
Ask HN: What is your personal photo/video storage and archival plan? - ryeguy_24
So, I’m a new dad. And with that, now have hundreds of photos and videos that, without a shred of doubt, I want to keep forever. I currently have 3 backups (computer, usb drive, and cloud backup through crash plan). I also use Flickr Pro which I guess is my 4th backup. Then (ok, so maybe I have 5 backups) I have some home videos on YouTube to watch on my Roku TV.<p>There is some manual work needed (not a lot) to make sure all are in sync. But boy I wish there was a fully automated way to do this that allowed sharing, lots of backups (even offline tape), and ability to collect and view videos and photos on all devices.<p>I’d love to hear how others are managing the long-term storage of photos and videos.
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mceachen
I've personally learned the following lessons the hard way:

Lesson 1: "RAID isn't a backup." If all you do is copy your files to a NAS,
they aren't safe. If you're NAS is taking snapshots onto a different physical
spindle, that's good, but it's better to have your NAS backed up to a
physically separate device, in case of cryptolocker attacks or hardware
failures.

Lesson 2: if it's not automatic, it won't get done. Set up Resilio Sync or
SyncThing or your NAS-specific backup software on your phone to pull photos
and videos off and back then up automatically. Set up a cron job on your NAS
to backup.

Lesson 3: consider an off-site backup. Backblaze has a great service, and so
do other cloud services.

Lesson 4: don't use a digital asset manager that requires proprietary hardware
or messes with your original files. Google photos, for example, is free, but
garbles much of the metadata tags in your files, and downsamples your videos
into a blurry mess (even if you use original quality). Failed photo startups
are astoundingly prevalent. Use something that's been designed to continue
even if the company doesn't.

Amusingly enough, I'm working on a photo startup (spoiler: it satisfies what I
wanted from lesson 4!). It's currently in closed beta, if you're interested in
trying it out and sharing feedback:
[https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-
photostructure/](https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/)

~~~
slipwalker
backblaze.com and wasabi.com are currently my favorites.

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devm0de
I’m no archival expert but here’s my lazy mans 3 location strategy.

I use iCloud photos by default, then open google photos app on my phone every
once in awhile to have a duplicate cloud sync ($2mo). Then when I remember
every month or so I open photos on my Mac and copy everything over to my
synology nas which houses a master iPhoto library that is hundreds of GBs at
this point. Using iPhoto is probably a mistake here since it’s fairly
terrible, but not sure how else to reasonably manage all my photos. I’ve tried
Picasa but came back.

I’ve been burned by apps like everpix cloud storage that suddenly shut down
and gave me only a few days to download nearly a terabyte of now unsorted
photos. Similar thing with Sony cloudstation. I wouldn’t trust any single
cloud storage provider from screwing you at some point.

------
stuartmscott
Congrats on becoming a dad!

S P A C E maybe the solution you're looking for to store all your photos and
videos.

\- End-to-End Encrypted - your private key stays on your device(s) so only you
can read your files.

\- Blockchain-Backed - your files are immutable and indelible.

\- Open Sourced - all source code is available from Github under Apache 2.0.

\- Decentralized - you choose which providers store your files, and can setup
your own computers as providers.

\- Shareable - you can share a file with any other S P A C E user.

\- Currently in Open Beta with an Android app and command line clients for
Linux, Mac, and Windows. Your private key can be shared with your other
devices so you can access your files from any of your (supported) devices.

There is still some manual work as you need to add the files to S P A C E, but
I will look into supporting automatically adding files.

Aletheia Ware currently has two providers, one in San Francisco and the other
in New York, but unfortunately neither offer offline tape backups. However, if
someone else wants to setup this type of provider I would be happy to help.

The other comments had an interesting point;

\- mceachen "Use something that's been designed to continue even if the
company doesn't."

\- devm0de "I wouldn’t trust any single cloud storage provider from screwing
you at some point."

I designed S P A C E to continue even if my company, Aletheia Ware LLC,
doesn't by open sourcing all the code, and enabling anyone to be their own
providers. By having multiple parties able to provide these services
independently you avoid the risk of having all your eggs in one basket - just
like you shouldn't store all your data on one harddrive, you shouldn't store
all your data with one cloud storage provider.

I would greatly appreciate any feedback you, or other HNers, have.

[https://space.aletheiaware.com](https://space.aletheiaware.com)

[https://github.com/AletheiaWareLLC](https://github.com/AletheiaWareLLC)

------
robotbikes
SyncThing is pretty useful for copying files automatically between devices. It
can be configured to say have every photo you upload automatically copied to
another computer. It was a little tricky to try to make sure that when photos
were deleted from the phone they weren't deleted from their backup/photo
archive. I think I got that working. Just make sure you document your setup so
that you can easily provision new devices when your setup changes. Might I
also recommend getting some photos printed individually or in a book. The
longevity of physical objects and accessibility of them is pretty hard to
discount. It will also help your kid to be able to look at them as they grow
older.

------
amerkhalid
I use Android phone, dslr camera, & MacBook Pro.

I subscribe to iCloud. Also all photos from phone are synced to Google Photos
in HQ format (free unlimited).

I use Dropbox to sync photos from phone to MBP.

Then I use Lightroom to move photos from Dropbox folder to my external SSD and
free up space on Dropbox.

Also I use Lightroom 6 to import photos from DSLR and keep them on external
SSD.

Then I open Apple Photos and import photos from SSD into Apple Photos. Since I
have a small SSD in MBP, Apple Photos uses "Optimize Storage" setting. I can
access these photos on iPad. I prefer iPad for photo and video editing.

Finally, I copy all content from my SSD to NAS backup.

It is a bit clunky. It would be really great if Apple Photos let you make
backup on your local HD/NAS.

