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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

#311

Post by 8fingerlouie »

password4321 wrote: post #133
8fingerlouie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it helps you now, but i also keep all our family photos in the cloud (iCloud in my case), but at the same time i have a small ARM machine at home that keeps a mirror of the iCloud data. That ARM machine also has the responsibility of making backups, local to a USB drive, as well as to another cloud. Not mirrors, but proper versioned backups (as in Restic, Borg, Arq, Duplicacy, Kopia, etc). I also maintain a…

> I don't bother archiving documents Isn't that 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less space though? I do understand where you're coming from for sure.

I still do a 3-2-1 backup of documents with 2 versioned backups, one at home and one in another cloud provider, just like with photos.

The archive however is the recovery if I’m not able to retrieve my normal cloud copy (hacked, ransomware, loss of credentials, etc), I cannot access my local mirror copy (ransomware, dead disk, etc), I cannot access my local backup (dead disk, separate from the mirror disk), and I cannot access my cloud backup either.

For all of those things to go wrong a the same time, something major has to happen. Besides, where I live, most required documents (drivers license, passport, birth certificate, tax records, etc) exists in government databases, so all I have at home will be various documents that maybe have sentimental value, but not exactly needed.

Furthermore, documents change “frequently” where photos tend to be somewhat more static, so I can archive photos, and maybe get That being said, I think we have like 1GB documents in total, so it would be easy to fit in the archive.

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

#312

Post by kylehotchkiss »

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…

Rough strategy:

1) use iCloud Photos

2) find a Mac with a very large system drive (1tb or above)

3) open the photos app on mac and ensure settings is configured to “download originals” not “save space”

4) make sure the computer is online on a regular basis. You should see ~/Pictures/Photos.app becoming massive over time.

5) setup Time Machine for that computer

6) success! You have a second copy of your photos library on Time Machine now.

7) Use Arq.app to backup your Time Machine drive to AWS glacier. Nice! Now you have 3 copies of your library.

An alternative path is making sure you have both a giant iPhone storage and giant Mac storage. Make sure photos on phone is set to “download originals”. Manually backup your iPhone to Mac monthly. These backups include photos library. I recommend encrypting your backup and keeping a key in safe and 1Password. Continue with Time Machine and Arq.

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

#313

Post by FireBy2024 »

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…

We do the same. What's a good alternative for videos?

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

#314

Post by Alifatisk »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #312
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…

Rough strategy: 1) use iCloud Photos 2) find a Mac with a very large system drive (1tb or above) 3) open the photos app on mac and ensure settings is configured to “download originals” not “save space” 4) make sure the computer is online on a regular basis. You should see ~/Pictures/Photos.app becoming massive over time. 5) setup Time Machine for that computer 6) success! You have a second copy of your photos library…

Is this the correct url?

arqbackup.com

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

#315

Post by kylehotchkiss »

Alifatisk wrote: post #314
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rough strategy: 1) use iCloud Photos 2) find a Mac with a very large system drive (1tb or above) 3) open the photos app on mac and ensure settings is configured to “download originals” not “save space” 4) make sure the computer is online on a regular basis. You should see ~/Pictures/Photos.app becoming massive over time. 5) setup Time Machine for that computer 6) success! You have a second copy of your photos library…

Is this the correct url? arqbackup.com

Yup! that's the one.

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

#316

Post by coolspot »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #312
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…

Rough strategy: 1) use iCloud Photos 2) find a Mac with a very large system drive (1tb or above) 3) open the photos app on mac and ensure settings is configured to “download originals” not “save space” 4) make sure the computer is online on a regular basis. You should see ~/Pictures/Photos.app becoming massive over time. 5) setup Time Machine for that computer 6) success! You have a second copy of your photos library…

You don’t need large system drive, just any drive connected (like USB) or even on the network.

Hold Alt (Option) when starting the Photo app to invoke a dialog where you can select custom photo library location.

You can have multiple photo libraries in different locations and switch between them during Photo app start.

https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/create-additional-lib...

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

#317

Post by WirelessGigabit »

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...

Sadly this doesn't work with end-to-end encryption enabled.

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

#318

Post by varispeed »

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 would be careful with hard drives. As I learned couple of days ago when I got my 10 year old hard drive from storage, I was unable to read most of the data as the drive would start to intermittently disconnect from the computer. Most likely the drive is okay, but the board has developed an issue - maybe capacitors gone bad or something. Now, I am yet to check if it is the one that has hardware encryption (I supposed to get rid of all of them and copy data to alternative drives) - there are drives that encrypt the data by default and if you don't set up the key, the encryption still takes place with some default key. If the board dies for some reason, then you won't ever be able to decrypt the data - even if technically was unencrypted, even by swapping the board from a working hard drive. This happened to me once and I lost 3TB of important data couple of years ago.

That being said - I think the best additional backup is to store important things on BluRay - producers estimate they should last 80-100 years and so far never had a bad disk, even those burned years ago.

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

#319

Post by kylehotchkiss »

coolspot wrote: post #316
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rough strategy: 1) use iCloud Photos 2) find a Mac with a very large system drive (1tb or above) 3) open the photos app on mac and ensure settings is configured to “download originals” not “save space” 4) make sure the computer is online on a regular basis. You should see ~/Pictures/Photos.app becoming massive over time. 5) setup Time Machine for that computer 6) success! You have a second copy of your photos library…

You don’t need large system drive, just any drive connected (like USB) or even on the network. Hold Alt (Option) when starting the Photo app to invoke a dialog where you can select custom photo library location. You can have multiple photo libraries in different locations and switch between them during Photo app start. https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/create-additional-lib...

Awesome! I'm a huge fan of Photos for organizing photos from my external camera but don't always want to mix them up with my iCloud Photos library. I'm gonna give this a try. I wish Apple would allow iCloud Photos to handle multiple libraries like this.

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

#320

Post by luckylion »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #304
luckylion wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it really cheap? For 3 years of cloud subscribtion, I can buy 2 Nas drives, drop them at the homes of two of my friends, sync my PC to NAS 1, and backup NAS 1 to NAS 2. They are like 2 -click setup if you use Synology/Qnap/etc. And I will have more storage space.

You can do that, the average person can't, so you should probably consider the time you'd spend on it, and how much it would cost the average person to hire someone to set it up for them. I don't think it'll be too cheap.

In the end, not dealing with that is most likely worth it for most people (including most people who have the necessary skill set).

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