Hacker News Reader

Doing exactly what you are suggesting, I will tell you why it's a much bigger cost than just the cost of the drive.

- The Seagate drive you mention has horrible failure rates, IIRC.

- Unless you know how to set up and monitor a ZFS pool, don't bother. Your data will not survive without this.

- Are you confident enough in your backup solution? Are your backups offsite? Are they offsite on another ZFS pool, or similar mechanism? Do you check your backups for integrity? What is your strategy for when backups (or original data) is corrupt?

- Does your home grown solution provide a secure sync capability between all your devices? Alternatively, do you have access to the photos from all your devices?

- Does your home grown solution allow your friends and family to view/download a subset of the photos from any of their devices?

- Is your solutions online a reasonable percentage of the time?

- Is your home grown solution as fast as AWS? As in, if you are traveling and want access to your data, how fast will it download/upload?

Basically, unless you plan on spending quite a bit of time setting this up, and know what you are doing, it is much much cheaper to pay from Prime, or similar.

Edit: BTW, the box you put these drives into must have ECC RAM. Without it, expect corruption. Same goes for your other box, the backup you host offsite.

> BTW, the box you put these drives into must have ECC RAM. Without it, expect corruption.

That's a rather strong statement to make.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/dram-error-rates-nightmare...

It's a rather fair statement to make. The rates of errors in memory are significant[1], and ZFS does nothing to ensure that in memory data structures are uncorrupted; it was designed to be used with ECC RAM[2].

[1]http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf [2]http://louwrentius.com/please-use-zfs-with-ecc-memory.html

> Just for the sake of argument, why rent when you can own? For $99 a year, you can buy a 2-TB external drive (Seagate's is $90 on Amazon at this time) and keep backing up your stuff to fresh hardware.

I do this (home backups), but I also value having offsite backups.

I don't see Prime photos as a reason to signup for Prime by itself, but hell, as a longtime Prime member who has signed up just for shipping, I'm obviously very happy with how they've continued to role out perks.

I don't even plan to use Photos (OS X isn't supported yet, anyway), but I love the demonstration of their commitment to Prime members. More than anything, that's where I think things like this are valuable.

Having photos on my own external hard drive is an enormous liability. Even ignoring the risk of a fire / theft / loss (not to mention the hassle itself of backing them up locally), drives fail.

> have a pretty big downloading task ahead of you to get all these images and move them elsewhere

I would say instead you have an enormous uploading task ahead of you to move 2 Tb of photos from your HDD into the cloud somewhere.

Plus, the main reason I have photos is to share them with other people. If I'm going to end up uploading them somewhere else, it's just easier.

I know opinions differ on privacy, but I honestly could not care less who sees my vacation photos.

You're comparing a redundant geographically-separated allways-available service with a hard drive that can fail/burn/get stolen.

And if you don't stay with Prime, you just fall back to Amazon Cloud Drive. Their pricing isn't amazing, but not horrible either. $25/year for 50GB.

For comparison, S3 redundant storage is $18/year for 50GB.

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/pricing/ref=cd_home_navpri...

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

The main advantages are:

  - the auto-backup apps on the different platforms
  - the web interface for online browsing and sharing.
  - not having to worry about hard drive failures.

If you actually want to do this, get a RAID 1 NAS like the Synology Diskstation 214 or 214+, stuff a couple 4TB drives into it, and then additionally set it to periodically auto-backup the valuable bits to Amazon Glacier.

This ends up being a good bit more expensive, but you'll actually have your photos in 10 years instead of having just a dead hard drive.