Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
getoffmyyawn
kylehotchkiss
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.
getoffmyyawn
That's a nice comprehensive approach. I'm actually pretty happy with my setup from a data loss prevention perspective. It is just that, as I approach 2 decades of saving digital photos, I question the utility of it.
My parents have photo albums going back a few generations. The family tradition is that they are passed to the cousin with the most children, to maintain for future generations. If I were handed 500K+ images in a drive or a cloud account from each family member, I doubt I would ever look at most of them. With a bound and curated album, I know they are full enjoyed by every family member with an interest in the past.
coolspot
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...
kylehotchkiss
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.
Gigachad
For google I have it set up to generate the Takeout backups every 2 months. Easy to do
AdamN
+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.
yaseer
+101.
My wife and I now have an annual tradition of making physical albums of memories from the past year.
Making the album in January is not just fun - it makes you mindful of fond memories at a time when you're likely to think "Geez, another year has passed so quickly".
My only regret is realising I should have started the habit much earlier.
undefined
ericcholis
I have PhotoSync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html) set up to automatically send all my iCloud photos to my home NAS which automatically backs up to Backblaze. I can also specify other destinations for PhotoSync and the NAS backup.
ElCapitanMarkla
Been PhotoSync for about 10 years now, it works great
deltarholamda
This is definitely the way. This is also the best way to cement memories with your kids as well, and they love the process.
Professional photographers take a thousand photos, but they only use one. Quality, not quantity.
FireBy2024
We do the same. What's a good alternative for videos?
getoffmyyawn
I've been looking into authoring blu rays. Seems to be several promising apps but I haven't tried any yet.
vocatan
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!
8fingerlouie
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 couple of USB drives with yearly updated mirrors of the entire photo library. The drives are stored at geographically different locations, and surface scanned, updated and rotated yearly.
And finally, as a "last ditch recovery", i maintain an archive of M-disc Blu-Ray discs that contain a complete copy of our family photo library. Every year i make an identical set of discs containing the past years photos, and these sets are stored alongside the USB drives.
I don't bother archiving documents as everything that is important is stored on government servers anyway, or exists in hardcopy. Also, if every step in my normal 3-2-1 backup scheme has failed and i need to recover from the archive, i probably have bigger issues than retrieving my budget for this years finances.
exitb
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?
tokamak-teapot
Old cheap Mac Mini with USB drive attached. Put Photos library on it. Set it to keep all photos locally. Back up that drive elsewhere.
briffle
I pull mine from Google Photos, with a docker image running a tool: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync
Its not perfect, but as a backup, it works well.
gwkoehler
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...
8fingerlouie
I have recently switched to a M1 Mac Mini, and just have each family member sign in to that using Remote Desktop. It brings the added bonus of working as a content cache for anything iCloud.
My only gripe is that it downloads the shared photo album (new in iOS 16) once for each account, and when your photo library is 1.8TB, that suddenly becomes a lot of wasted space. When it comes to backing it up the backup software deduplicates the data, but not for the initial storage.
I really wish Apple would implement some kind of method for backing up photos stored in the cloud without the need for mirroring them.
Before the M1 I was using iCloud photo downloader ( https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... ) on a Raspberry Pi 4 which also worked well, but in the end I got tired of iCloud credentials expiring every ~90 days, requiring each family member to login again through a console.
Considering the M1 idles at roughly 20% more than a RPi4 (M1 at 4.5W) it was an easy sell. I just got the cheapest model and added a large USB drive. Using a Mac also gives you the possibility of using something like Backblaze Personal with unlimited backup storage, if that’s your thing :-)
I use Healthchecks.IO ( https://healthchecks.io/ ) to keep an “eye” on the backup status (and other more mundane tasks like monitoring the power state of my summerhouse)
rpgbr
I’ve been using this tool to backup Apple Photos library to an external drive: https://github.com/RhetTbull/osxphotos
theNJR
I’d like to hear this too
password4321
> 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.
Arch-TK
You have to fuck around with the storage format because by default scanning sofware, even when scanning documents, will basically just take poorly compressed high resolution images. Maybe there's some service which sorts that out for you but so far I have a little webapp which stores an index of paper copies. Once I figure out how to automate scanning, compressing and OCRing documents then I think it will be worth storing digital copies. But for now it works.
