Hacker News Reader

Comment by cedricd | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised how technical and homegrown all these solutions are (well, it's an HN crowd so maybe I shouldn't be). I'm a techy too and pretty into photography, but I've gone the other way.

I store all my photos on a desktop computer and use BackBlaze to automatically keep everything backed up.

It violates the 3-2-1 rule but in the 10ish years I've been using this approach I've had tons of harddrive failures, had to restore some backups due to my own mistakes, but I haven't lost a single image.

I used to do complicated sync stuff but I found that the more moving pieces there were the more I would lose photos for various reasons.

View on HN

Question about your approach: are you able to partition your Backblaze back-up in order to maintain just a minimal set of photos on your local machine?

Would love to do this: - Back-up local machine via Blackblaze - Periodically delete all local photos, save somewhere in BB - Turn on regular back-up again - keeping both the local stuff (now much smaller) but also the previous bulk save in BB.

My answer to maintaining a minimal set of photos on a local machine isn't great unfortunately. The desktop holding all the photos acts like a file server and I connect my laptop to that when browsing images.

There's a way to do it that I find somewhat risky: pay a bit extra for permanent storage. Normally Backblaze will remove deleted files in 30 days (I pay for a year). If you do permanent then you can delete your originals from your local machine and Backblaze will keep them presumably forever. That approach makes me nervous personally :)

Interesting. Wasn’t aware of that option. And I agree that it feels strange to sign that data over to someone/something in that manner.

I use Backblaze as well but I'm disappointed the company doesn't support backing up Application folders or system folders. They also stopped supporting Mac OS X older than 10.13.

I’m much the same but with an additional local backup: iCloud Photos (with one computer set to save all originals), Time Machine backups to a local NAS, plus BackBlaze for offsite.

I wanted the photos outside the Time Machine bundle. It was (and is) a horrible process, but I quit photos.app, rsync them to a nas, then reopen iPhoto and post the result (success or fail) to Slack.

Getting to the photos was horrible, so made an alias of the folder that contains the files (which is in the library bundle).

It’s all on a VM so it sort of out the way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com