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My friend and I built https://pixaver.com https://pixaver.com. It doesn’t address all of the points you note here, but it does offer some piece of mind if we ge

My friend and I built https://pixaver.com https://pixaver.com. It doesn’t address all of the points you note here, but it does offer some piece of mind if we get locked out of Google Photos.

red0point 5y ago
Congrats on building such a nice tool! I‘d gladly pay for something self-hosted, or some tool that allows me to download it on my own hardware. I don‘t want to solve the problem by A) paying even more money every month, much less even more than for Google Drive & Photos storage itself! B) uploading my personal photos to a completely untrusted provider (at least I can trust Google to some degree to not leak my photos to any stranger on the internet).
- karjaluoto 5y ago
  Those are fair points and thoughts I’d probably have myself. I’m not trying to sell you on this, but here are my responses to your two notes. The first is that we know it’s more expensive than Google Photos storage. That’s in part so that we can actually fund development. As a small operation we can’t run it as a loss-leader or make up revenue from other channels like Google could. The second is that we’ve been somewhat vetted through Google’s application process. We’ve also been building things for the web for 20+ years. Admittedly, trust is hard to earn from folks you don’t know, but we are decent people. To be honest, Pixaver probably isn’t right for most folks on HN as most here are pretty technical. (I’m just a daily reader here, and spotted this thread, so I thought I’d share it.) We’ve geared this more for people like my mom who don’t want to set up a local hard drive or do anything even remotely technical. For someone like her, it’s a couple of clicks to having a second backup without needing to do anything additional. :-)
shepherdjerred 5y ago
Do you have any plans to support backups of other Google content, e.g. gmail?
- karjaluoto 5y ago
  We’ve thought about it, but I think it’ll be a while before we’re able to get to that. We also run two other products, and we’re just two people. So, we’re already spread a bit thin.
  - shepherdjerred 5y ago
    Let me know if that happens! I'd love an easy way to make sure my data is safe in the event Google randomly bans me :) I'll check out Pixaver soon to see if it'd work as a backup for my Google Photos!
    - karjaluoto 5y ago
      Nice! If you do try it, please let us know how the experience goes for you. I think the onboarding process is a bit intimidating given the (necessary, yet lengthy) permissions we request. I’ll mention that you’d be interested in more options around backups to @shelkie. Like I said, I don’t think we can make this happen now, but it’s good to have a sense for what others might find useful.
      - shepherdjerred 5y ago
        Hi! I just tried it out and signed up for the 25gb plan. It was incredibly easy. I really appreciate that your prices are reasonable. Just curious -- where are photos stored for Pixaver? Are you using cloud storage?
        karjaluoto 5y ago
        Awesome—thanks for signing up! If you run into any issues, do let us know. :-) We’re using Wasabi for cloud storage. So far it has worked pretty well for this project.

My friend and I built https://pixaver.com https://pixaver.com. It doesn’t address all of the points you note here, but it does offer some piece of mind if we get locked out of Google Photos.

red0point 5y ago

Congrats on building such a nice tool! I‘d gladly pay for something self-hosted, or some tool that allows me to download it on my own hardware. I don‘t want to solve the problem by A) paying even more money every month, much less even more than for Google Drive & Photos storage itself! B) uploading my personal photos to a completely untrusted provider (at least I can trust Google to some degree to not leak my photos to any stranger on the internet).

karjaluoto 5y ago
Those are fair points and thoughts I’d probably have myself. I’m not trying to sell you on this, but here are my responses to your two notes. The first is that we know it’s more expensive than Google Photos storage. That’s in part so that we can actually fund development. As a small operation we can’t run it as a loss-leader or make up revenue from other channels like Google could. The second is that we’ve been somewhat vetted through Google’s application process. We’ve also been building things for the web for 20+ years. Admittedly, trust is hard to earn from folks you don’t know, but we are decent people. To be honest, Pixaver probably isn’t right for most folks on HN as most here are pretty technical. (I’m just a daily reader here, and spotted this thread, so I thought I’d share it.) We’ve geared this more for people like my mom who don’t want to set up a local hard drive or do anything even remotely technical. For someone like her, it’s a couple of clicks to having a second backup without needing to do anything additional. :-)

shepherdjerred 5y ago

Do you have any plans to support backups of other Google content, e.g. gmail?

karjaluoto 5y ago
We’ve thought about it, but I think it’ll be a while before we’re able to get to that. We also run two other products, and we’re just two people. So, we’re already spread a bit thin.
- shepherdjerred 5y ago
  Let me know if that happens! I'd love an easy way to make sure my data is safe in the event Google randomly bans me :) I'll check out Pixaver soon to see if it'd work as a backup for my Google Photos!
  - karjaluoto 5y ago
    Nice! If you do try it, please let us know how the experience goes for you. I think the onboarding process is a bit intimidating given the (necessary, yet lengthy) permissions we request. I’ll mention that you’d be interested in more options around backups to @shelkie. Like I said, I don’t think we can make this happen now, but it’s good to have a sense for what others might find useful.
    - shepherdjerred 5y ago
      Hi! I just tried it out and signed up for the 25gb plan. It was incredibly easy. I really appreciate that your prices are reasonable. Just curious -- where are photos stored for Pixaver? Are you using cloud storage?
      - karjaluoto 5y ago
        Awesome—thanks for signing up! If you run into any issues, do let us know. :-) We’re using Wasabi for cloud storage. So far it has worked pretty well for this project.