How I Almost Lost Every Family Photo I Have | Hacker News Reader

How I Almost Lost Every Family Photo I Have

rantsandrambles.net

23 pointsgrflynn54 comments

Catastrophies like this probably will happen to most people.

For a long time I've used Flickr as an archive for my better photos, but I may be moving that to something else because the new Flickr interface is intolerably slow to use.

I was working on a presentation last week and I wanted to use my own pictures, but the time in the time I'd spend waiting for Flickr to load to put one image in my presentation I could find and insert five images from Bing or Google Image Search.

My offsite backup is to Amazon Glacier via Arq. Slow, but cheap, and insha'Allah reliable.

What tool are you using to back up?

Arq http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

Thank you. I did not realize that Arc was the name of the actual program. Stupid me.

I'm currently (both as in "these days" and "right now") trying to add file-level encryption to rdiff-backup. Hopefully, this will make backups as easy as rdiff-backup already is, while still providing strong security, and the advantage over duplicity is that you don't need to create full backups of your set from time to time (encryption is file-level so it should only upload the changed files).

Have you seen obnam? Encrypted(GPG) de-duplicated backups.

http://liw.fi/obnam/

I saw it a while back, but there was something I didn't like, I seem to remember. Is it like Duplicity, that does a massive encrypted tarball?

No, not a massive tarball. If I recall right, each unique block of each file is individually encrypted.

Also recommend Glacier via Arq. I have hundreds of GB of astro photos that I don't need immediate access to, but want securely backed up. Arq/Glacier are ideal for this kind of long term storage. Just be aware that there is an AWS $$ penalty for deletion of recently uploaded data.

I just want to pipe up and say I agree with you about the new Flickr interface. I find it intolerable.

My archive of photos has always been files in directories. Nothing "mysterious" can go wrong with those... Copy as many times as you like to whatever medium you like, and not dependent on any particular software.

Mine too. I'm still unclear on how OP lost the photos in the first place.

iPhoto has some sort of archive/database file that can get corrupted, I think.

Agreed. I keep all of photos in a directory and I use a program called Jhead to rename the files based on jpeg metadata. Example:

20130101_12-13-34.jpg (YearMonthDay_Hours-Minutes-Seconds)

I chose this scheme because it works on all the OSes I use and, having no spaces, tab-completes nice with Bash.

Had a similar experience with iphoto. Now I dump straight to a folder, scp to my raided synology NAS, and make another copy on a usb drive that I store at work.

I'm unclear on a point: If you have a Time Machine backup, and it used to work at some point, why can't you restore that from Time Machine?

I saw you say that that database was empty, but if you just go back a few days (to a point when you know it worked), then it will work. Time Machine backs the entire drive up.

Now Flickr offer a free terabyte of storage, offsite backup for photos is free. I wrote this script to upload my iPhoto pics: https://github.com/jawj/iphoto-flickr

This is an awesome script. I just used it to upload 3600 photos/videos. I might suggest utilizing the async options to speed up the upload process.

Also I noticed one issue regarding photos taken by non Apple camera apps - opening an issue on github now.

With all the solutions thrown about here from multiple SD drives, cloud storage and even a "simple web server and web interface" (while I agree that would be a fun project) to sync between them, I'm forced to wonder why old-school ways of backup aren't considered.

How difficult and awkward would it be to have an external DVD/Blu-ray writer, a spindle of disks and a permanent marker? It's not like you're doing the backups in one go, after all. A disk every couple of weeks to a month for the average Joe isn't too much. This isn't a professional photographer after all.

From our research at Everpix, most photos taken today are on mobile phones, and most people very rarely connect their phones to their computers. So you really need a solution that starts on the mobile device, and cloud services work the best for that.

I usually select and dump my photos/videos to a shared drive on my laptop over wifi, so cloud is still an ancillary feature for me. After all, what if I'm in an area with no reception? I can still use Bluetooth to transfer files.

