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Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

319 points by vocatan 4y ago

vocatan 4y ago
Pop goes the photo cache, all my family photos mysteriously vanish into the depths of Amazon Photos
- prox 4y ago
  Is that your only backup? Because precious photos need more than one (like any backup regime really) Still it sucks and it shouldn’t happen, hopefully it’s just a reporting error in the app.
  - temp2022account 4y ago
    Sharing my family-photo-backup system: - Synology NAS is accessible on LAN & phones sync photos when at home - Nightly rsync from internal NAS storage to 1 external (non-raid) hard drive The nightly rsync does not delete files, so the external hard drive is pretty close to an off-site backup even though it's still attached. The only better thing I've thought of doing is mounting it ro after backups + re-mounting before backups. At the end of the day we get 3 copies of data: the photo on your phone, the photo on the shared NAS, and the photo on an external hard drive that spends 99% of its life spun down.
    - aftbit 4y ago
      IMO the biggest remaining risk to this is a house fire at night while you are at home. You wake up to alarms and smoke and run out the door without your phone. All three copies of your photos will burn at once. This is where an additional off-site would be valuable. That might be a second external hard drive that you store off-site and re-sync every few months, or maybe an encrypted cloud backup using restic.
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        It’s pretty easy to set the Synology to upload to a cloud provider for a folder or file share. It has alerts and all sorts.
        prox 4y ago
        Could you do a swap with a friend/colleague? So upload to their NAS and vice versa.
        lostlogin 4y ago
        For sure. I just trust Backblaze more.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  I'm hoping that it's just a stale cache or microservice that hit an issue building its view of the metadata or something. They use S3 to store your data (according to this blog[0]) so my fingers are crossed that the data is still there, they just need to get an engineer onto it. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-amazon-s3-intelligent-tiering-to-significantly-reduce-storage-costs/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-...
gdelfino01 4y ago
I love my Synology NAS. It handles photos great: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/photos https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/photos
- madethemcry 4y ago
  Me too! I don't trust to open my network to the internet though. So I've created a VPN to connect with my ubiquity network from mobile. Sadly, I can't share photos with other folks or allow my family to participate easily. I'm a layman in terms of networking. I always wonder how people can sleep if they open their home network. In this case either by using QuickConnect or forward ports and access the machine through a custom domain secured by TLS. I mean that would be perfect but I just can't convince me to take that burden of maintaining that open door into my network. I've read about creating sub networks with the power of ubiquiti (or any other router), but I will never trust anything I configure there either because I can't confirm it's secure. So I'm stuck with Google Photos additionally to Synology Photos because of the convenience of sharing.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    My solution is to not open it. Use the cloud for browsing, use the home machine to copy the files down. You rarely need to browse on the home machine, it's really just there if the cloud provider ditches you.
- akho 4y ago
  I own a Synology NAS, and now believe that it would have been easier to just set up a computer for the tasks I use it for. There are just too many cases where the solution is to use a container (and the clumsy web interfaces for reverse proxying &c), and if I end up SSHing into it too much, I prefer to have a more controllable environment. It does fit some workflows very well though, you just have to assess if your needs over the next few years fit their business intentions.
  - avsteele 4y ago
    Synology has an app which will automatically back up your photos to the NAS/server (only when on WiFi). I haven't been able to find an alternative to this on Android, have you? (photosync looks good but seems to only work for iOS last I checked).
tecleandor 4y ago
I don't know if it's due to one of those weird GDPR blocking rules (I'm in Europe) but amazonforum.com doesn't let me connect. It just drops my connection: http https://www.amazonforum.com http: LogLevel.ERROR: ConnectionError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='www.amazonforum.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: / (Caused by NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.HTTPSConnection object at 0x10b551e10>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 61] Connection refused')) while doing a GET request to URL: https://www.amazonforum.com/ But if I connect indirectly, like through archive.is, it works: https://archive.is/wip/5MK8A https://archive.is/wip/5MK8A
- danielbln 4y ago
  Not GDPR related, as I can see it from central Europe.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Had a similar problem but it's because Pihole is resolving the domain to 0.0.0.0 here. Through one of my servers in France it seems to work just fine.
  - weare138 4y ago
    I was having the same issue. Disabling Pihole fixed it.
- KomoD 4y ago
  > I don't know if it's due to one of those weird GDPR blocking rules (I'm in Europe) but amazonforum.com doesn't let me connect. It's not, I'm in EU as well, can connect without any issues
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    Those blocks are tiresome. Like the eu is going to go after the eg alabama times or other small sites. I just vpn to usa and send them an email. Google etc...easy meat for gdpr, but for small site - why are you tracking me anyway?
paddez 4y ago
As a slight aside - I was surprised to learn that Amazon Photos (if you have Prime) includes RAW camera formats as valid photos for the purposes of their unlimited storage offer. I've taken to essentially backing up all my RAWs to Amazon Photos - even the ones I would typically discard.
- plagiarist 4y ago
  I also. I don't know why they would offer that as part of their base Prime service when no competitors seem to. The upsell for printing doesn't seem appealing to the type of person who would be storing RAWs.
akho 4y ago
Sorry for your loss. (here I was hoping that the Docker thing filled the surprised Pikachu face quota for the week’s frontpage)
dschuetz 4y ago
No kidding, huh
kmfrk 4y ago
How fast are Backblaze transfer speeds these days? I wasn't a huge fan of the client, but running something third party like Arq[1] felt like a bad workaround. [1]: https://www.arqbackup.com https://www.arqbackup.com
- Daedren 4y ago
  The Backblaze client's for Backblaze Personal Backup, while Arq and other third-party clients and APIs are for Backblaze B2, no?
- gilrain 4y ago
