5 ms·

I gladly pay $100/year to never ever ever EVER have to hear my wife complaining about me losing the pictures of us and the kids. You can't put a price on that m

I gladly pay $100/year to never ever ever EVER have to hear my wife complaining about me losing the pictures of us and the kids. You can't put a price on that my friend. :) Same reason I pay for iCloud storage on our family account. Peace of mind. Could I wire up some rsync contraption, sure maybe - would I sleep peacefully? No.

zepolen 10y ago
Google photos is better for that.
- kw71 10y ago
  So long as Google decides to keep the service operating, maybe.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Yes, but Dropbox isn't even profitable yet.
- tonyplee 10y ago
  I have 1/2 TB of pictures kids pic, videos from cell phone, SLR etc backup to multiple HDD. If everyone put 1/2 TB or more to google, can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service.
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    > If everyone put 1/2 TB or more to google, can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? Not everyone is going to do that though (anytime soon anyway) so that's not a real concern. It's like asking when gmail first launched "okay but what if EVERYONE uses the full gigabyte?"
  - i336_ 10y ago
    I'll answer in reverse order: > Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service. This is an incredibly good point, both in terms of bandwidth considerations (particularly their ratelimiting) and in terms of products randomly disappearing with limited takeout windows. FWIW, https://get.google.com/albumarchive/<G+ https://get.google.com/albumarchive/<G+ UID> will net you takeout archives of your image albums. Incidentally this works with any Google account that doesn't have public photo access turned off, and is rather fun to play with (as is the site: search operator :D) -- > can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? YouTube used to officially report that 300 hours are uploaded per minute, back in 2014. http://tubularinsights.com/hours-minute-uploaded-youtube/ http://tubularinsights.com/hours-minute-uploaded-youtube/ says we're likely at 700hr/min now. OK. (Been wanting to do this math for a while, actually...) Let's see. This is all back-of-the-envelope and I wouldn't mind some more concrete numbers to work with! YT reencodes all videos into several formats. I'm looking at http://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA http://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA, which is 1:20:58 long. It was uploaded fairly recently so has the full complement of encodings. I see: - 5 DASH audio bitrates: 51k (27.53MB), 66k (31.93MB), and 120k (58.02MB) for clients that can decode OPUS, 89k Vorbis (46.67MB), and 132k M4A (73.16MB) - 6 DASH video sizes in both WebM/MP4 (so 12 total formats): 256x144 (43.09MB / 63.54MB); 426x240 (39.79MB / 140.34MB); 640x360 (71.80MB / 122.65MB); 854x480 (118.37MB / 266.00MB); 1280x720 (234.63MB / 548.81MB); and 1920x1080 (463.04MB / 1.05GB). (Yes, WebM is amazing compared to MP4.) - Three legacy video formats: 176x144 3GP (39.51MB), 320x180 3GP (116.05MB), 640x360 WebM (211.30MB), 640x360 MP4 (205.97MB), and 1280x720 MP4 (621.68MB). So, for this standard, 30fps 1080p video, YouTube is actually storing... 4.51GB of data. Huh! Nice. If this video is 1h20m, 1-(60/80) means I should subtract 25% from 4.51, and I get 3.38GB for one hour of video. OK. Taking that figure of 700 hours... that's 2366GB (2.31TB) per minute :) In other words YouTube needs to find disk capacity for 39.42GB of data every second. I'm not sure how to multiply by an increasing gradient with a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so I'll punt and pretend it was 700 hours/min all the way back to 2014, so the past 2 years. Quite inaccurate, but possibly still interesting: (2.31 * (1024^4)) * 12 * 365 * 2 = 22249277495024025.60 Uhh.... that's... ah. 22PB. Err, 19.76PB to be precise. This is for the boring 30fps-and-under 1080p videos out there. Not the 60fps, 2K/4K/8K (!), 360° and similar stuff, and there's an increasing pile of that being uploaded.
- ShinyCyril 10y ago
