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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

Not quite what I expected when I clicked on this, but anyway.

I would never treat my phone as my only copy of my data. I don't consider phone storage to be permanent OR a backup.

If you're into preserving your memories that are locked into your online services and apps like Google Photos, Facebook, Twitter, etc, I've started a project called Timeliner which downloads your data to your own home computers: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner - I run it on a cron every week.

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A phone is particularly terrible as a single copy of data because it has a high exposure to theft, physical damage, and water damage.

And just as importantly, phones are practically irreparable. Phone dropped and screen cracked? Good luck, unless it's an old Android (which don't prompt before allowing their storage to be mounted). Laptop dropped and snapped in half? Just take out the drive and put it in another computer.

I'm not sure why you would make this claim. I've replaced the screen on my partners phone in a couple of hours with no previous experience. There's an entire industry of phone repair and data recovery.

I don't know what kind of phone you have but that's just not true. OnePlus for instance will replace your screen for £89 even on a brand new OnePlus 7 Pro, and it takes about 5 days to get it back.

I've been looking for something like this for Reddit. I'd love to be able to pull down all of my comments there (ideally with context).

The only things on my phone that I don't regularly back up are text conversations. I've seen tools that forward all your texts to a gmail account, but I'm not really looking to give all that data to Google assuming they aren't already reading them off my device.

I've used SMS Backup and Restore on Android. Exports to xml, and can include mms if desired.

It's pretty good overall, though emojis can cause issues. They offer 2 settings on how to handle them.

I'm using Signal for text messaging as well, and thus can use its automatic backup functionality (only on Android currently, I think ). In case it's useful to you.

Sure, contributions welcome if you want to add reddit! I'd use it too. :)

As for text messages: that's on my list, but I'd have to learn how to write a mobile app first. If anyone is serious about contributing that, let's chat in the issues about an app design.

Last I checked reddit only shows your your last 1000 comments. So it's impossible to get your older comments. I don't know how they do this in light of GDPR's data portability requirements.

See

https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/6ynrth/why_does_reddi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/30a7ap/does_redd...

But what you can do is download every single comment on reddit, then search through that to find yours. See https://www.reddit.com/r/pushshift/

Cool project! I think there is definitely a need for something like this. I've achieved something similar by syncing Google Photos to Google Drive (https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6093613) and then using Google Drive for Windows to sync to my local computer, and then run restic periodically to store snapshots in Backblaze B2. It sounds like timeliner would make that a little easier, with some more powerful capabilities.

It looks like timeliner requires your phone's files to be uploaded to a third party cloud beforehand.

If you want to directly backup files from your phone to your home computer or NAS, https://syncthing.net/ and https://www.resilio.com/individuals-sync/ have android, iOS, desktop, and NAS support. It's what I've been recommending to PhotoStructure's beta users, and both seem to work well.

Can you link to iOS version of Syncthing? Main page doesn't link to it.

Huh, I could have sworn there was, but I don't see it there, either.

On iOS I've only used Resilio Sync, fwiw.

A nice feature of plex media server is that the app on your phone will back up your photos to your home server.

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