
Ask HN: What's the current least bad solution for storing personal photos? - sgdesign
I was all ready to switch all my photos to Everpix. But after its well-publicized shut down, I&#x27;m now a little hesitant to trust that kind of service.<p>Dropbox seems like they&#x27;re making a play for photo storage, but I&#x27;m not sure they&#x27;re quite there yet. And I guess there&#x27;s also services like Google Drive or iCloud, but these always seemed opaque and poorly designed to me.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m curious to know what people use. I&#x27;ve got 50GB of photos sitting on my hard drive and I need to do something about it!
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tonteldoos
Do you need them online for any particular reason? At 50GB, I'm assuming it's
all your raw camera data, so obviously not all of it needs to be shared with
friends?

If so, buy yourself a small NAS with two 500GB or 1TB drives in it (it'll cost
you less than $200), and configure them as RAID-0. This will give you
redundancy (not backup), and availability on your network. Get another 500GB
or 1TB portable drive, and backup your NAS to that once a week, or once a
month, depending on how often you add photos. Ideally store this drive
offsite, or in a safe or similar, because this is your backup drive. Most NAS
drives will also allow you to share the content, but due to security concerns
I would probably not recommend that. If you need access to them away from
home, setup a machine with SSH access to your home network, and access the
drive that way via VPN (although this is a completely different topic).

Generally, with technology being cheap, I'm anti storing any valuable personal
data in the cloud. If you do need or want to share some of the photos, find a
service that allows that (there are plenty), but definitely don't use it as
your primary storage or backup service.

Note that the above is pretty much my setup, and it's been serving me well for
a few years now (with a similar amount/size of photos).

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joeclark77
Dropbox just upped the "Pro" account from 100GB to 1000GB. That's more than
enough to store all the pictures you'll take in the next few decades. The
benefit of something like Dropbox or its various copycats is that the file is
stored on _each of your computers_ as well as being stored in the cloud. So
you really aren't putting all your eggs in one basket either locally or
remotely.

But you should also curate and print out some of your photos. This was
discussed on HN just a couple of weeks ago:
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8129457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8129457)).
The linked article
([http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2014/08/prints.html](http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2014/08/prints.html))
reminds us that we're living in a "digital dark age" that's likely to leave
few traces in history. Furthermore, even if your great-grandchildren _could_
read the photo files you store today, do you really expect them to look at all
of them?

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orky56
Flickr is actually not a bad option. It's been around the longest and Yahoo is
actually finally putting some weight behind it. Compared to general file
storage services like Dropbox, Flickr offers 1 TB of space. You don't have to
worry about hitting the ceiling on limits. Also, although many people
associate Flickr with professional & public photos, it is very easy to make
pictures private by default.

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naskwo
Use [https://www.famipix.com](https://www.famipix.com) Disclaimer: I founded
this site in 2005, and I still run it today. You can also order very high
quality prints, for archival backups.

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skidoo
I have been using MEGA since its launch, and have been quite happy with the
service.

[https://mega.co.nz/#fm](https://mega.co.nz/#fm)

~~~
kalagan
Isn't it a bit dodgy? I would be afraid for my photos to disappear without
notice.

~~~
mkal_tsr
_Any_ web service could disappear without notice. Never trust a
company/service to have your back. They enable convenience, not security /
peace-of-mind.

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mkal_tsr
Pre-encrypt -> Amazon S3. Easy-peasy.

