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Comment by 8fingerlouie | Hacker News Reader

I'm aparently boring.

My "backup routine" consists of storing photos in iCloud, which is then syncronized "real time" to a local Mac Mini.

From the Mac Mini i then run scheduled backups to a local external harddrive, as well as a local Raspberry Pi running Minio, and nightly to OneDrive.

The external harddrive backup uses Timemachine, the raspberry pi backup uses Kopia, and OneDrive is done with Arq.

Furthermore, i make yearly archive discs. Identical copies on M-disc Blu-Ray media, stored in geographically different locations. Each disc contains the photos that have changed in the previous 12 months, and no encryption/archiving is used.

Alongside the M-disc media i keep a couple of external harddrives that contains the entire photo library. These are checked (with badblocks, non-destructive surface scan) yearly, updated and rotated when storing the new M-disc media.

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You must really love those photos.

The default setting for iCloud Photos is non-e2ee, which allows US federal police access to every photo you have ever taken or saved without a warrant/probable cause.

The photos also likely have EXIF GPS data and timestamps, so it's also a track log of location history.

> which allows US federal police access to every photo you have ever taken or saved without a warrant/probable cause

I'm aware of that, though it's no different from any other US based cloud provider. I am however a citizen of the EU, so there's the EU/US safe harbor (or Schrems II) agreement in place.

In the end it all comes down to trust vs convenience. I trust Apple more than Amazon or Google, and about as much as Microsoft. Apple keeps my data on EU soil, and is a lot more convenient on Apple platforms. Microsoft sends all OneDrive data to the US.

I do however use Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, which e2e encrypts photos and others. All backups, including local ones, are source encrypted.

the point of immich and photoprism is that you host them on your computer, on your own network and it never goes through those centralized entities in the first place.

but WHY? why do you go to such lengths?

When i was a kid, photos came in physical form, both as prints and as negatives. These could be stored in different locations, although most of the time they would be stored in the same location.

These days it's all digital photos, and i think most people agree that some kind of backup is needed. If you primarily use a cloud service, there is probably little risk that your data suddenly vanishes (though it has happened), but instead you're faced with the danger of losing access to that account, meaning your stuff might still exist, you just no longer have access to it.

My "normal" backup routing is simply "iCloud -> Mac Mini -> external harddrive + OneDrive", and the Raspberry Pi and Kopia is a (long running) test to eventually replace time machine.

As for the M-disc archive, it's a convenient and low cost way of creating resilient backups of my photos that doesn't require me to print everything. The archive will survive a lot more hardship than your average digital media, and does not require somewhat frequent usage to retain information. Harddrives lose their charge after 5-7 years of sitting unused, SSDs in as little as 2 years. Blu-Ray media will retain information for decades, and (according to the sales brochure) M-disc will retain information for a millenium, which i assume is about 900+ years longer than i need it to.

In theory, i could simply ditch the remote backup and rely on the M-disc media, but that's where convenience comes into play.

sounds like a reasonable backup and archiving process which will compensate for both, the internet and the home burning down

The real question is, why don’t you?

You will find, in time, that nobody has an actual answer to this. It's purely nerd-lust for not doing things the simple way

My photo library contains a large part of the moments of my life worth remembering, from being a kid, teenager, young adult, meeting my wife, our kids , pets, and everything between. I would seriously hate to lose it because somebody knocks over a can of soda.

There are two major threats to my photo library. One is loss of the cloud data and/or loss of access to it (and/or malware, natural disasters, etc), which is why i keep data locally as well. The other is loss of data locally, anything from a failed piece of equipment to a house fire.

The reason why i make a local backup of the synchronized cloud data is in case malware decides to encrypt/delete all my photos, in which case iCloud will happily synchronize all the changes to all devices, effectively deleting all good copies.

So with a local backup of the data i've mitigated the first threat, loss of cloud data and/or access to it, but i'm still left with the threat of losing data at home, which is why i also backup to a different cloud provider, which again comes with a threat of losing access, and this is where the Blu-Ray archive comes in.

Because burning Blu-Ray discs is time consuming, i rely on my "day to day" 3-2-1 backup to keep data safe, but ultimately the Blu-Ray discs safeguards against loss of cloud data and loss of local data (identical copies stored in different locations), so they're my last ditch defense of disaster recovery.

You don't?

Sounds like a brilliant archiving solution. Does your M-Discs have any amount of parity?

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