  restic backing up to B2 works very well for me, and it’s really cheap. The restores I’ve tried so far have been acceptably fast, albeit in the gigabyte rather than terabyte range.
quaintdev 4y ago
Use Immich OP: https://github.com/immich-app/immich https://github.com/immich-app/immich
- akho 4y ago
  At least they warn you to “not use the app as the only way to store your photos and videos!”
wyldfire 4y ago
I thought I had received an email from Amazon a few months ago telling me that my storage on Amazon Drive was going away. Pretty frustrating any time a service like this just goes poof. EDIT: I misremembered the details, actually the email says: > Beginning December 31, 2023, files stored on Amazon Drive will no longer be available to customers. We will continue to support Amazon Photos and ensure customers can safely back up, share, and organize photos and videos with the Amazon Photos service.
- simonh 4y ago
  >files stored on Amazon Drive will no longer be available to customers That's an interesting choice of phrasing they're using.
ho_schi 4y ago
Sounds unfortunate. Hopefully just an error or the service can replace it by a snapshot. No local backup on a drive or memory-card? Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network. The cloud is the server of someone else and not a backup.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  God you'd hope that Amazon is using S3 versioning (they apparently use S3 as the backend storage, because, well, yeah, you would. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-amazon-s3-intelligent-tiering-to-significantly-reduce-storage-costs/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-... )
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network. The cloud is the server of someone else and not a backup. That's common knowledge among tech people but blaming the victim is not the solution here. These services are marketed as safe, reliable, and not needing backups (in fact sometimes they make it difficult to take backups, even more so for a non-technical user). Maybe the regulation should be changed that any consumer-grade storage service either needs to provide adequate SLAs & compensation, or have to advertise in bold and prominent font (at least as prominent as their selling points) "WE MAY EAT YOUR DATA AT ANY TIME, PLAN ACCORDINGLY".
  - luckylion 4y ago
    Nobody is blaming the victim, they're saying that you should have a backup outside of your cloud provider. I don't think people care enough about SLAs to pay a premium, until something happens to their data. But by then it's too late. The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately?
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      > The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately? The warning served its purpose quite well though - the majority of people including smokers concede that smoking is harmful. If they are still smoking despite that, it's on them. The same cannot be said of cloud services. Very few people outside of tech think that the cloud can fail (whether technical failure or just randomly ban you for potential unspecified violation of ToS), so the same kinds of warnings would be useful to spread awareness.
stepri 4y ago
This is just a reminder to take a backup of your cloud photos and store it locally (or other cloud provider). For example, with Google Takeout you can get a ZIP file with all your photos and videos from Google Photos.
- ALLTaken 4y ago
  For iCloud, would just copying images from iCloud to the backup media be enough?
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Local photo library is a folder, disguised as a package. One of the folders store all the originals on the device. Copy that folder, and you're good to go. You can also get the full folder hierarchy, if you wish.
    - yardstick 4y ago
      If you enable iCloud for the photo library, and even if you select store originals, I have found that Photos still offloads some pictures. It’s just not guaranteed. I really wish Apple had a complete export button, similar to google takeout. Or at least a good CLI tool to get the original images one by one. Fwiw my library is ~200k files and close to a TB.
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        Agreed. I rsync images out of Apple’s weird file structure that’s in the bundle. It’s horrible, but with ‘download originals’ enabled it works well. It’s particularly frustrating with large libraries as they occupy nearly all an SSD. For this reason I do it all on a VM that’s on a Synology.
  - mleo 4y ago
    You can use privacy.apple.com to request a copy of all photos and other digital data. It will send emails with download links when bundled.
lordnacho 4y ago
This is the main reason I have a NUC sitting at home. It copies my family photos from the cloud and that's all it does.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
harry8 4y ago
1.5 Terabytes? (Assuming 6Mb/photo which is what I'm getting from an old nikon in raw format, dunno what everyone else is using - enlighten me please if necessary). Less than USD$50 for a 2TB disk. So buy 3, post one to a family member when its full. Double the price it for SSD? How much Amazon Photos storage do you get for $150? Ok for this guy, none, and I get connection refused from the link above so I got no details. But assuming it worked as advertised how much would you get?
- plagiarist 4y ago
  Nikon RAWs are more like 50 Mb on their current cameras. Amazon offers unlimited photo storage with Prime. I agree they should also have their own physical backup if the photos are important, even at ~10x the storage requirements you estimate, but I'd also say any complaints about Amazon losing their photos are valid.
  - harry8 4y ago
    oh, ok so prime sub is about $50/yr but you get other things and it seems popular. And 15 Tb is the go. Can you encrypt them or do they require to be able to view your photos so not just bytes on disk? >any complaints about Amazon losing their photos are valid. Like crossing the road, being right doesn't help. :(
    - fullstop 4y ago
      Prime is $139/yr for non-students in the USA, at least.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Data point: I have 7T of "photo data". I think some proportion of that is video, but probably no more than 10%. I am quite old and it does include scans of all the film images I've taken since birth, and all of one side of my family's film media scanned, and backups of all the cell phone images from family members' devices. From memory however most of the data comes from digital-era DSLR images which can be 30-40M each. None of this data is stored in a FAANG company's DC.
elzbardico 4y ago
After a scare of being temporarily unable to recover my account on Flickr (later resolved), I got into the habit of printing my significant photos in a shop and storing them in a box in a cool and dry place. Of course, I also have local backups.
vocatan 4y ago
Just to add context - I do have backups, but they're spread across a myriad of different hard drives. I had used Amazon Photos to consolidate, and benefit from the facial recognition to be able to quickly locate pictures of family members quickly. I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. Thanks for the comments!
- capableweb 4y ago
