Ask HN: How/Where do you store/backup your photos safely?
If you want your photos to be accessible after 10 - 30 years, where would you store/backup your photos ?
I let all important photos be made into a photo book. None of the available backup strategies are robust, safe and future proof enough for this task (I'm talking about pictures of my family, kids etc.).
Moreover, my experience is, that if you have them in a physical book, you tend to look at them way more often yourself and with others.
Bonus point: I only have to do it once per picture. No need to migrate to another backup strategy, another provider and so on.
I store my photo archive on a Synology NAS at home which syncs to Dropbox and uploads a copy of each photo to Google Photos for browsing and sharing. I'm hoping to switch to Backblaze, from Dropbox, once Synology Photos is available and drop Google Photos as well.
I've documented the entire process and include source code on Github.
Github repo to automatically organize photos based on EXIF:
https://github.com/jmathai/elodie
Series of posts on Medium (to be read in order):
https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal...
https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin...
https://artplusmarketing.com/one-year-of-using-an-automated-...
https://medium.com/vantage/how-to-protect-your-photos-from-b...
I keep all the negatives as a physical backup and all the scans go straight into google photos. The special ones are printed and in a photo book.
Pros are no longer being plagued with thousands of photos, I am a lot more purposeful with my photography, as scanning technology improves I can rescan for higher quality photos. Also I am more creative with film, it has made me learn a lot more about photography.
Cons are low light photography is harder, development/scanning is costly if you aren't doing it yourself and if you are it costs time.
For the photo camera, I am _seriously_ considering buying small SD cards for this.
As soon as I return from vacation I have between 200-1000 new photos.
Until now I moved them to my computer, then to the cloud and tried to clasify them as soon as I have some time (doing it on the cloud is not fast).
But SD prices are now a bargain. $5-10 for a "small 16GB" is more than enough for holidays.
I just need to:
1 - create a "contact card" with some remarkable photos 2 - and archive it with the SD card attached to it 3 - make a backup SD of the SD and contact card.
This should last at least 10 years.
* Synology DS Photo and PhotoStation for local storage
* Google Photos Uploader to sync DSLR photos to Google Photos
* copy of synology photos to an external USB drive
* Backblaze backup of everything on the Synology
I don't know if that's enough to guard against cryptolockers, but it seems enough to me. (Being on Linux also makes me probably a less likely target for cryptolockers, but that's not the case for everyone.)
It would be good to have a second backup in case the backup HDD fails, of course.
Hasn't happened to me yet, but I've crashed my external HDD once, a second backup definitely makes sense.
In that scenario, if your backup drive is writeable from your infected machine, your backups are potentially fucked.
One way to guard against this would be for example a raspberry pi on your network that periodically connects to your (possibly infected) main machine and makes incremental copies over the network to an external HD connected to the Pi. (Meaning the Pi reads and determines what is new, what's is old and how to make the incremental backup.) This of course needs to be coupled to some sort of smart versioning scheme and regular inspection of the backups by the user.
- in a physical photo book. This forces me to be more selective, so only the best pics are printed (less than 300 pics)
- their digital counterparts are backed up in: one pendrive, one hard drive, one cloud provider. I update the backups every 6 months or so
I have no idea if the digital pictures will be accessible in 30 years, so I try to keep myself up-to-date regarding this topic (every 5 years or so). It's not very difficult to migrate a few hundred pics to a new kind of storage system/format.
Hard copies are of course an additional bonus but I'm not considering them "backup".
My strategy in general is that data should be in at least 2 distinct geographical locations at least 10km apart and managed by 2 distinct organizations (for example Backblaze and Google if you are using 2x cloud backup).
1. Sync/send it into OneDrive cloud.
2. My mostly-offline (and powered down) home NAS downloads it and create a copy on its RAID disk (I'm switching it on for that task like once a month or so)
3. Once a year, I'm sitting down for the evening with my wife and choose the photos from the current year that should be send to print.
4. Printed photos are being delivered, we put it into our photo album.
Lightroom CC automatically ingests any raw images I take on my phone. I sort and archive those on Lightroom Classic later.
My Lightroom photo library mostly lives on my Synology NAS. This gets backed up to Wasabi using their Hyper Backup utility.
And I also do make use of google cloud and apple cloud where available. Is that a problem? I'm honestly not sure. They're just innocent photos I would not mind if they leaked.
https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/
TLDR: have multiple copies of everything. Printed copies on acid-free paper is great. Keep your original files of possible. If you can, store copies in more than one location.
I just dump everything in and forget about them as "another" backup.
- Daily rsync of NAS to an external disk
- Periodic encrypted/compressed archives in S3
(disclaimer: I came here for that)
1 year, definitely. 5 years, probably. 10 years, not so sure. 20 years, insufficient data.