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Comment by _sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

On the note of data storage, it's frustrating that I can have photos and videos -- that I intend to keep for the next 50+ years -- spread out between 2 to 4 services (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Photos) just by owning a couple phones and a computer or two, which I imagine is pretty typical. I know there's a start-up idea in here somewhere, because I personally would pay premium to consolidate all those into one organized location, but I don't exactly know what that is. I know Dropbox has an option to import data from other services, but in my experience it hasn't been as "smart", automated, and thorough as I'd like it to be.

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Once the baby videos started rolling in all the cloud solutions started getting expensive real fast. I had to stoop down to running my own file server. Buy a pair of drives every now and then to expand, and nightly rsync to keep things backed up.

The product I would like is a photo album with an indexing and web interface components, and plugins to make sense of different phone platforms. Nannies love to text videos and getting those off the phone has been a pain; I end up saving the whole iOS backup and scraping any media looking files from it.

Running my own server and writing a script to scrape files or even doing it manually is too much work for me, I just don't have the time to dedicate to something like that. That's why I'd pay premium for a service that automates this for me.

How much baby video do you record?

I have to imagine you're usage is an outlier here.

Up to two TB now at 3yro kid. Part of the problem is the video resolutions grew a lot, and having to snapshot the whole phone whenever it fills up. (Though I did some deduping and the redundancy is not as high as I thought...)

I doubt my usage is an outlier. But I suspect that I keep more video than most people just because I can.

I do the same thing, although my data growth seems to be a bit higher. My kid is less than a year old and I'm on pace to generate about 2-2.5 TiB for the first year. (Mostly 4k video.)

At some point I might start thinking of re-encoding the originals, but so far storage is cheap to have locally, and I'm going to see how long I can keep this up.

I'm also the same way. I try to keep everything, because I can, and I'm also now storing baby videos.

I have a 2TB iCloud plan for my iPhone X. The phone is set to "Optimize Storage", so it will de-scale old "local" pictures once I hit ~256GB.

In the background, I also have the free and unlimited version of Google Photos running. It automatically uploads everything, including videos. Videos will be scaled to 16 MP / 1080p, but I'm not complaining since it's free.

I haven't hit 2TB yet, but so far it works. I also have a 20TB Synology NAS setup, but have little desire to run my own photo storage/hosting. The Photos app on my MacBook Pro also is set to download everything via iCloud Photo Library, so that's also backed up to the NAS via Time Machine.

Why did owning multiple devices result in your photos being spread across multiple services? Other than iCloud they're all cross platform. They all offer easy ways to download your entire library, is there a problem with downloading everything and reuploading to a different service? Also if you really want to keep them for 50+ years I think you'd be crazy not to have at least one on-site copy and one off-site copy.

>They all offer easy ways to download your entire library,

Frequently there are proprietary things that aren't included in the library. For example, if you become dependent on Google Photos ability to recognize faces and objects, you tend to stop bothering to tag photos manually so when you export everything all you have is a big pile of unorganized photos.

Personally, I'd prefer to have things a little spread out. If you end up with account problems at one provider you still have other copies. (I'm thinking of scenarios like "mistaken DMCA takedown" or "account mistakenly flagged as fraudulent" or weird things like that.)

>I personally would pay premium to consolidate all those into one organized location

Why would you want to increase risk of losing them all at once?

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