  > I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. I'm also looking for something FOSS that can do basic face recognition + maybe even more, but last time I checked DigiKam's detection didn't work so well, or maybe I got spoiled by the detection in Google Photos. If you do give it a go, would be nice if you reported back on your experience :)
  - komali2 4y ago
    FOSS photo software with face recognition (note that some of this is off-premise face recognition, sometimes requiring an API key you get on your own) https://damselfly.info https://damselfly.info https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos https://photoview.github.io/ https://photoview.github.io/ I may have missed some: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#photo-and-video-galleries https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho...
    - capableweb 4y ago
      What I found in my previous search is that either they're really good at managing large collections of photos, or they're really good at doing various AI/recognition, but none of what I've found have been good at both. Hence my interest in DigiKam as their management features for large collections is second to none.
      - CWuestefeld 4y ago
        Isn't that OK? You should be able to find some reasonable workflow around using the recognizer to tag the photo in its EXIF/IPTC metadata, and then load that into the organizer.
eddieroger 4y ago
Lots of reminders to make backups and alternatives offered, but I think it's fair to expect something from Amazon here since Photos, being a Prime benefit, is a paid service, which should come with a reasonable expectation of stability. It's a shame Amazon doesn't have an easier way to find formal support.
ppetty 4y ago
Does anyone know if iCloud (photos) storage is AWS S3? Curious if using both iCloud & Amazon Photos is a decent redundant backup plan in addition to a local copy. Or if I have iCloud & Prime, why not? (I also use Backblaze.)
- timvisee 4y ago
  I believe iCloud uses Google's cloud as storage backend.
- vdfs 4y ago
  What if a strong solar EMP wipe all storages on earth? you need redundancy on at least two other planets (I would suggest the moon but it's close to earth)
- wenyuanyu 4y ago
  I think Apple uses GCP as well. A photo is probably replicated twice across AWS and GCP by Apple, and AWS and GCP will then replicate it at least 5 times on their own side onto different racks or even AZ.
flykespice 4y ago
That is why always you should synchronize your cloud with a local backup storage, always remain skeptical on cloud-backed storage as you are relying on someone else keeping it up (it can go anytime). Cloud storage is just as volatile as your physical storage breaking or getting lost.
komali2 4y ago
That super sucks. Stories like this (but about Google Photos) led to me setting up the following backup strategy. 1. First, all photos are on a fat external harddrive connected to a homelab server. When I come home with photos, I dump them onto this (TODO to find a way to automatically copy them into the proper spot off the camera upon the camera being plugged in, or a different spot if the gopro is plugged in) 2. Once a day, these are rsynced to a separate set of harddrives, which serve self hosted photo software I use (similar functionality to google photos. Looking for a replacement that lets me create arbitrary albums of photos, and then create web pages pointing to those arbitrary albums, that's FOSS. Currently evaluating photoview and librephotos) 3. Once a day, all photos are backed up to a backblaze b2 bucket using duplicati. with several previous versions also kept. 4. Once a year, a fucknormous external drive is purchased, all photos dumped onto it, and mailed to my parent's house, where they put it into a firebox. 5. Oh, and all my photos are also uploaded to google photos, because why not I'm very much a scrub when it comes to sysadmin tasks and was able to set up all of the above with about... I don't know, no more than 100 hours of effort I'm sure, probably less. I recommend at least looking into consumer backup services like the one by backblaze!
twawaaay 4y ago
And people laugh when they hear about my USB HDD docking station and a fleet of 3.5" HDDs backup setup....
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  3.5" HDDs? Aww, I got all excited because I read that as 3.5" FDDs, and got nostalgic for the noise... and installing Windows from like twelve of the bastards.
  - petodo 4y ago
    Yeah, nothing like CRC error nostalgia.
- petodo 4y ago
  I dont laugh, just hope you store it at different locations.
  - twawaaay 4y ago
    One is always co-located at parents in law. Whenever I drive there with my family I take the newest backup and rotate it. Just in case I was robbed or had a house fire.
- Toutouxc 4y ago
  And then you read up on bit rot and HDDs dying when not used for a long time, and there goes the fuzzy feeling. :(
  - greendave 4y ago
    Just wait until you read about what happens to those cold-storage SSDs!
kypro 4y ago
Why is this getting so heavily upvoted? Are we sure OPs title is even correct? This may be user error? It's possible the photos are still there, or if they are gone, perhaps Amazon can restore. OP, did you try to call / contact Amazon before you posted this?
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  ...they literally posted a link to their question in an Amazon forum... ...which is listed as the first port of call for support.[0] > For more help, try our Amazon Drive & Amazon Photos forum But hey, maybe I missed the prominently displayed phone number somehow, so if you can help me find it, it'd be much appreciated. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GDMHBWK3M5RAV5TY https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
thrdbndndn 4y ago
It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread. I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.
- owlninja 4y ago
  And a follow-up will likely not make the front page.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  I'd be freaking the fuck out too, tbh. These days you tend to get better support from the megacorps if you tweet or post on HN, it can bypass the obligatory outsourced support layer.
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
    Oh I totally agree. I do wish I have such luck when posting on HN though, often ended up with zero upvotes and no replies.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      The stories that get helped often start with the premise that a company has destroyed the person's life/business and the company is hated by a large portion of people here. That will get the most upvotes, visibility, and sometimes a company will reach out.
      - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
        Bitcoin just ate all my cat videos! But they were backed up to Ethereum, but Ethereum might be declared a security, so they'll be gone too! At least I've also got them on XRP.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    It might be true about some other big tech companies but AMZN is exceptionally obstinate.
softwaredoug 4y ago
A 'better than nothing' but very easy thing I do is use two cloud providers for photo storage. Since my photos are all phone based, backing up to any cloud provider is pretty straightforward.
