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Comment by vocatan | Hacker News Reader

Pop goes the photo cache, all my family photos mysteriously vanish into the depths of Amazon Photos

I'm hoping that it's just a stale cache or microservice that hit an issue building its view of the metadata or something. They use S3 to store your data (according to this blog[0]) so my fingers are crossed that the data is still there, they just need to get an engineer onto it.

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-...

Is that your only backup? Because precious photos need more than one (like any backup regime really)

Still it sucks and it shouldn’t happen, hopefully it’s just a reporting error in the app.

Sharing my family-photo-backup system:

- Synology NAS is accessible on LAN & phones sync photos when at home

- Nightly rsync from internal NAS storage to 1 external (non-raid) hard drive

The nightly rsync does not delete files, so the external hard drive is pretty close to an off-site backup even though it's still attached. The only better thing I've thought of doing is mounting it ro after backups + re-mounting before backups.

At the end of the day we get 3 copies of data: the photo on your phone, the photo on the shared NAS, and the photo on an external hard drive that spends 99% of its life spun down.

IMO the biggest remaining risk to this is a house fire at night while you are at home. You wake up to alarms and smoke and run out the door without your phone. All three copies of your photos will burn at once. This is where an additional off-site would be valuable. That might be a second external hard drive that you store off-site and re-sync every few months, or maybe an encrypted cloud backup using restic.

It’s pretty easy to set the Synology to upload to a cloud provider for a folder or file share. It has alerts and all sorts.

Could you do a swap with a friend/colleague? So upload to their NAS and vice versa.

For sure. I just trust Backblaze more.

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