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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

“Average home NAS user” doesn’t have 40TB of data. With a subset of data that’s important like photos it’s not that expensive and with Backblaze and other services that are directly integrated in operating systems like Synology also not that hard to do.

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I agree with the advice which is what we do. Average home user (with emphasis on average) doesn't have 40TB, but a "normal" non-professional one might.

We have about 9TB of photos. I can easily imagine someone like us, who is into video, of having more than 40TB of videos.

When will you ever be able to appreciate and look at 9T of photos?

AI tools analyze photos pretty well now. It’s very common they bubble up old photos I had forgotten about.

Good point, now AI is a real good excuse for thoughtless data hoarding.

When you're old and retired, and are reminiscing about your kids or grandkids back when they were small, or about past vacations.

My parents tend to take a lot of photos whenever the family is together, and it used to bother me. Only in recent years I started to understand them.

I've passed through the other end of this. I spent a few hundred hours scanning my father's and grandfather's slides, negatives, and prints on high-end scanners in 2010. There were thousands of images, and since then that number has probably increased several orders of magnitude with digital cameras and then phones. The sheer number is beyond human comprehension. Now that images are so trivial to make, I value curation much more than shear number. I suppose it's always a quantity vs quality thing.

You don't always immediately know which ones will be important.

Today you might take 10 photos of your family and keep the best one where everyone is smiling.

But 10-20 years from now you will probably appreciate having kept the other 9 where the baby is crying, the kid is making a face, and grandma has started to wander off.

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