Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

amazonforum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 357 posts

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

#231

Post by tyingq »

ericmay wrote: post #228
tyingq wrote: post #185

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 d…

> 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. Getting users to add photos and then charging (while also using them as image sets for training) was the strategy from the beginning. They didn't resort to anything. Keeping your photos stored somewhere is very sticky, partic…

> They didn't resort to anything.

I did spell out what one of the changes was. I used to be able to sync photos, which for me isn't a lot of space...but also NOT SYNC videos, which do use a lot of space. That option was removed, and syncing can only be turned off/on globally now.

Separately, there was also this change, which is notable: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10100180?hl=en

So, yes, I believe they once offered more storage and flexibility, then took that away.

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

#232

Post by luckylion »

Nextgrid wrote: post #108
luckylion wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is blaming the victim, they're saying that you should have a backup outside of your cloud provider. I don't think people care enough about SLAs to pay a premium, until something happens to their data. But by then it's too late. The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately?

> The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately? The warning served its purpose quite well though - the majority of people including smokers concede that smoking is harmful. If they are still smoking despite that, it's on them. The same cannot be said of cloud services. Very few people outside of tech think that the cloud can fail (whether technical failure or just randomly ban you…

> If they are still smoking despite that, it's on them.

That's my point: the warnings don't lead to reasonable decisions.

"If you don't pay for it, you are the product" has to be one of the most echoed sentiments of the last few years, and people still demand everything for free, and prefer to pay with their data instead of paying for the content they consume (e.g. on newspapers).

If Amazon gave them a choice of "you're data is most most most likely fine" and "your data is most most most most likely fine, and we'll pay you $1000 if it's not but you pay twice the money each month", I doubt they'll see a lot of people switch over. They'll have some, but not many, because ultimately, people don't care enough.

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

#233

Post by scrozier »

foobarbecue wrote: post #52
bayindirh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digikam is the bees knees in digital asset management. I manage my personal photo archive with that, and it punches way above its weight.

"knees bees" ... maybe I'm missing a joke, but I always said "bees knees" in this context as a play on "business"

I'm almost 65 and I never put "bee's knees" together with "business." And they say you can't teach an old dog....

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

#234

Post by luckylion »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #143
luckylion wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is blaming the victim, they're saying that you should have a backup outside of your cloud provider. I don't think people care enough about SLAs to pay a premium, until something happens to their data. But by then it's too late. The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately?

> I don't think people care enough about SLAs to pay a premium Huh? People specifically pay for cloud to not lose their data. Before that my parents used to copy photos from laptop to laptop, and lose them when a hard disk failed. Now if cloud loses your data, they might ask wtf am I paying for.

There's "cloud" and there's "guaranteed cloud with SLA and compensation if it fails", and the latter will be more expensive. The former is somewhat "best effort", and that's also why it's cheap.

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

#236

Post by bobleeswagger »

My important stuff goes like this:

PiBox w/ Mirrored SSDs -> Server w/ RAIDZ2 (at another wing of the house) -> Windows NAS -> Backblaze Unlimited

Multiple SSDs and HDDs would have to go down at the same time, and there are hourly snapshots up to a month in case a roll back is needed.

If you're relying on a third party in any case except total catastrophe, you're just waiting for that moment to come! This is why Backblaze is at the end, I depend on them when I have failed to provide availability myself.

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

#237

Post by lostlogin »

mleo wrote: post #86
ALLTaken wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can use privacy.apple.com to request a copy of all photos and other digital data. It will send emails with download links when bundled.

While that service is good, that’s a difficult method for saving a large library on a regular basis.

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

#238

Post by didgetmaster »

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 glad you haven't really 'lost' the photos since you have copies elsewhere. It is surprising how many people these days rely on some cloud service to store and preserve their only copy of some important and unreproducible data.

You are right about file systems doing a lousy job of helping you organize and locate photos, especially when they are spread across many different HDD and SDD drives attached to various computers. They are equally bad at organizing other forms of content (documents, videos, logs, music, software, etc.)

File systems were invented decades ago when the biggest hard drives could only hold a few thousand files at most, and drives were also so expensive that most people only had one of them. Traditional file systems are antiquated and need to be replaced with something better.

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

#240

Post by ashwagary »

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.

A buddy self-hosts his collection using a free tool called PhotoPrism. It has some auto classification abilities.

https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

Post reply on HN