8fingerlouie
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 <10% “duplicates” due to later edits, archiving documents will pretty much be a lot of duplicates each year.
That being said, I think we have like 1GB documents in total, so it would be easy to fit in the archive.
ghaff
I do occasionally want to retrieve older documents. As you say, they're smaller and the effort to put individual docs into a "I might want this someday" folder seems more trouble than it's worth. Of course, having a vast sea of basically write-only docs does make finding things harder especially as I don't put as much effort into organizing things any longer.
capableweb
> I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up.
I'm also looking for something FOSS that can do basic face recognition + maybe even more, but last time I checked DigiKam's detection didn't work so well, or maybe I got spoiled by the detection in Google Photos. If you do give it a go, would be nice if you reported back on your experience :)
wh33zle
Not sure if it has been mentioned already but photoprism added face recognition a few releases ago and it is working well for me: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism
The quality of this software is overall extremely good. It is a solo-developer as well so you might want to consider sponsoring them if you end up using it.
I am not affiliated, just a happy user :)
thedanbob
Seconding photoprism. The face recognition was pretty meh when it was first introduced, more of a gimmick than anything. But (I assume) a recent update pushed it into "wow, this is actually really good" territory.
philsnow
To photoprism users: do you know how well it handles identifying photos of kids over the span of years?
Google photos absolutely blows me away with its ~1% false positive rate (that is, given a photo, correctly identifying with kid(s) are in it) identifying each of my kids, nieces, and nephews. I don’t really know what its false negative rate (a false negative would be an uploaded photo of John but that doesn’t get tagged as having John in it) is, though.
I can search for each of my kids and see photos of them going back to their birth.
Cyph0n
Photoprism is absolutely amazing. It was the quickest donation I’ve ever made to an OSS project.
I have a Photoprism instance running on my home server backed by a raidz1 ZFS pool (1st backup). Photos are periodically synced to a Backblaze bucket with versioning enabled (2nd backup). The source of most photos is an iOS device with iCloud enabled (main copy). I rely on PhotoSync to periodically sync from the iOS device to Photoprism.
komali2
FOSS photo software with face recognition (note that some of this is off-premise face recognition, sometimes requiring an API key you get on your own)
https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos
I may have missed some: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho...
capableweb
What I found in my previous search is that either they're really good at managing large collections of photos, or they're really good at doing various AI/recognition, but none of what I've found have been good at both.
Hence my interest in DigiKam as their management features for large collections is second to none.
mavhc
How does the face recognition compare to https://www.photoprism.app/
raffraffraff
There's a difference between face detection and face recognition. Last I checked (less than a year ago) it could find faces, but was abysmal at recognizing them. I spend a few days on it, tweaking this and that, taking to the devs. It was crap.
thedanbob
It was pretty bad until just recently (a couple of months ago?) when I noticed it was incredibly improved, might want to try it again.
varispeed
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.
brokenmachine
I recommend ddrescue for data recovery, worked really well when I needed it.
It will resume when you hook the drive back up, and work around dead sectors.
bayindirh
Digikam is the bees knees in digital asset management. I manage my personal photo archive with that, and it punches way above its weight.
foobarbecue
"knees bees" ... maybe I'm missing a joke, but I always said "bees knees" in this context as a play on "business"
bayindirh
Fixed it, thanks. Sometimes my mind to finger interface changes packets on the way. I guess my nervous system uses UDP.
scrozier
I'm almost 65 and I never put "bee's knees" together with "business." And they say you can't teach an old dog....
LMMojo
"Bee's Knees" == absolutely the best
magicalhippo
I tried it as a replacement for Picasa, but found it underwhelming.
It was slow processing the images, so took very long after adding new pictures to them turning up in searches.
One of the main attractions, searching geotagged images by location, wasn't smooth at all and quite clunky to use.
Tried it a few times last fall but gave up.
tastemykungfu
Except for it's horrible face recognition right?.. ugh.
yread
Latest release failed the tests (with some memory corruption yikes) even. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that it won't eat your photos.
But the v7 uses DNN from OpenCV for face detection that supposedly has 91% accuracy on CPLFW which is pretty good! So how come people here say it sucks?
bayindirh
I'm away from my desktop computer, but it wasn't half bad when I last updated its DB. I don't take much portraits, so I don't use that feature much, but give it a look when I can and update you.
e40
I can’t find an arm image for macOS. That’s a bummer.
didgetmaster
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.