onphonenow 4y ago
Wow - this is really not great. Amazon support is usually pretty ok though this is a weird case - any luck getting in touch w anyone?
riskable 4y ago
This is why I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously on all my devices. If one of them screws up I've always got the other one. What I need to do though is get them all copied to my home backup server (the HTPC) on the regular...
- patrakov 4y ago
  > This is why I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously on all my devices. If one of them screws up I've always got the other one. That's insufficient. If one of then screws up, deletions will likely propagate to the other.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    That’s not how it works.
  - fullstop 4y ago
    Deleted photos in google photos are not deleted. They go into a "trash" folder with a retention period of, if I remember correctly, 14 days. So, yes, they could propagate but you have time to correct the mishap.
  - hassancf 4y ago
    Exactly. And if it’s a local backup, that local backup needs to be taken offline, to avoid the same issue if things get deleted in the cloud
    - aftbit 4y ago
      Or use a versioned backup so you can recover from deletes or corruption. ZFS snapshots, restic versions, even rsync + symlinks can work.
  - bilekas 4y ago
    > That's insufficient. If one of then screws up, deletions will likely propagate to the other. That's not the setup described at least. It's both of the services withing in parallel. > I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously Your scenario would depend on Google being a backup for Amazon or vice versa.
fallingmeat 4y ago
This is why you should always synchronize you cloud with your other cloud, and the NAS in your closet, and floss after every meal, and take daily vitamins.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Quick note that "synchronize" may not be quite right -- if Amazon deletes all your photos you don't want to sync those deletes anywhere else.
Mizoguchi 4y ago
The old 3-2-1 backup rule is still relevant today.
andy_ppp 4y ago
This happened to me with Lightroom, I’m still being charged £10 per month and they can’t find the account. I cannot get through to support either.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  Chargeback? Or are you hoping to resolve it and get the photos back some how?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
josefresco 4y ago
Anyone have a good iCloud backup option? I finally "gave in" and stopped manually pulling photos off my iOS devices and subscribed to iCloud. However I'm worried I'll get screwed or mistakenly delete something.
- johnnyballgame 4y ago
  Install iCloud app locally and sync them. Then backup your local folder to another device or cloud. Backblaze B2 is a great cloud option for raw storage.
  - presto8 4y ago
    Exactly what I do. I use an old Mac Mini with an attached 5 TB USB drive. This provides a mirror of the iCloud data. For versioning, add a separate drive and use Time Machine. This provides versioning. For offsite backup, B2 or other backup provider.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Does icloud drive contain the photos? My issue with icloud was that as far as I was aware, I could only sync photos via the Photos mac app, or web page downloading a zip archive a few gb at a time. Both options ended up failing for me unfortunately. The Photos app would quit instantly when I set it to sync the library because I guess it was too large perhaps. The web page downloads would time out a few hundred mb in. I tried using third party command line tools for icloud downloads, and they too would time out.
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  iCloud doesn’t really back up photos. It’s more of a sync. If you’ll manually delete a photo from your phone, it’ll be deleted from iCloud too.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The conflation of sync and backup can actually be really dangerous. You don't want a primary backup to have the opportunity to delete files because they (apparently) have been deleted on the primary.
clevedotoner 4y ago
One of my worries that keeps me sleeplessly awake at nights sometimes is the possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not. A sufficiently strong solar flare can essentially put us back a few centuries electronically, and a few millenia socially, instantly. Wonder if there are stress tests on cloud storage that account for this possibility by means of adequate insulation or whatever it is that can counteract a solar flare.
- davidmurdoch 4y ago
  Isn't a lot of our critical stuff backed up to tape drives still?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    "A lot"? Sure, I guess. But as someone who stores multiple copies of everything both onsite and in the "cloud," I certainly don't have local tape backup and I doubt that Backblaze does either.
    - davidmurdoch 4y ago
      I mean "critical stuff" like banks and government data, not regular users.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        I'm guessing a lot of "critical stuff" is not backed up on tape libraries these days. But I may be wrong. Do any cloud providers use tape at all?
- rafabulsing 4y ago
  Could putting backups in Faraday cages protect against solar flares?
  - warble 4y ago
postdb 4y ago
Can't really see the forum without a login. Anyone can just copy/past it here?
Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
Bon Appétit!
iLoveOncall 4y ago
> carefully curated 55 photos a day, every day, for 12 years, does not sound "carefully curated" to me.
krzyk 4y ago
I'm surprised that there is something like Amazon Photos, this is literally first time I hear about it.
xyst 4y ago
This is what happens when you give the intern prod access
PaulHoule 4y ago
Must have gone the same place two-day shipping went.
debacle 4y ago
My wife just purchased a 10tb ssd as a "backup" for Amazon Photos. I think it's likely worth it considering the value of basically the history of our lives.
- dboreham 4y ago
  You need to buy one too, and put it in a different building than hers.
- mindslight 4y ago
  wat? SSDs aren't quite to 10TB yet, at least consumer ones. Do you mean multiple SSDs in an enclosure? Because I sure hope you didn't end up with a fake. Fakes have hacked firmware that makes it report the wrong capacity, and you only find out when you go to retrieve your data. Additionally, I've heard SSDs aren't great long term backup mediums, compared to mechanical hard drives. I personally use both.
bilekas 4y ago
It's not clear from the question what the problem could have been, but I would be REALLY surprised if the app would be responsible for removing the photos in storage. The app is just a front-end, deleting data (with Amazon photos and even S3) is not easy to do by accident without user input. Is it just resynching the application (metrics updating) ? Super curious the issue.
VLM 4y ago
