that actually finding or doing anything with the photos in the storage is not very easy, but at least everything is backed up there!

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

#264
it's not common, but not very rare either, that we go to view an old set of pictures on Google Drive and find some of them are corrupt and cannot be displayed. I've never reported anything to Google, because I don't really have any evidence to provide. All I know is, we didn't upload all these 'corrupt' photos 5/10/15 years ago.

and I do not have backups of them all (which is on me)

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

#265
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've been enjoying the iOS photos widget. Every day it surfaces new photos from the past, based on different themes. A nice 2 minute diversion each morning.

But you're right, otherwise I would never have time to dig back into old photos.

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

#266
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sharing my family-photo-backup system: - Synology NAS is accessible on LAN & phones sync photos when at home - Nightly rsync from internal NAS storage to 1 external (non-raid) hard drive The nightly rsync does not delete files, so the external hard drive is pretty close to an off-site backup even though it's still attached. The only better thing I've thought of doing is mounting it ro after backups + re-mounting befo…

IMO the biggest remaining risk to this is a house fire at night while you are at home. You wake up to alarms and smoke and run out the door without your phone. All three copies of your photos will burn at once. This is where an additional off-site would be valuable. That might be a second external hard drive that you store off-site and re-sync every few months, or maybe an encrypted cloud backup using restic.

It’s pretty easy to set the Synology to upload to a cloud provider for a folder or file share. It has alerts and all sorts.

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

#267
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iCloud doesn’t really back up photos. It’s more of a sync. If you’ll manually delete a photo from your phone, it’ll be deleted from iCloud too.

The conflation of sync and backup can actually be really dangerous. You don't want a primary backup to have the opportunity to delete files because they (apparently) have been deleted on the primary.

If rsync is used before the backup is uploaded/archived you can set the flags to do the things you want.

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

#268
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Action…

> They told me they didn’t want to hear any complaints unless I’d bought the product. You have to think about the game-theoretic equilibrium of the alternative, given the same set of bad actors involved: if you could report listings you hadn't bought, then these idiots would all just be constantly reporting their product-category brand-name competitors' listings, as non-suspicious one-off actions from different dark-…

Or Amazon could pay someone to review reported listings. This kind of DoS only works if the system fails to distinguish good listings from bad.

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

#270

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 k…

I went that route but wasn’t able to sleep soundly until eventually setting up a replicating NAS at a family member’s house.
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