  I don't fully understand the underlying cause, so take this with a pinch of salt... but my girlfriend's father's photo collection almost got wiped out by Google Photos. After being locked out of his Samsung tablet (supposedly it set itself a lockscreen out of the blue), I checked whether it had backed his photos up on Google Photos, but nothing there... After resetting it (it seems Samsung removed the ability to reset the lockscreen password via your Google account) I assumed that the photos were lost. However upon opening the app we rejoiced when they started appearing. Shortly afterwards, the Google Photos app popped up a message stating that an upgrade was required, after which all of the photos had disappeared again. The workaround was to reset the tablet, open up Google Photos, wait until the photos had synced and then disconnect from the internet as soon as possible to prevent Google Photos from trying to update itself (the message couldn't be dismissed). My hunch was that the version of Google Photos that shipped with the tablet was very old and they have long-since updated the format for storing photos, hence why they wouldn't show up online?
  - i336_ 10y ago
    Methinks you could definitely get in touch with Google about this. Product support may well actually do what it's supposed to do... Alternatively, keep the tablet on cotton wool until you see someone mention in here they're from Google, check their profile for contact info and email them directly. Keep doing this until you get a reply back, and get them to poke your issue over to the right department. :P
    - ProAm 10y ago
      > get in touch with Google about this Ha!
  - sbov 10y ago
    Sure, but I've read a story like this about about pretty much every company. In our house we have our photos in 3 places: the device, remote backup, and local offline backup (external hard drive). 2 is easy, 3 takes a little bit of a routine.
    - 10y ago
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  But one has to make sure they subscribe to the paid plan, because Google offers free unlimited storage only if you let them resize/compress the photos. Which is something I refuse. Anyway, Dropbox wins on the OS-level integration, which also doubles as a bullshit- and hassle-free way to transfer files between your devices. But well, at this point I'm a paying customer of both Dropbox and Google because I run out of free-tier storage on both :).
  - tajen 10y ago
    My sister refuses to receives photos by Dropbox because, she says, it's less usable than WeTransfer and it looks like a virus to her. When sitting with her, I noticed: - Dropbox aggressively suggests to create a new account to recipients, - She's unknowledgable, so when a popup appears, she assumes it's mandatory. Hence she installed Dropbox without wanting it on her phone and PC and couldn't understand why so many steps are required to download a few photos. Also, "why does it try to upload all my folders ?!?" hence the spammy/virus impression. - Dropbox sends an Android notification for every upload, which is both annoying and worrying to her, because she doesn't want her private life to go online. I always assumed the mass went with Dropbox. Turns out the first example I see from that audience thinks it's a virus. Big lesson of user experience here.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I can imagine. My use patterns mostly let me avoid this, but I've seen some of the stuff you've described. It seems that any good business, in its quest to grow, will eventually start making annoying and user-hostile things. Dropbox definitely was cleaner and better in the past than it is now. It's a story I repeated by company after company - they reach peak quality, and instead of leaving things as they are, they have to "innovate" in more and more crap. I'm one of the earlier users of Dropbox, so I still have a "Public" folder with an ability to create direct links to uploaded files. They've turned this feature off for new accounts some time ago - I guess because people started using Dropbox as a CDN. Still, it's one of its most useful features for me. I use the "Public" folder almost every time I want to transfer some files people - it lets the recipient avoid all that popups and captive forms bullshit.
skuzye 10y ago
I agree. Having them take care of backups has a lot of worth in my book also
pjc50 10y ago
Funnily enough, I wrote a "one-way sync your OneDrive to external disk" tool for my wife to avoid the opposite problem: loss of data due to failures of the paid-for sync solution.