Helmut10001
Self-host and use Photoview [1], it has face recognition. I use this since 2 years with 5TB of photos (on ZFS) and it works flawlessly. It is worth it - everything under your control and you decide when to migrate. My phone's photos are also uploaded automatically to a Nextcloud folder, which is read-mounted to Photoview and scanned automatically.
zamalek
This is my backup method:
* A nextcloud+recognize (for face recog) instance running on Hetzner. $20/month (I co-host other services on the VM). This is attached to a Hetzner storage box.
* Syncthing pushes all of nextcloud to a zfs.rent (great service BTW) machine, I purchased my disks up front, so it's $cheap/month. ZFS snapshots are taken.
* Local RPi NAS. Syncthing up to the other two.
About $40/month in total. How valuable are 240k photos to you?
Uploading photos is a matter of sending them to Nextcloud. Syncthing does the rest.
34679
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.
thrdbndndn
It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread.
I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.
EdwardDiego
I'd be freaking the fuck out too, tbh. These days you tend to get better support from the megacorps if you tweet or post on HN, it can bypass the obligatory outsourced support layer.
thrdbndndn
Oh I totally agree.
I do wish I have such luck when posting on HN though, often ended up with zero upvotes and no replies.
themitigating
The stories that get helped often start with the premise that a company has destroyed the person's life/business and the company is hated by a large portion of people here.
That will get the most upvotes, visibility, and sometimes a company will reach out.
rchaud
Maybe, but somehow I don't see them rushing in to spare the blushes of the Amazon Photos product team. Now if this were an S3 cloud bucket.....
PaulHoule
It might be true about some other big tech companies but AMZN is exceptionally obstinate.
throwaway173738
Yeah I usually have bad experiences calling Amazon and have stopped buying anything from them, preferring wither other online stores or driving to a physical store depending. The CSRs usually don’t speak english well enough to respond to anything other than the issues the app also lists. One CSR insisted I send back an item that fell out of the package in the delivery driver’s car.
onphonenow
I’ve had good support experiences at amazon actually
hbn
The point of these services is they're supposed to be an easy-to-use, worry-free photo backup. Amazon/Google/Apple should surely have the resources available to keep my photos stored somewhere with some redundancy. I don't want to worry about how they do it, but that's the idea. In exchange they're probably training image recognition algorithms or what have you on my photos, and I certainly wouldn't keep anything too personal on those services (i.e. nudes). I may even be paying them for more than the free storage limit. The least they can do is be a reliable backup. Yahoo Mail doesn't disappear emails randomly, YouTube doesn't just disappear videos randomly (barring stupid robot moderation). You'd expect the same for your photos on these services.
brokenmachine
>YouTube doesn't just disappear videos randomly
My experience couldn't be further from that.
When I look through my "Watch Later" list, probably 10% of videos are missing. I think you have to choose "show deleted".
I've been planning to set up a script that uses yt-dlp to auto-download the new videos on my Watch Later list every night, but haven't got around to it yet.
zigzag312
I agree. One selling point of cloud services is that technical details, like backup, are managed for you.
akho
So they might still get their photos back. 240,364 photos is a lot, and none are replaceable. It’s still a lot of stress.
undefined
wlesieutre
In this case they do have backups, just not convenient ones
prmoustache
who would rely on only one vendor and repo for his data?
unxdfa
Smells like everyone in github
I got told I was insane for backing up github. I clone all our github repos daily, zip them up and stuff them in S3
akho
Everybody but you and I, that’s who.
owlninja
And a follow-up will likely not make the front page.
caeril
It's also highly suspect.
240k photos is 66 photos per day, every day, over a full decade.
If you're spending time taking 66 photos a day, I think you have bigger (personal) issues to contend with than your image storage solution.
Even on vacation, relaxing, with my kids and wife, visiting all manner of picturesque spots, 66 photos would be an enormous feat of narcissism.
The author is either lying about the photo library size to garner sympathy, or has a gargantuan psychological issue to address.
cnick
In macro photography, taking an extreme closeup of something like an insect necessarily has a very, very thin depth of field due to its high magnification. To get the entire insect in focus, you use a technique called focus stacking where the focus changes by tiny fractions of a millimeter on each exposure. You can literally take 100 to 200 of pictures for one subject. If I do 10 of these in a day, I've reached one percent of OPs forever photo volume. https://www.photography-raw.com/creating-stunning-macro-phot...
