3 ms·
Ask HN: How do you backup your photos?
I'm struggling with finding a solid method/process for backing up my photos, which for me function as physical manifestations and triggers of memories. Do you have a robust approach for that, which worked for you over decades and/or at least a few EOLed technologies?
Some core aspects I have trouble planning over:
- photos have lifetime longer than that of most 3rd party (web)services I've known
- seemingly even of most hardware storage technologies... E.g. tapes & diskettes no longer in use; cdroms less and less popular; hdd connectivity standards change (scsi, pci, usb, sata, whatever...)
- hardware storages fail - and sneaky silently if not checked periodically!
- fairly big volumes - easily GBs even for casual photographer or just a passive photo subject
- 3rd party services require passwords, which again bring another can of management problems (balancing accessibility vs.risk of losing)
- at the same time, the very idea of photos as memories asks for ease of reviewing/browsing old ones
Do you have some kind of periodic (yearly?) schedule of reviewing available options, testing readability of existing copies and potentially migrating/copying stuff to new venues? Did you build an awesome rube-goldberg machine of Perl scripts to automate it and sleep calmly? Or did you maybe find the silver bullet of a magic everlasting solution?
How do you manage how many copies a photo has on various media?
Did you maybe find out that works best for you is falling back to prints and old-school physical albums?
As a side note: nice to have if the solution would work for other types of contents too (texts, html, videos - general backup?), but my main and most pressing concern are purely photos; to stay super focused, jpegs-only is acceptable.
I'm desperate for a good solution I could feel I can trust.
- Tade0 9y agoI guess what you could do is search among storage manufacturers who offer products for the industry, not only consumers. Samsung has a line of SSDs designed for reliability and they fared well in tests: http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim... There's also a much less known company named GOODRAM which is one of the very few such companies having their only facilities within EU borders. I have a few of their products and some of them come with a lifetime warranty.
- flojo 9y agoI use the tool syncthing. That syncs all my photos on my home media server with my workstation in the office. Its like an off site backup.
- brudgers 9y agoI don't use it, but I think the most reliable method for the end user is to shoot film and keep the negatives. Short of a fire, a film negative for modern film is pretty robust. When push comes to shove, hardware is often a useful abstraction and shoebox filing solves 90% of all filing needs with very little effort. Good luck.