zepolen 10y ago

Google photos is better for that.

kw71 10y ago
So long as Google decides to keep the service operating, maybe.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Yes, but Dropbox isn't even profitable yet.
tonyplee 10y ago
I have 1/2 TB of pictures kids pic, videos from cell phone, SLR etc backup to multiple HDD. If everyone put 1/2 TB or more to google, can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  > If everyone put 1/2 TB or more to google, can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? Not everyone is going to do that though (anytime soon anyway) so that's not a real concern. It's like asking when gmail first launched "okay but what if EVERYONE uses the full gigabyte?"
- i336_ 10y ago
  I'll answer in reverse order: > Also need to consider how long it will take me to download back those pic once they decide to shutdown the "free" service. This is an incredibly good point, both in terms of bandwidth considerations (particularly their ratelimiting) and in terms of products randomly disappearing with limited takeout windows. FWIW, https://get.google.com/albumarchive/<G+ https://get.google.com/albumarchive/<G+ UID> will net you takeout archives of your image albums. Incidentally this works with any Google account that doesn't have public photo access turned off, and is rather fun to play with (as is the site: search operator :D) -- > can google backend really handle that, if so for how long? YouTube used to officially report that 300 hours are uploaded per minute, back in 2014. http://tubularinsights.com/hours-minute-uploaded-youtube/ http://tubularinsights.com/hours-minute-uploaded-youtube/ says we're likely at 700hr/min now. OK. (Been wanting to do this math for a while, actually...) Let's see. This is all back-of-the-envelope and I wouldn't mind some more concrete numbers to work with! YT reencodes all videos into several formats. I'm looking at http://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA http://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA, which is 1:20:58 long. It was uploaded fairly recently so has the full complement of encodings. I see: - 5 DASH audio bitrates: 51k (27.53MB), 66k (31.93MB), and 120k (58.02MB) for clients that can decode OPUS, 89k Vorbis (46.67MB), and 132k M4A (73.16MB) - 6 DASH video sizes in both WebM/MP4 (so 12 total formats): 256x144 (43.09MB / 63.54MB); 426x240 (39.79MB / 140.34MB); 640x360 (71.80MB / 122.65MB); 854x480 (118.37MB / 266.00MB); 1280x720 (234.63MB / 548.81MB); and 1920x1080 (463.04MB / 1.05GB). (Yes, WebM is amazing compared to MP4.) - Three legacy video formats: 176x144 3GP (39.51MB), 320x180 3GP (116.05MB), 640x360 WebM (211.30MB), 640x360 MP4 (205.97MB), and 1280x720 MP4 (621.68MB). So, for this standard, 30fps 1080p video, YouTube is actually storing... 4.51GB of data. Huh! Nice. If this video is 1h20m, 1-(60/80) means I should subtract 25% from 4.51, and I get 3.38GB for one hour of video. OK. Taking that figure of 700 hours... that's 2366GB (2.31TB) per minute :) In other words YouTube needs to find disk capacity for 39.42GB of data every second. I'm not sure how to multiply by an increasing gradient with a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so I'll punt and pretend it was 700 hours/min all the way back to 2014, so the past 2 years. Quite inaccurate, but possibly still interesting: (2.31 * (1024^4)) * 12 * 365 * 2 = 22249277495024025.60 Uhh.... that's... ah. 22PB. Err, 19.76PB to be precise. This is for the boring 30fps-and-under 1080p videos out there. Not the 60fps, 2K/4K/8K (!), 360° and similar stuff, and there's an increasing pile of that being uploaded.
ShinyCyril 10y ago
I don't fully understand the underlying cause, so take this with a pinch of salt... but my girlfriend's father's photo collection almost got wiped out by Google Photos. After being locked out of his Samsung tablet (supposedly it set itself a lockscreen out of the blue), I checked whether it had backed his photos up on Google Photos, but nothing there... After resetting it (it seems Samsung removed the ability to reset the lockscreen password via your Google account) I assumed that the photos were lost. However upon opening the app we rejoiced when they started appearing. Shortly afterwards, the Google Photos app popped up a message stating that an upgrade was required, after which all of the photos had disappeared again. The workaround was to reset the tablet, open up Google Photos, wait until the photos had synced and then disconnect from the internet as soon as possible to prevent Google Photos from trying to update itself (the message couldn't be dismissed). My hunch was that the version of Google Photos that shipped with the tablet was very old and they have long-since updated the format for storing photos, hence why they wouldn't show up online?
- i336_ 10y ago
  Methinks you could definitely get in touch with Google about this. Product support may well actually do what it's supposed to do... Alternatively, keep the tablet on cotton wool until you see someone mention in here they're from Google, check their profile for contact info and email them directly. Keep doing this until you get a reply back, and get them to poke your issue over to the right department. :P
  - ProAm 10y ago
    > get in touch with Google about this Ha!
- sbov 10y ago
  Sure, but I've read a story like this about about pretty much every company. In our house we have our photos in 3 places: the device, remote backup, and local offline backup (external hard drive). 2 is easy, 3 takes a little bit of a routine.
  - 10y ago
TeMPOraL 10y ago
But one has to make sure they subscribe to the paid plan, because Google offers free unlimited storage only if you let them resize/compress the photos. Which is something I refuse. Anyway, Dropbox wins on the OS-level integration, which also doubles as a bullshit- and hassle-free way to transfer files between your devices. But well, at this point I'm a paying customer of both Dropbox and Google because I run out of free-tier storage on both :).
- tajen 10y ago
  My sister refuses to receives photos by Dropbox because, she says, it's less usable than WeTransfer and it looks like a virus to her. When sitting with her, I noticed: - Dropbox aggressively suggests to create a new account to recipients, - She's unknowledgable, so when a popup appears, she assumes it's mandatory. Hence she installed Dropbox without wanting it on her phone and PC and couldn't understand why so many steps are required to download a few photos. Also, "why does it try to upload all my folders ?!?" hence the spammy/virus impression. - Dropbox sends an Android notification for every upload, which is both annoying and worrying to her, because she doesn't want her private life to go online. I always assumed the mass went with Dropbox. Turns out the first example I see from that audience thinks it's a virus. Big lesson of user experience here.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I can imagine. My use patterns mostly let me avoid this, but I've seen some of the stuff you've described. It seems that any good business, in its quest to grow, will eventually start making annoying and user-hostile things. Dropbox definitely was cleaner and better in the past than it is now. It's a story I repeated by company after company - they reach peak quality, and instead of leaving things as they are, they have to "innovate" in more and more crap. I'm one of the earlier users of Dropbox, so I still have a "Public" folder with an ability to create direct links to uploaded files. They've turned this feature off for new accounts some time ago - I guess because people started using Dropbox as a CDN. Still, it's one of its most useful features for me. I use the "Public" folder almost every time I want to transfer some files people - it lets the recipient avoid all that popups and captive forms bullshit.

skuzye 10y ago

I agree. Having them take care of backups has a lot of worth in my book also

pjc50 10y ago

Funnily enough, I wrote a "one-way sync your OneDrive to external disk" tool for my wife to avoid the opposite problem: loss of data due to failures of the paid-for sync solution.