Time lapse photography is taking a photo every X seconds/minutes/days. If you want the video to look smooth, you need 24-30 shots per second, so a 30 second video has 720 exposures. So again, failed three time lapse attempts and I'm at 1% of OPs forever exposure count.
There's an awful lot of judgment in your comment, and the issue certainly seems like a lack of understanding on your part, rather than OP's "psychological issue" or "lying." I'll refrain from my own judgements, and suggest you watch David Foster Wallace's "This is Water," and when you're done, please watch it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY
unxdfa
Knowing Amazon retail / services support, their data is gone and they'll be lucky if they raise anyone at all.
If you pay $15k a month for AWS enterprise support, you will find someone who may or may not be able to help you within 6 months after misinterpreting the problem and having to raise your account manager and wave your hands around.
krzyk
I'm surprised, Amazon is well known of having the best in class customer support for their store (I mean: "Customer: My kindle broke, because I sat on it. Amazon: no worries, let me send you a replacement, no need to send back the old kindle" level of good support) - oh and human support, not google botocracy.
Nextgrid
Any large-scale consumer-grade service optimizes for cheapness of support.
It's just a coincidence that when it comes to retail, the cheap option (just ship another one out) also works well for the customer. At scale, shipping duplicate items, even expensive ones still works out cheaper than well-trained, competent, well-treated and well-paid humans.
This one on the other hand requires engineering time (can't be resolved by a bot or monkey pressing a "ship another item" button) which isn't cheap and unless they have legal liability, it's cheaper to just stonewall or even ban this customer forever and lose their business.
unxdfa
Have you tried getting through to a human recently on Amazon retail support? It's quite difficult. First you have to negotiate with a bot with an IQ and service level of an angry wasp, then you get filtered through to someone who usually can't help. So you have to try 2-3 times to get stuff sorted.
The whole thing is designed to put people off and make it difficult to get problems resolved.
I'm fairly good at being annoyed enough to work around this but most people out there can't handle things like that easily and Amazon knows it.
Mindwipe
They are for retail, not for services.
karmicthreat
This has not been my experience. I pay 100$/mo for support and when I have had issues (had a RDS upgrade go really bad once) they have contacted me quickly to get details. Usually only 2-4 hours for an engineer to be on the issue.
tyingq
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 don't sync videos". You USED to be able to do this, but it's all or nothing now. Which I suppose drives revenue for the paid storage plans?
justin_oaks
While I still use Google Photos, there are times that I don't want pictures I take with my phone to be synced to the cloud. Since Google Photos does not allow such functionality, I installed a second camera app. That app allows me to choose where the picture are saved, so I save them to a folder that doesn't get backed up by Google Photos.
It's annoying to have to do this, but at least I can finally choose what gets synced and what doesn't.
vorpalhex
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.
tyingq
Sounded good, but searching F-droid for "private cam" or "privatecam", etc, yields no result.
paledot
You can do this with locked folders.
ericmay
> 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, particularly for non-software developers. And even so how do you even transfer them to another service without a huge bill?
tyingq
> 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.
artificial
I suspect photos are used for classification and training purposes.
stepri
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.
Trasmatta
I hate how Google Photos seems to no longer have the ability to auto sync to your computer. When it was integrated more with Google Drive you could do that, and then my daily automated backups would pull them. That way I had them in Google Photos, my computer's hard drive, and my off-site backups, all automatically. Now my only option is to periodically do a manual Takeout, as far as I can tell.
lom
You can get automatic takeouts from Google, might have to find a way to automatically download them when they send it to your email
coldpie
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?
BLKNSLVR
When you have kids, and when they turn into teenagers, you'll want to remember them as they were before.
;)
My daughter loves looking back at home videos of the family. So embarrassing, so beautiful, so many little things about their personalities that would otherwise be forgotten.