From a scalability standpoint how does one accumulate, and then utilize, a quarter million photos? I'm a bit older than most, but that would be a photo every other hour since the minute I was born... Kind of a digital hoarder moment. Which is relevant because my entire archive fits on a flash drive and I have a couple flash drives and its no big deal at that small of a scale. But a quarter mil pics will take some serious storage. Now I could imagine if you owned five security cameras and stored a snapshot every minute for a month, that's about a fifth of a million photos, but that's all autogenerated and if you lose your complete set you'll have a new set in a month anyway.
- delfinom 4y ago
  They could be a photographer. Often they'll take numerous photos in a very short time span to capture a bunch of movement and angles just so they can pick the best of the bunch later Why do they keep everything? Idk, /r/datahoarder is a subreddit that exists though so the mindset is out there
  - aftbit 4y ago
    IMO... why not? 250k photos at 10MB each is only ~2.5 TB. That easily fits on modern hard drives. You can even buy SSDs that would fit that for under $500. If you are a professional photographer, then you absolutely should keep everything you ever shoot, just in case one photo is ever worth it. Even if you're an amateur though, that's not really that much storage in the grand scheme of things.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      It’s a complete pain if you use a laptop as your daily driver. You don’t want the entire drive filled with photos, and using an external drive with Apple Photos is a PITA as the integration with iCloud doesn’t play nice if the drive isn’t reliably attached. Apple would make a lot of lives easier if they made a tidy way of exporting images from Photos easier to automate. And while they are there, a photo file structure that wasn’t horrible, with photos names something like ‘date-time’.
nicoburns 4y ago
Amazon have been sending me repeated email telling that it’s photos service is shutting down for over a year now. Have you not been getting those?
- jwineinger 4y ago
  From what I can find, Amazon Drive is shutting down at the end of 2023 but Photos is not. So you've got until end of year to download non-photo/non-video files from your Drive before they're gone. https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23943055011 https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23943055011
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    You seem to be right. I wasn't actively using either product so I didn't pay too much attention to the details.
sirius87 4y ago
Stuff like this terrifies me. I'm personally reaching a point where I'm considering investing in an offline NAS with a RAID array and replacing disks every few years to be safe (or based on SMART tests). Imagine uploading all your photos to a cloud provider, then having 5% of your files disappear. How would you even know your photos are missing if its a small %? At least when your local filesystem is corrupted, you know what you're losing.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  Synology. Rsync images to it, upload to Backblaze at midnight and alerts set up to come through on failure. Not cheap, but it’s a beautiful thing.
- aendruk 4y ago
  I went that route but wasn’t able to sleep soundly until eventually setting up a replicating NAS at a family member’s house.
- B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
  > How would you even know your photos are missing What if you never found out in your lifetime? (seriously, I have dire doubts about the usefulness of our hoards ...)
tyingq 4y ago
This space is frustrating with any of the cloud vendors as they originally offered a lot of storage for free, then had to resort to various strategies to claw that back after it got expensive. Google is especially frustrating for me. By default, an Android tries to sync all videos and photos up to Google photos. You can turn that off, but not in any sort of granular way. For example, you can't say "sync photos, but don't sync videos". You USED to be able to do this, but it's all or nothing now. Which I suppose drives revenue for the paid storage plans?
- artificial 4y ago
  I suspect photos are used for classification and training purposes.
- justin_oaks 4y ago
  While I still use Google Photos, there are times that I don't want pictures I take with my phone to be synced to the cloud. Since Google Photos does not allow such functionality, I installed a second camera app. That app allows me to choose where the picture are saved, so I save them to a folder that doesn't get backed up by Google Photos. It's annoying to have to do this, but at least I can finally choose what gets synced and what doesn't.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    I specifically use "Secure Cam" from GrapheneOS (mine came from Google Play) for this, as it is close to the stock pixel camera and doesn't suffer the lag some other camera apps have. -- edit I originally called the app "private cam" and said it was from fdroid, apologies! Forgot I had aliased it.
    - tyingq 4y ago
      Sounded good, but searching F-droid for "private cam" or "privatecam", etc, yields no result.
      - 4y ago
remote_phone 4y ago
I have 4 backups (and growing) of all my important digital things especially my photos. I have two separate overlapping backups and every few year I buy a new hard drive and put the old backup drive in storage. I will continue to do this until I die.
__bjoernd 4y ago
Commentator's voice: it had not.
wly_cdgr 4y ago
Periodic reminder to keep multiple offline backups of anything you actually care about. Although, you should also think about whether you really need to keep more than a few dozen or at most a few hundred photos of your total life.
serbanTeodor 4y ago
Is there a way now to pull all the data. This is scary and I’m right now buying USB for storage, but I don’t know how to bulk retrieve all my photos. I imagine they probably close any ways to export the data to not migrate to other service. All I can think is to do a Selenium program to go through all the entries but I think it will be a bitch to have it resume from a certain point and not miss something
godshatter 4y ago
This is a general question; is no one else worried about Amazon or whichever company trolling your photos with face recognition, building up a graph of who you are connected to, all in the name of "giving you a better shopping experience"? Or who knows what else they might do with the meta data or AI object recognition shenanigans. I guess I don't extend much trust to the companies that provide these services, especially if they are free. But then I don't take many photos nor share them around much. That might change the equation a bit if I was more into that. What photos I do take that I want to keep I download to my desktop. Maybe I'm just too damned cynical.
- unixhero 4y ago
