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As a paying customer of Google Photos, I'm starting to explore alternatives after the recent round of horror stories. Baby photos are the one thing I don't have
by akkartik 6y ago
As a paying customer of Google Photos, I'm starting to explore alternatives after the recent round of horror stories. Baby photos are the one thing I don't have backups for due to their sheer size, and they are also utterly irreplaceable.
- echelon 6y ago> I'm starting to explore alternatives Any insights? Which photo services are the best?
- mplewis 6y agoIf you already have Amazon Prime, their unlimited photo backup is great.
- PascLeRasc 6y agoIs that better? I don’t have proof for this other than the Ring camera stuff but Amazon seems much less trustworthy than Google.
- tomjen3 6y agoS3 deep archive will run you 1 usd/month for 1000 GB of baby photos. You would pay way more than that to get them back, if they were lost.
- akkartik 6y agoFor sure. I'm happy to throw money at the problem. But I want something automated on my phone that I can trust to work reliably. I'd actually pay more for a fixed feature set if it means less instability.
- axaxs 6y agoAs another mentioned, Amazon Photos is good for this. Plus they give you unlimited original resolution photo storage.
- xref 6y agoOne caveat is this is truly only for photos, videos are excluded unless you choose one of the paid plans
- starclerk 6y agoI back up my photos from my phone to Dropbox, which is automated and seems to be reliable. Dropbox also makes it easy to back up to a hard drive I have in my possession. When combined with Google Photos, it's N+2 redundancy for ~$12/mo.
- mceachen 6y agoThere are several solutions that are set-and-forget. I have beta users that report success with SyncThing and PhotoSync. I personally use Resilio Sync. They all support automated backups to storage either that you have at home (say, on a NAS), or someone else's cloud.
- quaintdev 6y agoHow about local storage?
- mceachen 6y ago> I don't have backups for due to their sheer size If you've been living in the Apple ecosystem for a while, where 1 TB on your laptop is precious, realize that both SSD and spinning rust drives have plummeted in cost over the last decade. You can get a 12TB drive on sale for $175. That's $15 per TB. If you want something mobile and convenient, 2.5" external drives are ~$100 for 4TB. If you need speedy disk, a fast, 1TB m2 NVMe SSD can be had for just $100. Really, for just $200 you can get two external drives (always have a backup) and have the peace of mind that all your photos are 1) safe, and 2) in your possession.
- akkartik 6y agoI already have all that. Like I said in the part you trimmed out: > Photos are the only things I don't have backups for due to their sheer size The bottleneck here isn't storage space. It's bandwidth and transfer time, given Android's crappy file system interface. (iOS, of course, has none.) I kept up with Google Photos backups for almost a year. But ain't nobody got time for that.
- xnx 6y agoI agree it's a hassle, and a bummer that they de-integrated Google Drive and Google Photos. I've got a reasonably functional alternative using SyncTrayzor/Syncthing.
- MikusR 6y agoInstall syncthing on your phone and use it to safely get photos out.
- akkartik 6y agoThanks, I'm trying it out now.