Just a few hours ago I was checking backups and stumbled into a nest of folders that had some more home videos in it, and of my son just being his quirky little kid self. Gives my life meaning, shows me I did stuff ok.
coldpie
If I ever have kids, I'll have to have a stern talking-to with my surgeon about a botched vasectomy ;)
hbn
I have photos backed up on Google Photos for the last 10 years. I go back to find old photos all the time. There's different reasons, sometimes I'm just feeling nostalgic for a time in my life and want to see photos for them. Sometimes I want to find a specific photo of someone to send to them.
Here's a practical example of it coming in handy: back in university I moved to another city for an internship and took some framed photos I had on my walls. When I moved back into my parents' house when the internship was over, the nails were still in the walls and I wanted to hang them the same way I had before but couldn't remember which photo went where. So I went into my Google Photos, typed "photo frames," and was able to find pictures in my library with the framed photos in the background, and piece together which photo went where to get everything back to where it had been before.
skipnup
All the time actually. I have monthly folders, automatically backed up by my phone to the NAS. Each month my wife and I sift through the photos and delete all duplicates and boring stuff and then we have around 150 photos per month that we sometime just have on as a slideshow.
Yearly, we create printed photo albums that we look at regularly and show to our kids.
But all this only works after lots and lots of hours of manual work filtering the photos.
Still, over the last 15 years or so for two people we have way more than 100k photos stored on the NAS.
vel0city
I look at them a good bit. Having a good tool like Google Photos or similar makes it easy to jump back to the photos from that one trip a decade ago, that holiday together with the family no longer with us, the dreams I had for myself in highschool. I find it interesting to see the changes in my life objectively by looking at myself, the places, the people, and things around me at various points in my life. I find it helps me continue to keep perspective of my life in the same way some might keep a journal. It can help me jump back into the shoes of who I was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and reflect on who I am today and where I'm going.
If I don't have any real reference points, its hard to measure things. Its hard to improve things you cannot measure. And sometimes it just feels good to help remember the good times with people no longer with us.
prmoustache
I backup everything.
The thing is also to delete photos you don't want to keep long term. Most of my photos are only synced when I am on my local wifi, so until then having a good hygiene of deleting badly taken photos right after taking them.
Having said that I have recently started (late december) to do a weekly printing session of my key moments of each weeks. Well there have been weeks in january and february I didn't print anything. I sometimes only have one or two photo per day/event but since I put the date on the notebook next to the photo and keep all other photos it helps me find back the whole event if I want to see them all. I am using smaller photo format than 10x15cm, mostly zink 2"x3" adhesive photos and kodak instant print 3"x3" from instant cameras that have a printer function.
I should blog about that.
Tempest1981
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.
rolisz
Fun party trick: look up old photos of people when you meet them after a long time and show it to them. Everyone is shocked/embarrassed. Extra points if you can pull up childhood photos of them.
masfuerte
I liked that the X-Files reboot kept the old credits. Mulder and Scully look like babies. Then the credits end and reality intrudes. Of course, I'd aged at the same rate (maybe faster) but it was still a shock.
ghaff
I do cull/edit my photos but I have scanned photos going back to the 1960s that I look at from time to time.
ALLTaken
For iCloud, would just copying images from iCloud to the backup media be enough?
mleo
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.
lostlogin
While that service is good, that’s a difficult method for saving a large library on a regular basis.
toomuchtodo
mr337
And packaged as a docker container to run daily, weekly, or monthly backups. https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd
mmh0000
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.
WirelessGigabit
Sadly this doesn't work with end-to-end encryption enabled.
bayindirh
Local photo library is a folder, disguised as a package. One of the folders store all the originals on the device. Copy that folder, and you're good to go. You can also get the full folder hierarchy, if you wish.
yardstick
If you enable iCloud for the photo library, and even if you select store originals, I have found that Photos still offloads some pictures. It’s just not guaranteed.
I really wish Apple had a complete export button, similar to google takeout. Or at least a good CLI tool to get the original images one by one.
Fwiw my library is ~200k files and close to a TB.
ashwagary
A buddy self-hosts his collection using a free tool called PhotoPrism. It has some auto classification abilities.
worldsavior
That makes no sense. If you have backups locally, why store them on the cloud?
Toutouxc
One backup is no backup. Two backups is one backup.
ghaff
However great you think your backup strategy is, it probably doesn't seem so great when you lose your primary.
riskable
In case your house burns down. It happens.
postingawayonhn
So they can be easily accessed on multiple devices and shared with other people.
xeromal
The general rule is if you only have 1 backup, you have no backups. You need at least 2.