~~~
mceachen
FWIW, you could get rid of your DropBox steps if you used something like
SyncThing or Resilio Sync on your phone and MBP.

------
patatino
Has anyone found a solution for sorting and tagging images most efficiently? I
have a one-year-old daughter and need to do it already.

Main goals:

\- Tags like "2019", "3 weeks", "first step" etc

\- I also take 3-4 pictures right one after another and would like to keep the
best and delete the others

\- Best of pictures.. choose a couple of pictures to summarize an
event/vacations

I looked at different software but didn't find anything satisfying my needs.
Maybe adding the tags in the metadata would be the best options so they are
not software dependent?

~~~
brudgers
Naming files by date solves the "2019" problem. It helps with the "three
weeks" problem...just some math in the head. My advice is don't delete
pictures. At the base level it's work and everyone is fallible.
Photographically, the reason is that your opinion about better and worse
photographs will evolve over time. You will learn from your mistakes. But you
can't learn from the mistake of mistakenly deleting and image. Just file
everything.

All things being equal, tags are beneficial. But time spent getting good at
tagging comes at the expense of time spent getting better at making better
pictures. In terms of tagging, give yourself years to get better at it. Five
years from now, going back and sorting through pictures of your child won't be
a horrible chore. It will be a joy.

I strongly recommend getting a printer and printing your best pictures.
Printing will help you take better pictures. And even mediocre prints are
better than anything on a screen.

~~~
mceachen
No commercial ties to them, but if you're in the US, Costco does prints that
are cheap, and (as a former digital pre-press nerd, I can attest to)
reasonably accurate color reproduction.

The nice 7-color inkjet I've got under my desk has been unused for years and
years. Good riddance to fiddling with that ink-sucking, nozzle-coughing,
fiddly beast.

~~~
brudgers
I tried the Costco route for exactly the reasons you mention. The technical
qualities of the prints are better than what my inkjet produces. But in terms
of what I am looking for, my inkjet produces prints I prefer because rapid
feedback lets me iterate the image editing and my goals are orthogonal to
prepress values.

These days, most photographic tools are oriented toward prepress because there
is real money in B2B. I don't really care that much about accurate color
reproduction between the real world and the print. I care about predictable
correlation between what's on my screen and the print. I'm not aghast that
tungsten lights produce warm images (thogh sometimes fluorescent lights are a
problem).

Like you I forswore printers. Casual printing would often be a multi-hour or
multi-day process because the printer demanded a new cartridge. And two days
or two weeks later I would go to print and it would demand another.

About a year and a half ago, I broke down and bought a Canon Pro 100. After
the gift card it was $99 and came with 50 13x19 sheets. I print frequently
enough that I don't get clogged nozzles. I generally print 4x6. The paper is
cheap. It uses less ink. The prints don't take much space. A few months ago, I
switched to third party ink. It might not be as good as the OEM. Refilling is
more fiddly than disposable cartridges, but it's way more under my control: no
trip to the camera store or waiting for UPS. There's a guy on Youtube.

Costco printing made me see the value of printing. But in terms of what I do,
it's like outsourcing to the lab back in the film days. The printer in my
office is like having my own darkroom. But faster, cheaper, and easier. I can
print iteratively at 10pm Sunday and into a Monday morning.

I'm thinking about adding a dye-sublimation printer: Canon Selphy. No fiddly
bits, portable, and can run off battery. Somewhat like a Polaroid in terms of
producing quick prints in the field. It costs out to around $0.30/4x6 print.
Cheaper than a B&W 120 negative.

------
franferri
Here is what I do:

Level 1 protection: Offline (only on when adding/updating) harddrive. USB Hard
disk (non ssd) for example will do.

Level 2 protection: Always on Synology NAS at home with Raid 1 between 2
drives

Level 3 protection: Google Drive plan with 100Tb.

You work only in the level 2, always available in you network

You can automate between Level 1 and 2 if you connect the external hd to the
nas and click the button to sync the photos.

You can automate between level 2 and 3 with synology software alone (in the
package manager)

I hope this simplifies your life.