Edit: Here's what I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.mori.andro...

Thanks, I'll have to try that out. So far, I haven't had great experiences accessing my Android devices from my Linux laptop.

That said, your workflow isn't representative of most users, if only for the fact that most users don't really have a workflow per se, they just do whatever's easiest at the moment. People have photos all over the place (mobile devices, multiple computers/drives, social networks, email, etc.), and Everpix pulls them together into one unified collection.

Yep. My old phone used to plug in on USB, show up as a disk, I can use standard tools to copy the pics and vids. New phone, no of course not. Progress. Feh.

Clue: Everyone is not itunes compliant! Grr!

It still requires manual labor. We used to have external usb drives per computer, with a script in udev that started rsync as soon as you plug in a usb drive with a certain id. So essentially, plug in a usb drive to take backups. Plug it out when it says it's done. But even that was too much to remember to do.

We've moved to doing nightly rsyncs. Laptops rtc_wake at 4am, but of course suspend again before the backup starts if they're not plugged in. Backups are done over the local network from the "home server" to a big encrypted btrfs usb drive (so we get snapshots). And keep the offsite copy freshly rotated by visiting my parents :)

But we still some times forget to plug in the laptop at night.

Speaking from experience - This isn't nearly as foolproof as one would hope. I used that process to back up my music collection in the early days and have discovered that optical media/drives aren't nearly as durable or compatible as one would hope. Years later, I'd found a large portion of my collection was unreadable by all but the original drive that wrote them. And several of the disks have suffered aging failures.

Having an extra drive offsite is a great idea. The terms of service for Everpix are shady..

"By displaying or posting any Content on or through the Everpix Services, you hereby grant to 33cube a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content in or through the Everpix Services to you and to those other users with whom you choose to share such Content."

I don't think that is shady. Just means they don't have to pay him to show him (or his friends) the pictures on the service.

That's correct. It's legalese for an almost tautological statement: "we are allowed to do what you tell us to do with your photos." We take privacy seriously.

It effectively gives them the right to use your photos however they please.

No, that's not true. It only gives us the rights to (a) display your photos to you and those with whom you share them, (b) auto-organize your photos for you, and (c) delete photos stored on our serivce (when you click delete photo or delete source or delete your account).

We can't (and don't want to) use your photos commercially, browse through your photos, distribute them to people you haven't authorized to see them, turn them into ads, etc. And we've never had any sort of government request to access an account.

I have probably a couple hundred gigabytes of photos on my iMac at home, which I manage with Lightroom. A couple months ago, my iMac died unexpectedly. I didn't panic, though, as I had an external drive constantly doing Time Machine backups, plus Backblaze syncing everything.

It turned out the logic board was dead, so I just bought a new iMac, restored everything, and went about my business. No fuss, no muss, and absolutely no fretting.

Boogles my mind people find this photo collecting/hoarding behaviour normal.

You only have one life, live it, don't waste it behind a camera trying to fake it.

Even if OP's kid died the next week, as if there wouldn't have been hundred of other photos around.

I think wasting a birthday on a triviality would be what really mattered then.

Life is about experiences not collecting things.

Just share everything on Facebook. No matter how much you want something to be deleted, once it's up there it's never coming down.

I have a mix of Backblaze online backup, Time Machine local backup, Flickr for a selection of non-private photos, and Dropbox for documents/financial stuff.

Before I started doing backups, I was really lucky that every time I got burned it was by having a decently new (<2 months) old drive blow up, and I had most of my data on the old drive.

You're an asshole if you think that "just losing some photos" isn't a big deal. Minimizing or person's trouble by giving a hypothetical example is not only mean spirited, it's also stupid. For instance, the OP could have lost his family in a fire but at the same time someone else in the world could have that while also being tortured. Dumbasses

Beyond that, our photographs help to serve as a link to out memories, and to many people they are just as important as the memoirists themselves. Even more important later in life when our memories are failing and when we have lost those that are important to us.

