Hacker News Reader

Comment by firecall | Hacker News Reader

One rather counter intuitive way to “backup” your photos is to install Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone!

Google and MS don’t charge as much as Apple for storage, and you probably need you need to pay beyond the free limits, but it’s not a huge expense.

Once your installed Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone, just tell the apps to sync all your photos all the time!

Now I appreciate that isn’t for everyone.

But it works, is reliable, and requires no technical knowledge of running your own service.

The other thing to do is setup a Mac that synchs all your iCloud data, One Drive documents and Google Drive.

Then back up that device with Backblaze.

This gets expensive as a Mac with decent levels of storage isn’t cheap!

I live in fear everyday or my primary Apple and Google accounts getting locked!

I’ve had accounts since day one of iTools and very shortly after Gmail launched….

View on HN

The issue with OneDrive is that it doesn’t store metadata like the photo location, its damn near useless. But I do pay for storage for Google Photos and iCloud.

If you take all of your photos from your phone, you don’t need your Mac at all. Google Photos will sync directly.

I wouldn’t use BackBlaze (the $7 a month service). It doesn’t support NAS at all and it has to phone home every 30 days or it will erase anything that is stored on external drive.

I would use an app that backs up to their B2 service.

I personally just use my personal AWS account to back up my Plex media and just use the AWS s3 sync command using the AWS CLI and store everything in S3 Deep Archive. It’s less than $2 a month for 2TB.

Backblaze doesn’t erase after 30 days… I’ve had a computer be offline from it for several months and it still retained all data. And you can use the backblaze docker container to run on a NAS, much much much cheaper than B2.

Wasabi is much cheaper than AWS as well.

Finally the best solution for backing up your iCloud Photos is definitely Immich. Set it up on your own NAS or a VPS, back up to that, and then back up that server to an S3 storage using rsync or restic. I’ll note that I still backup to Backblaze because its so dang cheap.

I spent months trying to find the best setup a few months ago and this is by far the cheapest.

But still, this shouldn’t be required for normal people. They should get what they pay for.

> It has to phone home every 30 days or it will erase anything that is stored on an external drive

It’s actually more nuanced. It will back up files on a USB attached drive. If it doesn’t see the drive attached for 30 days, it will erase the backup.

If you have your computer off for more than 30 days and you bring your computer back on and the USB drive isn’t attached when it connects to BackBlaze, it will erase it.

Yeah I’m not going to trust my storage to Wasabi.

AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive is $1 a month.

> AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive is $1 a month.

Only if you’re backing up nothing and using non-encrypted files and making sure you don’t delete anything (rsync with delete turned off). I tested this not even three months ago. I hit $30 with only 3 tb of data with deep archive while wasabi AND backblaze cost less than that. No need to even trust a single provider. If you’re never changing your files AND you don’t care about encrypting them then yes GDA is fine and pretty cheap. Otherwise wasabi and backblaze get more done for less cost.

I meant a $1 a month per TB for AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive That was my bad.

I am definitely a fan of B2.

I understood what you meant about GDA. It just doesn’t come out to that unless you put stuff in and never touch it, which is a valid use case! Don’t get me wrong, I planned on doing the same but with restic it would cost so so much more than wasabi and backblaze that it was a massive waste of money and really revealed amazon’s strategy, which is lock your data away and charge you to access it.

I wasn’t talking about B2 though, I was talking about Backblaze personal, which you can run on a NAS with a docker container.

> It’s less than $2 a month for 2TB.

What would be the egress fee to get your data back in case of disaster?

The cheapest slowest egress, bulk retrieval is $2.56 per terrabyte.

Glacier is meant for in case of emergency break glass. You would use lifecycle policies on S3 to go from fast/more expensive storage for like the first 90 days and then have it automatically go to Glacier.

Yes I know it’s more complicated and nuanced. I’m purposefully yada yada yada’ing

I’m suggesting you do both One Drive and Google!

Also, to be clear, I’m saying to install One Drive and Google Photos on your iPhone.

My approach to this is based around having the least amount of things to manage.

In my scenario, I’m looking for the most simple out of the box systems to backing up that don’t require any self hosted solutions or NAS management and so on.

Just throw money at it!

Hence my suggestion to get a Mac, say a Mac Mini, with a decent sized drive and just sync everything to it.

Fully sync so it downloads the lot and need off loads.

The backup the internal drive with Backblaze.

I appreciate this advice isn’t for everyone, and it may not be the best solution.

But it’s a way to a least have some ultimate disaster recovery in place!

It may not be the cheapest, and cheapest doesn’t mean best. It may not be the best by some other measure of features, but it works and requires zero knowledge and additional hardware.

At least with some kind of backup, everything is not lost!

You don’t have to manage it or think about it. The services will sync for years without intervention until you upgrade your devices. For most people, that’s the important factor in having multi backups of their photos and documents!

I think we are saying almost the same thing. I have iCloud storage, pay for one Google storage and have Office365. I use all three.

But, we travel a lot, it’s a hobby of ours. Being able to see on a map where the pictures were taken is important. iCloud Drive and Google Drive preserve all of that information and the accompanying Live Photos, and depth information. One Drive doesn’t.

But I’m okay with a two full Fidelity sources and one low Fidelity backup.

100% with you there!

Having location data is very desirable, and searching my library without it would be painful!

I'm also a huge fan of how iCloud and Google Photos can search my photos just by a description. (not sure if One Drive can, never tried).

I'm horrified when I talk to people who only have their photos on their phones, with no additional iCloud storage. They have no additional backup at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com