~~~
madamelic
>Google Drive plan with 100Tb.

Is there a grandfather plan or are you spending ~$1k / mo to store 100TB?

It looks like the highest listed plan is $300 for 30TB.

------
brudgers
Recently, I started treating digital recording media as write once. Basically
SD cards are treated like film negatives. I shoot through to the end of an SD
card, then throw it in a shoebox. That's my first level backup. It's as
physical as a digital image can be. These days, a 64GB SD card is about the
price of a roll of slide film. They're not free. But they're not precious
enough to risk loss of data from reformatting.

The cards get copied to disks as I shoot of course. At the deep storage layer,
same strategy. Write once and archive the media when it's full. That's where
finished images go.

Write once is simpler. Not reformatting eliminates accidental reformats. It
eliminates the decision of which images/videos to save (and which to delete).
Unsalvageable images can become salvageable as my skill and knowledge improve.
Too much work becomes a few clicks.

Caveat: I don't shoot much video. If I did, it would be more expensive. But
not terribly so. And the price of physical storage media will keep going down.

Caveat {kinda, sorta}: There's incentive to continue to use relatively lower
resolution cameras to produce smaller files to save storage space.

Caveat: I can't view all the _original_ images on all devices. For me, that's
not a big deal. The best once go on social media and/or get printed.

~~~
mceachen
Most, if not all, SD cards are not a viable archive medium.

Expect bitrot within 5 years. In testing PhotoStructure's image and video
bitrot detector, I found _all_ of my older (5+ year) cards were either
unreadable or had file corruption.

~~~
brudgers
I agree. But reformatting SD card seems a less useful backup strategy. Both in
terms of accelerated bit rot and by adding human error into the mix.
Basically, reformatting is worse than filling and storing. Filling and storing
is less work. And the work it eliminates is prone to serious errors.

~~~
godot
Right, I think he's not doubting your strategy of not reformatting, but more
pointing out that the SD cards maybe shouldn't even be considered "first level
backup" because they'll probably inevitably bitrot at some point.

~~~
brudgers
Since the SD cards contain the originals, we're heading for trouble as soon as
anyone applies formal semantics to 'backup'. We could call the SD cards
"copies" but again, they contain the originals. I'm using 'backup' informally.

Concern about bitrotting originals is one reason to backup. Losing some images
is a partial disaster. Losing all of them is total. Reformatting is exactly
that. It's objectively worse than bitrot over time. It's objectively better
than not "backing up" at all. It might be less contingent than an online
solution with a credit card dependency over a period of five years.

------
jamesholden
Even finding photos or sorting and tagging can be such a chore nowadays. It's
also a privacy nightmare if you want to store photos online. God forbid you
accidentally upload/archive some photos you did not mean to or realize were in
your photos folder..

~~~
mceachen
I think what I'm building might help you! It's called PhotoStructure[1], and
it takes care of your privacy concerns by keeping your photos and videos on
hardware you own. Your data stays on your computer, where it belongs.

[1] [https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-
photostructure/](https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/)

------
elamje
Not exactly a backup, but [https://lifeboxhq.com](https://lifeboxhq.com) is
trying to make digital time capsules for files and such that persist for a
very long time.

------
duxup
Onsite Backup (Synology device) <\---> PC (active copy) <\---> Offsite Backup
(Backblaze)

It's all automatic because if backups aren't automatic there is a lot of risk.

