What do people do with thier pictures? (modern life, media and backing up)

7 points by bbyford 1 year ago | 23 comments

It struck me when chatting with my mother in-law that whether you're on an Android or iOS phone you may still be pushed into purcahsing more sych storage to keep your photos/videos backedup or simply give yourself more space...

For years now (as an iOS and Mac user) I've used Image Capture to download and free up my photos from my phone and backing them up on a RAID harddrive.... I'm probably not the norm here... So what do people do to keep media, free up space and make it easy (thinking of the older generation)... ideally without paying for the privilege?

al_borland 1 year ago |

I’m lazy, so I pay $2.99/month to not think about it. All my photos I’ve taken in the last 25 years are available on my phone and laptop.

That said, I do have some minor worries about something going wrong down the line. I’ve been thinking I should export everything and back it up to my NAS, and keep up on that going forward. But that keeps becoming a “tomorrow” task. There is probably a way to automate this with no cost, but I haven’t been bothered to try and look into it.

Storage management and backups are hard for the average user. It’s the #1 issue I deal with for both my mom and sister. It requires regular action on their part to get things off the phone, if they don’t want to pay, and backups also require a regular action of plugging in an external drive (because they keep unplugging it and don’t want to pay for cloud backup). I have considered paying the $2.99 for them, just so I don’t have to get the call of them crying because they think they lost all their pictures. The last time I got one of those calls it just started with my sister crying for a full minute, I was bracing to hear that one of my parents just died, and it was a picture backup issue, because her phone wouldn’t charge anymore and she thought she was going to lose all her kids baby pictures. I don’t know how it isn’t worth $2.99 to not have that feeling, if someone is unwilling or unable to do the regular maintenance to keep things backed up and storage free.

LUmBULtERA 1 year ago | |

Same - my partner and I pay the $2.99 with Apple and we'll probably pay more for the larger size when needed. It's not just about being "lazy" per se. Since buying a house and having a baby, life feels so complex and we can only focus on so many things. With the tiny amount of time left over after doing the rest of the necessities of life, do I really want to spend that time setting up and maintaining some fancy NAS scheme?

nicbou 1 year ago | |

What happens if your account gets banned without warning or chance of appeal? I don't know about Apple, but with Google it's a serious problem.

al_borland 1 year ago | | |

Those kind of things, or just issues/bugs, that make me want to have a 2nd backup that I control.

confusedalex 1 year ago |

I selfhost my photos with immich[1]. The drives are mirrored via zfs and get backuped daily to borgbase[2] with restic[3]

[1] https://immich.app/

[2] https://www.borgbase.com/

[3] https://restic.net/

bbyford 1 year ago | |

wowza! nice. I wonder what the version of that for a granny is?!

nicbou 1 year ago |

I use Google Photos because it's convenient and makes sharing with friends really easy.

On top of that, I use Syncthing to keep photos synchronised across multiple devices that I fully own. I don't want to lose all of my photos because Google gets more evil or indifferent than it already is. It's already really hard to download all your photos.

It works really well, but it's a bit of a hassle to set up.

knckl 1 year ago |

I should start with the fact that a) I am paranoid about data. b) I don't trust any of the public cloud providers. Not in the sense to keep all my data with any of them and not having a backup copy elsewhere.

At the center of my set up is a Synology NAS (2x 8TB RAID 1). I use it as a personal "google drive" via the Synology Drive app.

The Synology Drive app is installed on my phone (as well as on my wife's) and is automagically and continuously backing up all of our photos and videos to the NAS.

I use Office 365 for email. The NAS is backing up everything from O365 nightly.

We have all of our important docs scanned and stored in the NAS. All my self-hosted apps (Gitea, Bitwarden, Jenkins, etc) are backing up nightly to the NAS.

All data from the NAS is then backed up to three locations:

1. Wasabi (S3-like storage) 2. Hetzner Storage Box (via rsync) 3. Once a year back up to an external HDD

The data is client-side encrypted before it leaves the NAS to any of the backup targets.