  I am very worried about this. Yes. Facebook already did this since 2007, or earlier.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > Maybe I'm just too damned cynical. FWIW, I don't think so. There's such a thing as healthy paranoia. Privacy considerations definitely factored into my decision to move my library to iCloud Photos from Google Photos a couple years ago. I still maintain more than one backup of that library — one local, and one to a cloud backup provider.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Amazon Photos for face recognition Amazon Alexa for voice recognition and eavesdropping Amazon subsidiary Ring.com to spy on your neighbor's driveway AWS pulling it all together to send this panopticon to your local police department.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  >Maybe I'm just too damned cynical. Imagine if the nazis had access to the data that people store online now... There wouldn't be any Schindler's list, he'd already have been in jail because the algorithm said so. You can't opt out when everyone else has already opted you in.
Clasposite 4y ago
[flagged]
bobleeswagger 4y ago
My important stuff goes like this: PiBox w/ Mirrored SSDs -> Server w/ RAIDZ2 (at another wing of the house) -> Windows NAS -> Backblaze Unlimited Multiple SSDs and HDDs would have to go down at the same time, and there are hourly snapshots up to a month in case a roll back is needed. If you're relying on a third party in any case except total catastrophe, you're just waiting for that moment to come! This is why Backblaze is at the end, I depend on them when I have failed to provide availability myself.
sagebird 4y ago
When I hear individuals on talk about their backup routines they have developed, home nas servers, scripts that keep things synched, etc, I can’t help but to think about failed crypto ux attempts. I don’t like relying on monolithic monopolized corporate services as much as the next hacker— but I think there should be an easy to understand service for the 98% of basic users. If someone could make a service that detects and requests permission to connects to all of your cloud services and provides full backup service that includes whatever the best practices are it would seem like a win for those who don’t want to roll their own. A marketable “sticker” Ala “intel inside” ie - “open backup compatible” would be good to have with a simple but serviceable api. I think today there is little financial incentive for storage providers to make the data easy to access via machine. Ideally an api would not only allow incoming data to be quickly compared and synched… but would allow graceful and intelligent transfers or splits or duplication levels among stores, in the case that you want to change services or have your own backup.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ProAm 4y ago
  The problem is no one wants to learn how to do it. Everyone wants the easy button. This is why we have the cloud, iCloud storage, google photos, amazon photos, back blaze, etc.... None of this is that hard to do, not one just wants to put a minimal amount of effort into learning how to do backups, or automate them or deal with DR scenarios. If this information is important to you it would behoove you to learn how to protect it. Otherwise its not that important to you. Obviously IMHO.
  - asdff 4y ago
    It doesn't help that the OS vendors have been letting their own local backup tooling rot over the years, probably in favor of selling more cloud subscriptions. When is the last time Time Machine got some attention, when it was released 15 years ago?
ar9av 4y ago
Having used Amazon photos for a long time, I have had a bunch of issues. It is certainly (in my mind) not a replacement for Google photos, but is a possible second repository / backup. Advantages: unlimited full resolution backup Disadvantages: Poor facial recognition Unable to manually add tags Poor folder /album management Android app has stopped uploading photos and support hasn'tbeen able to fix it Upload from PC only using their app (which isn't great) Upload from PC has "lost" the database and subsequently uploaded at least 2 versions of the just under 1TB / 50k images / videos from my family The result is that actually finding or doing anything with the photos in the storage is not very easy, but at least everything is backed up there!
ihaveabeardnow 4y ago
it's not common, but not very rare either, that we go to view an old set of pictures on Google Drive and find some of them are corrupt and cannot be displayed. I've never reported anything to Google, because I don't really have any evidence to provide. All I know is, we didn't upload all these 'corrupt' photos 5/10/15 years ago. and I do not have backups of them all (which is on me)
zephrx1111 4y ago
I use Amazon Photo as yet another backup plan. I have my photos sync on OneDrive and NAS as well.
getoffmyyawn 4y ago
I used to seriously stress out worrying about the huge amount of family photos I have saved in cloud storage and what it would mean to lose them. I've got a local backup as well of course. Even that has to be upgraded every so often to make sure the hardware will continue to run reliably. A few years ago my (very non-technical) mother asked me to make and send her a photo album of recent pictures. My wife and I had so much fun doing it that we kept doing it. Choosing the best pictures, arranging them and making nice layouts and titles itself is a fun walk down memory lane. Now we have a shelf with about a dozen volumes of memories and we found we are far more likely to look at these than we ever were with photos in cloud storage. I like to think that if I lost all the digital copies, I would still be happy with what I have in these bound albums. I highly recommend this to everyone.
- AdamN 4y ago
  +100. The best and really only useful copy of your digital photo library is a curated set of prints, ideally as part of a book or a calendar.
  - yaseer 4y ago
    +101. My wife and I now have an annual tradition of making physical albums of memories from the past year. Making the album in January is not just fun - it makes you mindful of fond memories at a time when you're likely to think "Geez, another year has passed so quickly". My only regret is realising I should have started the habit much earlier.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I've made photo books but I really try to decrease the flow of paper and other physical things into my house. I'm behind at the moment but I heavily curate/edit and upload to Flickr which also lets me access photos when I'm not at home.
asdff 4y ago
I'm currently in a similar pickle with an icloud account. It's not lost, yet, but I can't pull the photos locally at all. The download links supplied on the icloud website time out a few hundred mb into the download. Third party command line tools also time out a few hundred mb in or so. This is a large library, so when I try and open up the Photos app on my mac and sync it there, the app quits immediately. I feel like its a ticking time bomb of a situation here with these data on this icloud account, and I also feel like I'm powerless and out of options to do anything about it, although I will stop using icloud and similar services as primary storage going forward.
memoryoak 4y ago
[dead]
btfo 4y ago
This is what you get for using proprietary software on hardware you do not own. You deserve it. You did it to yourself.
lebed2045 4y ago
I urge everyone to use external disk backup, possibly with prism opensource alternative to cloud photo storage. After Facebook deleted my acc for no reason and google locked my account due to payment system problems- you start to rethink who really own your memories in the cloud and how securely they stored.

