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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

#281

Post by getoffmyyawn »

I used to seriously stress out worrying about the huge amount of family photos I have saved in cloud storage and what it would mean to lose them. I've got a local backup as well of course. Even that has to be upgraded every so often to make sure the hardware will continue to run reliably.

A few years ago my (very non-technical) mother asked me to make and send her a photo album of recent pictures. My wife and I had so much fun doing it that we kept doing it. Choosing the best pictures, arranging them and making nice layouts and titles itself is a fun walk down memory lane.

Now we have a shelf with about a dozen volumes of memories and we found we are far more likely to look at these than we ever were with photos in cloud storage.

I like to think that if I lost all the digital copies, I would still be happy with what I have in these bound albums. I highly recommend this to everyone.

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

#283

Post by AdamN »

getoffmyyawn wrote: post #281

I used to seriously stress out worrying about the huge amount of family photos I have saved in cloud storage and what it would mean to lose them. I've got a local backup as well of course. Even that has to be upgraded every so often to make sure the hardware will continue to run reliably. A few years ago my (very non-technical) mother asked me to make and send her a photo album of recent pictures. My wife and I had s…

+100. The best and really only useful copy of your digital photo library is a curated set of prints, ideally as part of a book or a calendar.

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

#284

Post by 34679 »

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!

I'm curious if you've asked your family members whether they're ok with having photos of themselves being used to train Amazon's facial recognition model? I know it's a common practice and Amazon isn't alone, yet I feel people should be more aware of what's happening.

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

#285

Post by btgeekboy »

ghaff wrote: post #149
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, if cloud cannot be trusted I might as well buy a synology nas and drop at a family member's home.

Having a spare hard drive that you occasionally sync up and drop off at a family member's house in addition to other backup strategies is indeed a decent idea. However, I'm guessing that--if you're anything like me--you get lazy about refreshing it and, if something happens, you realize it's been a year since you did a fresh backup. A cloud provider backup (as opposed to sync) is a good belt-and-suspenders cheap insu…

The idea behind dropping a Synology off would be that you could sync to it remotely, so you don’t have to be lazy about refreshing it.

Though online backups have their own risks (ransomware).

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

#286

Post by asdff »

I'm currently in a similar pickle with an icloud account. It's not lost, yet, but I can't pull the photos locally at all. The download links supplied on the icloud website time out a few hundred mb into the download. Third party command line tools also time out a few hundred mb in or so. This is a large library, so when I try and open up the Photos app on my mac and sync it there, the app quits immediately. I feel like its a ticking time bomb of a situation here with these data on this icloud account, and I also feel like I'm powerless and out of options to do anything about it, although I will stop using icloud and similar services as primary storage going forward.

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

#287

Post by asdff »

gwkoehler wrote: post #171
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?

i have been using icloudpd for years. there is a docker image that makes it simple to install on my synology. because of 2fa, i have to re-authenticate it from the terminal every couple of months, but that takes one minute. https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

I tried this but I think my issue is the library is too large. It can pull a few dozen or a hundred or so photos just fine, but then it will time out but not quit out, so I have to babysit the process. Maybe there's a flag I missed in the documentation to retry downloads, but it basically was a nonstarter to me in the state it was in. I think its apples fault though; I can't get a big zip file of icloud data to succesfully download with their website either, it will also time out. Likewise when I try and update the bootcamp drivers on my intel bootcamp machine, I will get 30% of the way there and then it times out. I'd blame my home connection, but from cursory glances at various forums this is apparently a widespread issue with these sort of downloads form Apple.

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

#288

Post by asdff »

ProAm wrote: post #254
sagebird wrote: post #248

When I hear individuals on talk about their backup routines they have developed, home nas servers, scripts that keep things synched, etc, I can’t help but to think about failed crypto ux attempts. I don’t like relying on monolithic monopolized corporate services as much as the next hacker— but I think there should be an easy to understand service for the 98% of basic users. If someone could make a service that detect…

The problem is no one wants to learn how to do it. Everyone wants the easy button. This is why we have the cloud, iCloud storage, google photos, amazon photos, back blaze, etc.... None of this is that hard to do, not one just wants to put a minimal amount of effort into learning how to do backups, or automate them or deal with DR scenarios. If this information is important to you it would behoove you to learn how to…

It doesn't help that the OS vendors have been letting their own local backup tooling rot over the years, probably in favor of selling more cloud subscriptions. When is the last time Time Machine got some attention, when it was released 15 years ago?

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

#289

Post by tyingq »

vorpalhex wrote: post #261
tyingq wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Appreciate it...saves trying to find a camera app that's close to the packaged one. There's a lot of garbage apps to sort through!

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

#290

Post by mmh0000 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #174
ALLTaken wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For iCloud, would just copying images from iCloud to the backup media be enough?

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

I have no idea why you're getting downvoted. The icloud-photos-downloader is an amazing tool. I run it from a monthly cronjob to have a local backup in case icloud iexplodes.
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