Ask HN: What's a good solution for storage of photos/documents for a home?
I used to use Google Drive but I am getting a bit scared about the control the platform has and the effect of losing access or someone gaining access to it all.
This harddrive is backed up a few times in a month to another encrypted harddrive via a Raspberry Pi Server in the LAN. On that Raspberry Pi also Nextcloud is installed to allow syncing specific files with other members in the house.
The first harddrive that is connected to my machine directly is also backed up to another drive once or twice a year.
rpi might work too, but slow.
But if you are paranoyed that someone can steal your *photos. From your home.
Then use batteries from old laptop, take them out 3.7V 6 or 8 of them and use few for cloud backup if main power is off and for powerup rpi with cammera for face detection and movement sensors and main electricity inficator and usb 3G or 4G ethernet dongle if that thief will turn off electricity you can get notification via 4G network. If electricity is not turned off you still can get motion detection.
Use rpi gpins to send electroshock to burn that hdd.
Good luck experimenting.
If you're worried about Google (i.e. closing your account) then get some redundancy and use another cloud as well?
If you're worried about your documents being leaked by Google then you probably need to rethink a few things.
It will hold a lot of hard disks...and floppy disks...and zip drives...and Qic tapes...and CD-R's...and DVD's...and SD cards...and USB sticks...and of course paper.
It seems like every 2-3 years I hear about an apartment building in my area that has a fire destroying multiple units or the whole building. When I lived in an apartment I deliberately chose an old complex because they were concrete - better fire protection, less noise transfer, and fewer pest concerns/points of entry.
Also, water damage from pipes or roof leaks is categorically different from flood damage. Homeowners insurance covers roof and pipe leaks, but you need flood insurance for actual flood damage (basically water from any other sources).
Move the files to a new spindle every decade, at the very least.
TL:DR; Have several copies on different devices. You might want to invest in a NAS. Extra credit if a copy or two is not in the same place. Recent NAS and Linux distributions support filesystems that can guard against bitrot, which may not be common, but a layered data security approach is best.