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Processed photos and videos: Google Photos and YouTube. As an insider I know that I can't afford to match the availability of those and having the live display

by lrem 7y ago

Processed photos and videos: Google Photos and YouTube. As an insider I know that I can't afford to match the availability of those and having the live display copy indestructible is soooo convenient. Downside: I don't think YouTube will give you back verbatim input material. Photos will, but it can be expensive. Raw media material after processing: single local HDD and a remote raid. Home directory: two local time machine HDDs and a remote raid copy of head. Unpublished code: home directory + a private git server. Published code: as unpublished + GitHub (which I assume to be indestructible too).

y4mi 7y ago
I agree that it's hard to beat the availability of Google consumer services... But that is not backup. A backup serves as a fallback if for any reason the primary source has become unavailable. In Google's case such an even can and does occur when your account gets banned because of some random event which you had hardly anything to do with or because your user was compromised. A backup let's you recover from that and if you don't have that, I hope for your sake you don't mind losing the data too much, because the previous situations happen quite frequently if you actually listen on Twitter, Reddit or whatever social network you frequent.
- lrem 7y ago
  As I wrote: Google services are the display copy. Conveniently it's overwhelmingly likely to survive for years upon years without any effort. But it can disappear, for reasons you mentioned, in which case I can recover the input media from the options in the second paragraph.
mceachen 7y ago
Google Photos is most decidedly not a viable backup for photos and videos. Google Takeout is broken or flakey, and had been for at least a year. Good luck downloading any archive before it falls with "transfer failed: bad authentication" 30 minutes into the transfer. Of 30 tarballs, only one actually completed successfully. And the images in the tarballs aren't the same bits that I uploaded (via my pixel, so it's supposed to be "original quality," not "high quality"). Pulling your files via the API results in corrupted metadata. Time and GPS location tags are stripped. YouTube videos are, by design, reencoded with very low bitrates.

by lrem 7y ago

y4mi 7y ago

I agree that it's hard to beat the availability of Google consumer services... But that is not backup. A backup serves as a fallback if for any reason the primary source has become unavailable. In Google's case such an even can and does occur when your account gets banned because of some random event which you had hardly anything to do with or because your user was compromised. A backup let's you recover from that and if you don't have that, I hope for your sake you don't mind losing the data too much, because the previous situations happen quite frequently if you actually listen on Twitter, Reddit or whatever social network you frequent.

lrem 7y ago
As I wrote: Google services are the display copy. Conveniently it's overwhelmingly likely to survive for years upon years without any effort. But it can disappear, for reasons you mentioned, in which case I can recover the input media from the options in the second paragraph.

mceachen 7y ago

Google Photos is most decidedly not a viable backup for photos and videos. Google Takeout is broken or flakey, and had been for at least a year. Good luck downloading any archive before it falls with "transfer failed: bad authentication" 30 minutes into the transfer. Of 30 tarballs, only one actually completed successfully. And the images in the tarballs aren't the same bits that I uploaded (via my pixel, so it's supposed to be "original quality," not "high quality"). Pulling your files via the API results in corrupted metadata. Time and GPS location tags are stripped. YouTube videos are, by design, reencoded with very low bitrates.