Ask HN: What is your photo backup strategy (on Mac)? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your photo backup strategy (on Mac)?

12 pointsjozi919 comments

My photos are very important to me, so i do several backups: 1) The iPhoto Library is rsync'd to an external HDD 2) The iPhoto Library is rsync'd to a local FreeNAS box 3) Arq backup to S3 http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ 4) Crashplan backup to 3 locations: an external drive, a local server (not the FreeNAS box), as well as Crashplan central.

Terabytes are cheap, memories are not.

I use duplicity (http://duplicity.nongnu.org) to locally encrypt (GPG) and backup to a LAN machine running ZFS and to one or more cloud services (Google, AWS) depending on the data. This is automated using cron.

Whatever backup option you decide on, do not forget to test the recovery/restore process at least once a year. You can tweak your strategy anytime based on current cloud storage prices.

AWS Bucket w/revisions enabled connected to PictureLife.com. Amazon raises invoices directly to me for storage usage and if PictureLife shuts down (hopefully not) then there's no need to export data because I own/control the data. ie. AWS provides the hosting and PictureLife provides the product on-top of my hosting.

Manual backup to external HDD + automatic backup to google drive with this app https://support.google.com/picasa/answer/4392268 I also like the opportunity to view these photos through Google+ Photos interface.

Time Machine to a Linux file server (large RAIDZ2 ZFS array) for both my MBP and the GF's iMac.

CrashPlan family edition (unlimited backups for up to ten computers) for both of us, the Linux file server and my parents laptops as well.

Use Aperture vault, and hope Apple doesn't decide to discontinue the product ..... Doh!

I upload my favourite shots to Flickr full res. This is about 1% of my photo collection.

I then pray my HDD doesn't fail!

One day I'll get organised and backup everything up to one of those 1TB NAS with auto-cloud sync :S

Google Drive - syncs automatically full res photo's from my phone which shortly end up sync'd to my macbook.

Drive is the authoritive store for my photo's - any thing on my PC can be lost with no problems

Unison via SSH to a Raspberry-Pi-attached USB HDD. Upload to Flickr via cron-triggered python script from RasPi. Arq to S3. Hoping that "only to camlistore" will be the answer in 3-5 years.

Same as the rest of my data backup strategy. Backblaze.

How have you found it? I tried it out and found it was something like 45 days to run a full backup on my 1TB machine, and discontinued it fairly immediately.

Let's just say that was more than 45 days ago....

Can't remember how long it took but it finished uploading before I needed an emergency restore ;-)

I have all photos in dropbox with packrat feature. Furthermore I backup to my local Synology NAS via their software and to AWS S3 via arq.

Onsite backup via time machine to a NAS Offsite backup to Backblaze

Time machine once every day to a 2 TB external harddrive (WD Elements). It just works.

My big data-loss fear is a household robbery - so offsite is essential. Have you considered a scenario that involves losing your Mac and your backup drives?

3 levels. 1) time machine. 2) BitTorrent sync to share photo folders. 3) Mozy

+ rsync to External HDD at home + another at work + backblaze

BitTorrent Sync from Android to an Ubuntu server in LAN.

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