
Ask HN: How do you backup your photos? - akavel
I&#x27;m struggling with finding a solid method&#x2F;process for backing up my photos, which for me function as physical manifestations and triggers of memories. Do you have a robust approach for that, which worked for you over decades and&#x2F;or at least a few EOLed technologies?<p>Some core aspects I have trouble planning over:<p>- photos have lifetime longer than that of most 3rd party (web)services I&#x27;ve known<p>- seemingly even of most hardware storage technologies... E.g. tapes &amp; diskettes no longer in use; cdroms less and less popular; hdd connectivity standards change (scsi, pci, usb, sata, whatever...)<p>- hardware storages fail - and sneaky <i>silently</i> if not checked periodically!<p>- fairly big volumes - easily GBs even for casual photographer or just a passive photo subject<p>- 3rd party services require passwords, which again bring another can of management problems (balancing accessibility vs.risk of losing)<p>- at the same time, the very idea of photos as memories asks for ease of reviewing&#x2F;browsing old ones<p>Do you have some kind of periodic (yearly?) schedule of reviewing available options, testing readability of existing copies and potentially migrating&#x2F;copying stuff to new venues? Did you build an awesome rube-goldberg machine of Perl scripts to automate it and sleep calmly? Or did you maybe find the silver bullet of a magic everlasting solution?<p>How do you manage how many copies a photo has on various media?<p>Did you maybe find out that works best for you is falling back to prints and old-school physical albums?<p><i>As a side note: nice to have if the solution would work for other types of contents too (texts, html, videos - general backup?), but my main and most pressing concern are purely photos; to stay super focused, jpegs-only is acceptable.</i><p>I&#x27;m desperate for a good solution I could feel I can trust.
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Tade0
I guess what you could do is search among storage manufacturers who offer
products for the industry, not only consumers.

Samsung has a line of SSDs designed for reliability and they fared well in
tests:

[http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-
experim...](http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-
theyre-all-dead)

There's also a much less known company named GOODRAM which is one of the very
few such companies having their only facilities within EU borders. I have a
few of their products and some of them come with a lifetime warranty.

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brudgers
I don't use it, but I think the most reliable method for the end user is to
shoot film and keep the negatives. Short of a fire, a film negative for modern
film is pretty robust. When push comes to shove, hardware is often a useful
abstraction and shoebox filing solves 90% of all filing needs with very little
effort.

Good luck.

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flojo
I use the tool syncthing.

That syncs all my photos on my home media server with my workstation in the
office.

Its like an off site backup.