BLKNSLVR
Off site!
Geographical separation is important if you're serious.
ClumsyPilot
Exactly, if cloud cannot be trusted I might as well buy a synology nas and drop at a family member's home.
ghaff
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 insurance backstop to local backups that you hopefully never need.
I have local Time Machine and Synology NAS but I also pay Backblaze a nominal amount. Companies were paying Iron Mountain large sums of money before there was a cloud.
undefined
homero
House fire? Theft?
worldsavior
You can also say: cloud servers are on fire and the house is on fire, have another backup someplace else. It's all probability.
The probability that your house will be on fire these days is low, and the probability that your computer/hard drive will get on fire is also low (since you will probably take it out, no one will leave his phone in a burning house right?).
We can say that the probability above is that low that it doesn't really affect anything. There are many other different parameters to add, and I use a bit of math here which doesn't always reflect on life, but you get the point.
godshatter
This is a general question; is no one else worried about Amazon or whichever company trolling your photos with face recognition, building up a graph of who you are connected to, all in the name of "giving you a better shopping experience"? Or who knows what else they might do with the meta data or AI object recognition shenanigans.
I guess I don't extend much trust to the companies that provide these services, especially if they are free. But then I don't take many photos nor share them around much. That might change the equation a bit if I was more into that. What photos I do take that I want to keep I download to my desktop.
Maybe I'm just too damned cynical.
CharlesW
> Maybe I'm just too damned cynical.
FWIW, I don't think so. There's such a thing as healthy paranoia.
Privacy considerations definitely factored into my decision to move my library to iCloud Photos from Google Photos a couple years ago.
I still maintain more than one backup of that library — one local, and one to a cloud backup provider.
brokenmachine
>Maybe I'm just too damned cynical.
Imagine if the nazis had access to the data that people store online now...
There wouldn't be any Schindler's list, he'd already have been in jail because the algorithm said so.
You can't opt out when everyone else has already opted you in.
unixhero
I am very worried about this. Yes. Facebook already did this since 2007, or earlier.
rchaud
Amazon Photos for face recognition
Amazon Alexa for voice recognition and eavesdropping
Amazon subsidiary Ring.com to spy on your neighbor's driveway
AWS pulling it all together to send this panopticon to your local police department.
gdelfino01
I love my Synology NAS. It handles photos great: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/photos
madethemcry
Me too!
I don't trust to open my network to the internet though. So I've created a VPN to connect with my ubiquity network from mobile. Sadly, I can't share photos with other folks or allow my family to participate easily.
I'm a layman in terms of networking. I always wonder how people can sleep if they open their home network. In this case either by using QuickConnect or forward ports and access the machine through a custom domain secured by TLS. I mean that would be perfect but I just can't convince me to take that burden of maintaining that open door into my network.
I've read about creating sub networks with the power of ubiquiti (or any other router), but I will never trust anything I configure there either because I can't confirm it's secure.
So I'm stuck with Google Photos additionally to Synology Photos because of the convenience of sharing.
lordnacho
My solution is to not open it. Use the cloud for browsing, use the home machine to copy the files down. You rarely need to browse on the home machine, it's really just there if the cloud provider ditches you.
akho
I own a Synology NAS, and now believe that it would have been easier to just set up a computer for the tasks I use it for. There are just too many cases where the solution is to use a container (and the clumsy web interfaces for reverse proxying &c), and if I end up SSHing into it too much, I prefer to have a more controllable environment.
It does fit some workflows very well though, you just have to assess if your needs over the next few years fit their business intentions.
avsteele
Synology has an app which will automatically back up your photos to the NAS/server (only when on WiFi). I haven't been able to find an alternative to this on Android, have you? (photosync looks good but seems to only work for iOS last I checked).
akho
As I said, I do use Synology :) And iOS. So maybe not the best person to answer.
Nevertheless, Nextcloud keeps offering to sync my photos, and I think it also does that on Android.
gaudat
+1'ing this too. Very user friendly with its web interface. And I think it is the only self-hosted solution that can backup live photos from iOS devices.