The NAS acts as a DHCP and DNS server at home, which is not related to backups, but still super cool to have everything in one box.

knckl 1 year ago | |

I forgot to say that I also pay for 2TB iCloud storage so I don't have to remove any of my photos from iCloud. I do actually enjoy iCloud, but I don't trust them as sole owners of my data.

bbyford 1 year ago | | |

Crikey! Nice setup. Feel like I'm more aligned with you on this one where I don't want to put my data in the hands of someone who can both use it and lose it... I've got my NAS in the office but might look into a setup for the whole family

deafpolygon 1 year ago | |

How much does all that cost you?

knckl 1 year ago | | |

There is an upfront cost for the NAS and the hard disks which will vary depending on where you live.

NAS (Synology DS723+) - £450 1x 8TB Iron Wolf - £161 (£322 for RAID 1)

Wasabi Sys charges me $6.99 per TB (I pay around $8 for my critical data only) Hetzner Storage Box is ~£11 per 5 TB (I backup my critical + non critical data here)

So after the initial cost of the NAS and the drives, I spend £18 a month for backup storage.

I am not including the electricity cost because the NAS is pretty efficient. (21 watts during data access)

tcbawo 1 year ago |

I use Google Photo because it’s easy. However, the rate of recording has outpaced my ability to stay organized. I appreciate the memory highlights and throwbacks, but I think we are missing out on leveraging technology in this space. The lack of openness, portability, and permanence is disheartening.

Digital photos have an incredible opportunity to attach context to memories — not just time and place, but feelings and emotions. But, so far, this has been severely lacking. Imagine parents or grandparents being able to attach stories about a childhood event, or to annotate a travel journal. If such things are possible today, what are the chances they will be available and discoverable in twenty or fifty years?

Not many people consider the discoverability that a book of old photo prints offers over a digital library. To have a universal and timeless reach, there needs to be more openness and interoperability.

solardev 1 year ago |

I pay for additional Google storage because it works, it's easy, it's integrated, and, it's never failed. If you move your mother-in-law to some homebrewed DIY system, it will prob fail within a few years or when she upgrades her phone, and she'll be pissed she lost some of her precious pictures and wished she just kept paying instead.

The cost of just paying iCloud or Gdrive is so minimal (like $3-$10/mo?) that it's well worth it for regular users just for the peace of mind. Nothing you come up with at home will be anywhere as easy to use, or as reliable over the years, or work so seamlessly across all their devices, or make simple edits possible and sharing with their friends easy.

JohnFen 1 year ago |

I have my phone store all my photos (and other media) on an SD card by default, then periodically remove the card and copy all the contents onto a desktop machine (where it then gets synced to my NAS), then erase the card and put it back in the phone.

runjake 1 year ago |

I use iCloud Photo Library which automagically handles local storage.

Every few years, I get really paranoid about losing photos and videos, so I download the tool du jour to mass download my entire library onto a spare hard drive.

petabyt 1 year ago |

If it isn't on a SD card, then it's backed up on an old hard drive. I have a SATA to USB adapter I use to transfer data. For my phone photos I probably only have a few hundred from the past 6 years. I delete most of them. Most of my pictures are taken on 'real' cameras.

mikewarot 1 year ago |

I pay $7/month to backup my machine with BackBlaze. I've learned the hard way to turn off the default exclusions for video files. 8(

I download things from the phone to my PC periodically, so I don't have to worry about those photos either.

I've got multiple copies, including a lot of things on old DVD-Rs.

brudgers 1 year ago |

If I care about it, I print it and put the print in a box. Good luck.

bbyford 1 year ago | |

HA! unfortunately its not the 90s anymore :)

brudgers 1 year ago | | |

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

You can bet on today’s version of ADAT and Zip Disks. Digital is temporary.