319 points by vocatan 4y ago

vocatan 4y ago

Pop goes the photo cache, all my family photos mysteriously vanish into the depths of Amazon Photos

prox 4y ago
Is that your only backup? Because precious photos need more than one (like any backup regime really) Still it sucks and it shouldn’t happen, hopefully it’s just a reporting error in the app.
- temp2022account 4y ago
  Sharing my family-photo-backup system: - Synology NAS is accessible on LAN & phones sync photos when at home - Nightly rsync from internal NAS storage to 1 external (non-raid) hard drive The nightly rsync does not delete files, so the external hard drive is pretty close to an off-site backup even though it's still attached. The only better thing I've thought of doing is mounting it ro after backups + re-mounting before backups. At the end of the day we get 3 copies of data: the photo on your phone, the photo on the shared NAS, and the photo on an external hard drive that spends 99% of its life spun down.
  - aftbit 4y ago
    IMO the biggest remaining risk to this is a house fire at night while you are at home. You wake up to alarms and smoke and run out the door without your phone. All three copies of your photos will burn at once. This is where an additional off-site would be valuable. That might be a second external hard drive that you store off-site and re-sync every few months, or maybe an encrypted cloud backup using restic.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      It’s pretty easy to set the Synology to upload to a cloud provider for a folder or file share. It has alerts and all sorts.
      - prox 4y ago
        Could you do a swap with a friend/colleague? So upload to their NAS and vice versa.
        lostlogin 4y ago
        For sure. I just trust Backblaze more.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
I'm hoping that it's just a stale cache or microservice that hit an issue building its view of the metadata or something. They use S3 to store your data (according to this blog[0]) so my fingers are crossed that the data is still there, they just need to get an engineer onto it. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-amazon-s3-intelligent-tiering-to-significantly-reduce-storage-costs/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-...

gdelfino01 4y ago

I love my Synology NAS. It handles photos great: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/photos https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/photos

madethemcry 4y ago
Me too! I don't trust to open my network to the internet though. So I've created a VPN to connect with my ubiquity network from mobile. Sadly, I can't share photos with other folks or allow my family to participate easily. I'm a layman in terms of networking. I always wonder how people can sleep if they open their home network. In this case either by using QuickConnect or forward ports and access the machine through a custom domain secured by TLS. I mean that would be perfect but I just can't convince me to take that burden of maintaining that open door into my network. I've read about creating sub networks with the power of ubiquiti (or any other router), but I will never trust anything I configure there either because I can't confirm it's secure. So I'm stuck with Google Photos additionally to Synology Photos because of the convenience of sharing.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  My solution is to not open it. Use the cloud for browsing, use the home machine to copy the files down. You rarely need to browse on the home machine, it's really just there if the cloud provider ditches you.
akho 4y ago
I own a Synology NAS, and now believe that it would have been easier to just set up a computer for the tasks I use it for. There are just too many cases where the solution is to use a container (and the clumsy web interfaces for reverse proxying &c), and if I end up SSHing into it too much, I prefer to have a more controllable environment. It does fit some workflows very well though, you just have to assess if your needs over the next few years fit their business intentions.
- avsteele 4y ago
  Synology has an app which will automatically back up your photos to the NAS/server (only when on WiFi). I haven't been able to find an alternative to this on Android, have you? (photosync looks good but seems to only work for iOS last I checked).

tecleandor 4y ago

I don't know if it's due to one of those weird GDPR blocking rules (I'm in Europe) but amazonforum.com doesn't let me connect. It just drops my connection: http https://www.amazonforum.com http: LogLevel.ERROR: ConnectionError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='www.amazonforum.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: / (Caused by NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.HTTPSConnection object at 0x10b551e10>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 61] Connection refused')) while doing a GET request to URL: https://www.amazonforum.com/ But if I connect indirectly, like through archive.is, it works: https://archive.is/wip/5MK8A https://archive.is/wip/5MK8A

danielbln 4y ago
Not GDPR related, as I can see it from central Europe.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Had a similar problem but it's because Pihole is resolving the domain to 0.0.0.0 here. Through one of my servers in France it seems to work just fine.
- weare138 4y ago
  I was having the same issue. Disabling Pihole fixed it.
KomoD 4y ago
> I don't know if it's due to one of those weird GDPR blocking rules (I'm in Europe) but amazonforum.com doesn't let me connect. It's not, I'm in EU as well, can connect without any issues
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  Those blocks are tiresome. Like the eu is going to go after the eg alabama times or other small sites. I just vpn to usa and send them an email. Google etc...easy meat for gdpr, but for small site - why are you tracking me anyway?

paddez 4y ago

As a slight aside - I was surprised to learn that Amazon Photos (if you have Prime) includes RAW camera formats as valid photos for the purposes of their unlimited storage offer. I've taken to essentially backing up all my RAWs to Amazon Photos - even the ones I would typically discard.

plagiarist 4y ago
I also. I don't know why they would offer that as part of their base Prime service when no competitors seem to. The upsell for printing doesn't seem appealing to the type of person who would be storing RAWs.

akho 4y ago

Sorry for your loss. (here I was hoping that the Docker thing filled the surprised Pikachu face quota for the week’s frontpage)

dschuetz 4y ago

No kidding, huh

kmfrk 4y ago

How fast are Backblaze transfer speeds these days? I wasn't a huge fan of the client, but running something third party like Arq[1] felt like a bad workaround. [1]: https://www.arqbackup.com https://www.arqbackup.com

Daedren 4y ago
The Backblaze client's for Backblaze Personal Backup, while Arq and other third-party clients and APIs are for Backblaze B2, no?
gilrain 4y ago
restic backing up to B2 works very well for me, and it’s really cheap. The restores I’ve tried so far have been acceptably fast, albeit in the gigabyte rather than terabyte range.

quaintdev 4y ago

Use Immich OP: https://github.com/immich-app/immich https://github.com/immich-app/immich

akho 4y ago
At least they warn you to “not use the app as the only way to store your photos and videos!”

wyldfire 4y ago

I thought I had received an email from Amazon a few months ago telling me that my storage on Amazon Drive was going away. Pretty frustrating any time a service like this just goes poof. EDIT: I misremembered the details, actually the email says: > Beginning December 31, 2023, files stored on Amazon Drive will no longer be available to customers. We will continue to support Amazon Photos and ensure customers can safely back up, share, and organize photos and videos with the Amazon Photos service.

simonh 4y ago
>files stored on Amazon Drive will no longer be available to customers That's an interesting choice of phrasing they're using.

ho_schi 4y ago

Sounds unfortunate. Hopefully just an error or the service can replace it by a snapshot. No local backup on a drive or memory-card? Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network. The cloud is the server of someone else and not a backup.