So while you're bitching about first world problems, consider yourself lucky that your biggest problem today is that someone else suffered a near misfortune and that you are lucky enough to bitch about it from the comfort of your air conditioned home.

You ignorant, useless fucks.

Completely agree. I think the negativity on HN stories is this site's manifestation of karma whoring.

A family thought they lost a lifetime's worth of photos and cherished memories? Easy to make a snarky comment about first world problems and watch that number increase.

pg: if you read comments like that, do you ever regret not giving downvote access earlier? I feel that having top-rated comments be so unremittingly negative (and frankly dickish) hurts HNs image.

I do dislike the community system on HN. It rewards inflammatory posts and trolling rather than reasonable and rational discussion. And for that matter, it rewards sensationalistic posts.

I think the main issue is that HN is a really high profile community, and with that you get stupid people like these "1st world haters."

It's especially asinine because it implies that third-worlders don't care about family photos. What, you think that just because their standard of living is lower, they don't feel the attraction of visual media of their loved ones?

I get the impression that a lot of people who comment on this site don't comprehend how anyone who isn't a relatively wealthy programmer actually lives. Anyone who doesn't make at least $60,000/year is engaged in a daily struggle to survive and can't possibly have time to care about things like photos of their mother, apparently.

There are valid treatment programs for hoarding, none of which involve complicated computer backup rituals, so the discussion began off the rails before comments started derailing.

Toward those with a problem, it is possible to feel some empathy as their illness negatively impacts their lives while still recognizing the illness as an objective fact. Your analysis that those not showing some minimal level of empathy are mean spirited and stupid sounds more or less correct to me although its a matter of degree which makes it messily analog and complicated.

As for commentary about lost memories and such, in the long run we're all lost. Live your life to live, not to be documented and preserved. You're a person not a wikipedia article. I don't think you'd like most eastern philosophical outlooks on life; but we don't have to all agree with each other, merely be civil enough in our near direct opposition. Historically humans have done worse.

I would disagree with the ignorant, useless commentary in that most people know (of) someone with a hoarding problem and here on HN we know all about complicated technical rituals. As for the useless thats hard to parse, there seems little point in referencing a hoarding support URL in a locale where we all pretty much know how to google. And people who are sick usually already know so mentioning it isn't helping, as you correctly mention.

Overall a mixed bag, 7.0/10.0 as a comment about half the wide ranging comments were good and/or half good, some not so good. Well written from a literary standpoint although some logical argument issues behind the first glance.

On a broader scale I think its interesting to consider hoarding in the digital age; not seen much on that. Most of the diagnostic criteria from meatspace should transition pretty smoothly into tech; is the behavior negatively impacting the victim, and so on.

I don't think the cure for digital hoarding will be bigger storage or more outlandish technical schemes; I suspect a lot of people agree with me; this is probably the root of the "backlash" rather than some inherent hatred of victims. The dude in the article is doing the exact wrong thing to fix his fundamental problem with outlook on life, therefore intense backlash. I wish him well, even if I think he's going in the exact wrong direction to actually fix the problem.

Digital hoarding isn't just backing up your family photos; it's compulsively finding, downloading and storing all sorts of content that you have no real use for (movies, music, TV shows, books, software, etc. -- usually in violation of copyright).

Most people enjoy commemorating a special moment with a photo, and being able to easily relive that memory a few years later. Smart digital technology makes this cheap and easy. Sure, having the camera out all the time is compulsive. Going through and manually editing, tagging and deleting photos is compulsive too. Most people do neither, but they still want to keep their photo memories safe.

"Digital hoarding isn't just backing up your family photos"

It could include that but doesn't require it.

Analogy would be crazy cat lady doesn't have 100 of anything with fin fur or feathers, she's got 100 cats. That doesn't mean crazy home zoo guy in florida with 10 aligators and a tiger isn't any more or less whackier if its messing up their lives just as much.

