311–320 of 380 posts
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Nothing seems hard until you do it.
I agree. GP comment brings to mind the infamous reply to Dropbox Show HN which compared it to something users could trivially implement using basic Unix commands.
After that I decided to migrate as much of my hardware as possible to 19" racks. So next, I upgraded to a Synology NAS RS819 (4-bay, 4x4 HDD = 16 TB raw capacity, 12 TB in a RAID5 setup). This lasts for quite some time, as I'm not much into movies. Importantly, the NAS is normally physically _not_ connected to any networks except when I transfer a new batch of photos for archiving.
Some historic material is on a DAT tape in a fireproof safe but that is close to its expected end of life, which is fine as there are HDD copies.
To view the photos, I access a subset of commonly viewed media on another 19" server, so the NAS is truly for archival use only.
What would be nice, but is not yet implemented is a second site to add redundancy and protection from disasters (of course a backup should be offsite per definition). The two sites could synchronize over rsync. But I am still too concerned of the attack surface when putting archival machines on a network. A solution could be the following: some friends recommend Google's "cold storage" as a tertiary cloud storage, which is affordable, and they use scripts to encrypt their data; I think that is a good idea.
The question regarding mechanisms to manage things in case of one's death is an excellent point raised by the poster - I bet a lot of valuable information assets have already been lost due to people passing away when their relatives are not IT savvy to rescue them (or the deceased didn't take precautions to leave passwords and instructions behind).
1. copy to hard disk 2. buy a new drive every year and copy it forward 3. store a copy with relatives Note that a cloud provider: 1. can shut off your access at any time, by accident or on purpose, and you have no recourse 2. will sell your data to anyone at any time 3. will give it to any government for the asking 4. will leak it to any hacker 5. will allow employees of said cloud provider to browse your data 6. wil…
How long have you been following this procedure?
Some of my older drives are no longer recognized by the drivers anymore.
I've had several drives completely fail, and one I dropped that never worked again.
I've used CDROMS, DVD-Rs, zip drives, and even cartridge tape for a while, but the hard drives work the best. I still have the cartridge tapes, but no way to read them anymore. Same with zip disks, can no longer read them.
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How long have you been following this procedure?
I don't follow this exact procedure, but I do something similar. I have a bunch of external drives. They go back to ~100GB parallel-ATA drives in external USB enclosures. I think I have ~10 generations of disks in play right now. I've spent less than $2,000 on drives in ~20 years. I probably should have purchased a few more disks over the years since I went >18 months between generations and sometimes 24-30 months. I…
As a number of people have pointed out there are several problems with cloud based solutions:
1. Will the solution continue to be available
2. Will the company properly take care of your data, and protect your privacy vs. the companies own self interests.
3. There is an ongoing recurring cost.
With home based solutions you also have a large number of issues:
1. A lot of work that requires technical knowledge (making backups, regular testing, etc...)
2. You have to keep copies in multiple locations and maintain your own disaster recovery.
3. Obsolescence of your hardware, backup solution is a real problem.
4. This takes real time that you would probably prefer to spend doing something else, which means it will probably get neglected at some point, and therefore still highly susceptible disaster issues from hardware failure or much worse.
A number of people have suggested that the old way is better (Have paper copies of the photographs). This is also a bad solution
1. When converting modern digital photos to print you will loose data that is available in the digital photo.
2. Printed photos will degrade over time (Whether in a book or printed individually)
3. These are highly susceptible to destruction via disaster
4. There is no way to search your data
As far as the ongoing cost of storing in a cloud based solution, by the time you figure the cost for any of the other options when done right, The cloud based solution is probably cheaper depending on how you value your time in each of the other options.
As a number of people have pointed out in the comments as well, the photographs are only valuable if you have useful Metadata of the photos. With modern photos that is much better than before as you get a timestamp and often a GPS location with the photo. Ideally you want at least the date, location, event(if applicable), people in photo, description/story. That will take a photo from being useless to others besides the person who took it, to becoming highly valuable. The more information the better. Collecting that metadata is much harder to accomplish with old analog photos that have been digitized as they often have none of that metadata handy.
Storing, searching and using the metadata is solvable with good software. I tried solving many of those issues with my software. the issue that is not easily solvable is the where/how to store the data. My software allows storing on our service or you can import from Google Photos or Dropbox, but as noted those all have issues. If anyone has ideas on how to solve those issues and actually come up with a solution that is good, I would love to hear it.
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Multiple reasons: 1) Someone can use those to train DeepFake models and scam your family 2) There could be private photos and videos there that you aren't aware of 3) Why not?
1 and 2 will probably make sense to some. It's not something that would overcome my why not. For 3 the biggest problem with encryption is you introduce a single point of failure, if you lose access to the keys your photos are gone. On a simpler note I'm a big fan of keeping things as simple as I can. Encryption is not simple. It can be fun to work with and I don't want to ignore that but unless you want to do that fo…
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Maybe I am nitpicking but there are some very important steps missing: Encrypt everything Check drives (health etc) Etc
It's easy to say "Encrypt everything," but how do you go about it? For folks looking for an "easy" cross-platform solution to encrypt your sensitive bits in the cloud, check out Cryptomator [^1]. [^1]: https://cryptomator.org/ (no affiliation)
Sadly it has no gui (that I know of) but something like runtestic can help with automated incremental and encrypted backups, where you only want to keep the last n versions (and for example a weekly snapshot)
I use SFTP to upload new pictures from phones etc. to the pi. There are many apps that can do SFTP, like e.g. Foldersync on Android.
I have a shell script on the pi that runs once/day and uploads new files to S3 storage, after encrypting them with gpg.
I occasionally get a new USB stick and retire the old one, keeping it as a backup copy.
The whole thing actually works quite well and means:
- Local, unencrypted files I can access easily
- Encrypted files in the cloud, that no external parties can read
- Physical backups that I can put in a safe, or whatever
I use Google Photos and once a year I do a Google takeout to a hard drive and put that drive somewhere safe. I tweeted about this a while back and several people had good replies: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1445408384472211464 For context, this was after facebook was down for a day. I think the odds of Google deleting all my photos is pretty low, but the odds of me losing access to my Google account for…
Since we're talking about takeout, it's always a good idea to export your Gmail inbox once a year, encrypt it with GPG (or something similar) and store it offline somewhere on a drive.