There is only one significant issue that I found: Backing up large videos fails If I put the Syno behind Cloudflare. Because the photo backup app uploads it as one large HTTP form data and CF does not like it. So now I need to make do with basic firewalling at my place.
clevedotoner
One of my worries that keeps me sleeplessly awake at nights sometimes is the possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not. A sufficiently strong solar flare can essentially put us back a few centuries electronically, and a few millenia socially, instantly.
Wonder if there are stress tests on cloud storage that account for this possibility by means of adequate insulation or whatever it is that can counteract a solar flare.
ClumsyPilot
> possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not.
Oh, one solar flare can solve global inequality in an instant! There money in all bank account would dissapear and the recently rich would have to pull themselves up by the bootstraps!
HeavyFeather
Nah, it will just eliminate the middle class. I’m sure the millionaires will figure something out from their villas and yachts.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
Not the ones who wrote 12 magic words on a piece of paper ...
hyperhopper
What are you referring to?
8fingerlouie
I keep my data in the cloud, with a local 1:1 mirror of which i keep a 3-2-1 backup (local + cloud).
Besides that i keep USB drives and M-disc archives of photos, identical sets stored in geographically separate locations. Optical media should be resilient to most natural phenomenon like flooding and solar flares. They're not resilient to fires, which is why i keep duplicate sets.
agotterer
I keep everything in the cloud as well. Documents are either in GDrive / Dropbox and photos are in iCloud. For sensitive documents I created an encrypted disk image that I store in Dropbox and mount when I need access to it, which is pretty infrequent. I periodically backup content to a NAS and I backup the NAS to B2.
clevedotoner
I use Insync since this seems to be one of the few softwares that works on both Windows as well as a Linux box. But it has crazy privacy concerns. I have been able to view documents uploaded on someone else's account on my Insync app! I have no idea how many folks have seen my documents/data.
8fingerlouie
I use Cryptomator ( https://cryptomator.org/ ) for sensitive stuff. It offers transparent encryption across Linux, windows, MacOS, iOS and Android.
acidburnNSA
Big solar flares are one thing to worry about, and big EMPs are another.
https://spp.fas.org/starwars/congress/1999_h/99-10-07wood.ht...
Note: reader mode on Firefox Mobile makes this more legible for me.
davidmurdoch
Isn't a lot of our critical stuff backed up to tape drives still?
ghaff
"A lot"? Sure, I guess. But as someone who stores multiple copies of everything both onsite and in the "cloud," I certainly don't have local tape backup and I doubt that Backblaze does either.
davidmurdoch
I mean "critical stuff" like banks and government data, not regular users.
rafabulsing
Could putting backups in Faraday cages protect against solar flares?
warble
yes, or burying them. Make sure the box is waterproof.
sagebird
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 detects and requests permission to connects to all of your cloud services and provides full backup service that includes whatever the best practices are it would seem like a win for those who don’t want to roll their own.
A marketable “sticker” Ala “intel inside” ie - “open backup compatible” would be good to have with a simple but serviceable api.
I think today there is little financial incentive for storage providers to make the data easy to access via machine.
Ideally an api would not only allow incoming data to be quickly compared and synched… but would allow graceful and intelligent transfers or splits or duplication levels among stores, in the case that you want to change services or have your own backup.
ProAm
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 protect it. Otherwise its not that important to you. Obviously IMHO.
asdff
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?
undefined
paddez
As a slight aside - I was surprised to learn that Amazon Photos (if you have Prime) includes RAW camera formats as valid photos for the purposes of their unlimited storage offer.
I've taken to essentially backing up all my RAWs to Amazon Photos - even the ones I would typically discard.
plagiarist
I also. I don't know why they would offer that as part of their base Prime service when no competitors seem to. The upsell for printing doesn't seem appealing to the type of person who would be storing RAWs.
kypro
Why is this getting so heavily upvoted? Are we sure OPs title is even correct?
This may be user error? It's possible the photos are still there, or if they are gone, perhaps Amazon can restore.
OP, did you try to call / contact Amazon before you posted this?
EdwardDiego
...they literally posted a link to their question in an Amazon forum...
...which is listed as the first port of call for support.[0]
> For more help, try our Amazon Drive & Amazon Photos forum
But hey, maybe I missed the prominently displayed phone number somehow, so if you can help me find it, it'd be much appreciated.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
lordnacho
This is the main reason I have a NUC sitting at home. It copies my family photos from the cloud and that's all it does.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
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.