Ask HN: where do you backup a ton of photos?

[BadassFractal]

For years I've been dealing with the issue of wanting to backup large quantities of photos somewhere safe. I have several terabytes of them, either shot by me or passed down to me by my dad and friends.

I've been migrating from hard drive to hard drive for a long time, occasional drive failures here and there, and it's been pretty much a waste of time. I'd much rather put it up somewhere that scales infinitely, is properly redundant, and still gives me the ability to browse through the photos if I'm looking for something specific.

Dropbox is too expensive for the size I'm talking about. Google Photos tries too hard to push the G+ thing on me, which I don't care about, and Flickr offers no API to work with large sets of assets as far as I can tell.

There's Amazon's S3 and Glacier, which seem pretty reasonable for the price, and do have plenty of APIs, but as far as I can tell they don't really offer a way to nicely browse the images. Perhaps someone built a UI wrapper on top of that, wouldn't surprise me.

I can always setup a home NAS, maybe get 8TB in Raid 10, but I'm still concerned that these disks will eventually die and I'll still risk losing everything. Maybe I'm paranoid.

What are my other options? Am I missing something here? There's no way professional photographers don't deal with this issue every single day, so it must have been solved already.

[downer97]

Anywhere but "the cloud."

I desire actual control over my backups and who might have access to them. I spend money on redundant external drives, and spare parts for said drives. I keep track of the age of my drives, the degree of usage/wear-and-tear they're subjected to, their warranties, and failure rates for sister drives of same make and model purchased at the same time.

I don't worry about having a convenient interface to facilitate browsing through my backups. All I want is a bulk file system with no meta-data (no xml files, no db files). When forced to resort to restoring from backup, one is already faced with degrees of inconvenience. If the backup media is more convenient than the normal general-purpose everyday-use storage, then why is the backup media playing second banana to the day-to-day system?

[seiji → downer97]

Do you rotate your drives out to multiple secure storage facilitates? Do you have a plans against theft and fire?

You can have all the redundant copies in the world, but one earthquake won't respect your availability requirements.

[nodata → seiji]

So store the NAS in another city.

[BadassFractal → downer97]

Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. I do agree that the level of simplicity offered by a local NAS is hard to beat, especially when it comes to privacy.

[saluki]

I would recommend keeping:

1. A local backup copy on external drives.

2. Backup to crashplan (change settings so if a file is removed locally they keep the copy in the cloud).

3. Burn a copy to DVD (incrementally as they are taken off your cameras/phone) and store those offsite at your parents or a friends house.

I usually create DVDs by month for images . . . so you can track down images easier by date and then also have a best of each year on a DVD.

Over the years though a lot of photos are taken . . . at some point I expect you'll reach the age where it's physically impossible to even view all the photos you've taken . . . but it will be nice for kids/grand kids in the future to be able to browse through 75 years of grand pa and great grand pa's photos and see what he was up to . . . if the data survives through the generations . . . teach your kids about backups and passing down data . . .

[vrypan]

It's not photo-oriented and you won't be able to browse your photos on-line. But we are building a secure long-term personal digital archive at http://longaccess.com/

We would appreciate any feedback, as you are obviously someone that could use our service once (very soon) it's commercially available.

[gesman]

To backup 1TB on Soft RAID-ed fast storage on your own dedicated server (no cloud) will cost you approx $500/yr, all inclusive with no S3 pay-per-byte in-and-out bullshit. If that budget will work for you - then I could send you the link.

[avenger123]

Crashplan might be worth checking put. You still need the NAS backup, but I have found Crashplan is good for the offsite aspect of it.

[manglav]

How much would you pay for a nice UI wrapper, and the ability to designate glacier photos vs. S3 photos?

[gesman]

PS: SmugMug seems to offer something that might help you.