Also the criteria is not the useful or not, its the impact on life and human happiness. I have a full digital set of all star trek episodes from all TV series... ever... if I lost them I would be pissed for awhile, but I wouldn't cry freak out drive around looking for backups in a panic and get in way over my head technically (which for me would be way more extreme than the guy in the original story). Kinda like some folks without an alcohol problem can drink a couple beers without negatively impacting their lives, but a pretty good working definition of a guy with an alcohol problem is he drinks the same beers and his life totally falls off the rails... the problem is the impact on life not specific ethanol molecules.

Everyone likes your second paragraph. The problem is for some/most people its exclusively a positive activity, and for others the positive comes with epic legendary freakout mode. The problem is the epic freakout mode not liking pix or putting in a reasonable non life impacting effort to curate their pixs.

I have lost all my photos before. It was... initially upsetting, but oddly liberating a few weeks on. The things I care about, I still remember. The people I care about I still care about - and for the one who isn't around any more, I wish I'd spent more time talking to him and less time taking photos. I still take photos occasionally, but I've cut back a lot, and I think my life is better for it.

(And I can't afford air conditioning, thank you very much)

Here's how I handle photo backups:

http://www.brianlane.com/automatic-backup-of-files-to-s3-and...

Is there a script/application to sync a hierarchical folder of 100,000 photos to Flickr, now it has so much storage? One set per subfolder. I found a few Windows apps, but they mostly baulked at that many files.

I can't help you with Flickr, but the tools the author mentions in the article (Dropbox for backup file storage and Everpix for auto-organization/exploration/mobile access/selective sharing) can handle 100,000 photos, no problem. Personal bias: I pay for Dropbox and work at Everpix.

I use two exact equal external USB HDs to backup all my photos (twice) since the 2.0 megapixel era. The main issue now is how to organize photos from multiple devices I do it semimanually.

have you thought about using a simple web server and making a basic web interface? might be a bit nerdy but would be a fun weekend project :-)

A case study in first-world "problems"

As a first worlder myself, I'd say its a weird prioritization any goof could have, not limited to 1st world:

"horrifying realization that I had failed as a parent"

Hmm I worked with a guy who's teen son died. When I was a kid, I worked with a girl who had a couple kids as a teen and was actively pursuing a career in welfare motherhood. I've known a couple drug addicts, alkies, burnouts. Yeah I can see how some parents feel they failed. Some probably did, some probably didn't but feel that way anyway, sometimes. "lost some photos" doesn't quite make the cut, 1st world, 2nd world, or 3rd world.

The 3rd world version would be something like a dad in a shanty town is freaking out because he lost his favorite polaroid, meanwhile, his neighbors son was just beheaded by the local drug gang, now thats a real problem.

Priorities, priorities...

I've never taken a formal debate class, but I think what you are arguing falls under the Fallacy of Relative Privation. Can someone more skilled than me in logical fallacies verify this?

That would be a correct analysis IF I used the comparison in something totally unrelated to parenting, like my preference of JVM virtual machine memory management options. He failed as a parent when he lost a horde of 16 bazillion pictures, because an even worse scenario is he allocated 1 gig each to multiple separate JVM instances on a 1 gig image (guess what I just fixed...)

You might be able to get me on some zenos paradox / continuum fallacy basis but thats going to take some serious sophistry. Or maybe get me on a false dilemma strategy where having a dead kid and a drug addicted kid are hardly mutually exclusive although anecdotally they were two distinct kids. But I don't think the relative privation strategy is going to work well.

What, do you think people in third-world countries don't care about family photos?

Wrong. Obviously you have never traveled. People in third-world countries that are lucky to have a few photos will keep them as their most prized possessions.

When you do ever travel and take photos, make sure to share the photos with the people you photographed. Have extra prints make and mail them when you return from your trip.

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