EdwardDiego 4y ago
God you'd hope that Amazon is using S3 versioning (they apparently use S3 as the backend storage, because, well, yeah, you would. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-amazon-s3-intelligent-tiering-to-significantly-reduce-storage-costs/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-... )
Nextgrid 4y ago
> Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network. The cloud is the server of someone else and not a backup. That's common knowledge among tech people but blaming the victim is not the solution here. These services are marketed as safe, reliable, and not needing backups (in fact sometimes they make it difficult to take backups, even more so for a non-technical user). Maybe the regulation should be changed that any consumer-grade storage service either needs to provide adequate SLAs & compensation, or have to advertise in bold and prominent font (at least as prominent as their selling points) "WE MAY EAT YOUR DATA AT ANY TIME, PLAN ACCORDINGLY".
- luckylion 4y ago
  Nobody is blaming the victim, they're saying that you should have a backup outside of your cloud provider. I don't think people care enough about SLAs to pay a premium, until something happens to their data. But by then it's too late. The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately?
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately? The warning served its purpose quite well though - the majority of people including smokers concede that smoking is harmful. If they are still smoking despite that, it's on them. The same cannot be said of cloud services. Very few people outside of tech think that the cloud can fail (whether technical failure or just randomly ban you for potential unspecified violation of ToS), so the same kinds of warnings would be useful to spread awareness.

stepri 4y ago

This is just a reminder to take a backup of your cloud photos and store it locally (or other cloud provider). For example, with Google Takeout you can get a ZIP file with all your photos and videos from Google Photos.

ALLTaken 4y ago
For iCloud, would just copying images from iCloud to the backup media be enough?
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Local photo library is a folder, disguised as a package. One of the folders store all the originals on the device. Copy that folder, and you're good to go. You can also get the full folder hierarchy, if you wish.
  - yardstick 4y ago
    If you enable iCloud for the photo library, and even if you select store originals, I have found that Photos still offloads some pictures. It’s just not guaranteed. I really wish Apple had a complete export button, similar to google takeout. Or at least a good CLI tool to get the original images one by one. Fwiw my library is ~200k files and close to a TB.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      Agreed. I rsync images out of Apple’s weird file structure that’s in the bundle. It’s horrible, but with ‘download originals’ enabled it works well. It’s particularly frustrating with large libraries as they occupy nearly all an SSD. For this reason I do it all on a VM that’s on a Synology.
- mleo 4y ago
  You can use privacy.apple.com to request a copy of all photos and other digital data. It will send emails with download links when bundled.

lordnacho 4y ago

This is the main reason I have a NUC sitting at home. It copies my family photos from the cloud and that's all it does.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

harry8 4y ago

1.5 Terabytes? (Assuming 6Mb/photo which is what I'm getting from an old nikon in raw format, dunno what everyone else is using - enlighten me please if necessary). Less than USD$50 for a 2TB disk. So buy 3, post one to a family member when its full. Double the price it for SSD? How much Amazon Photos storage do you get for $150? Ok for this guy, none, and I get connection refused from the link above so I got no details. But assuming it worked as advertised how much would you get?

plagiarist 4y ago
Nikon RAWs are more like 50 Mb on their current cameras. Amazon offers unlimited photo storage with Prime. I agree they should also have their own physical backup if the photos are important, even at ~10x the storage requirements you estimate, but I'd also say any complaints about Amazon losing their photos are valid.
- harry8 4y ago
  oh, ok so prime sub is about $50/yr but you get other things and it seems popular. And 15 Tb is the go. Can you encrypt them or do they require to be able to view your photos so not just bytes on disk? >any complaints about Amazon losing their photos are valid. Like crossing the road, being right doesn't help. :(
  - fullstop 4y ago
    Prime is $139/yr for non-students in the USA, at least.
dboreham 4y ago
Data point: I have 7T of "photo data". I think some proportion of that is video, but probably no more than 10%. I am quite old and it does include scans of all the film images I've taken since birth, and all of one side of my family's film media scanned, and backups of all the cell phone images from family members' devices. From memory however most of the data comes from digital-era DSLR images which can be 30-40M each. None of this data is stored in a FAANG company's DC.

elzbardico 4y ago

After a scare of being temporarily unable to recover my account on Flickr (later resolved), I got into the habit of printing my significant photos in a shop and storing them in a box in a cool and dry place. Of course, I also have local backups.

vocatan 4y ago

Just to add context - I do have backups, but they're spread across a myriad of different hard drives. I had used Amazon Photos to consolidate, and benefit from the facial recognition to be able to quickly locate pictures of family members quickly. I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. Thanks for the comments!

capableweb 4y ago
> I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up. I'm also looking for something FOSS that can do basic face recognition + maybe even more, but last time I checked DigiKam's detection didn't work so well, or maybe I got spoiled by the detection in Google Photos. If you do give it a go, would be nice if you reported back on your experience :)
- komali2 4y ago
  FOSS photo software with face recognition (note that some of this is off-premise face recognition, sometimes requiring an API key you get on your own) https://damselfly.info https://damselfly.info https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos https://photoview.github.io/ https://photoview.github.io/ I may have missed some: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#photo-and-video-galleries https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho...
  - capableweb 4y ago
    What I found in my previous search is that either they're really good at managing large collections of photos, or they're really good at doing various AI/recognition, but none of what I've found have been good at both. Hence my interest in DigiKam as their management features for large collections is second to none.
    - CWuestefeld 4y ago
      Isn't that OK? You should be able to find some reasonable workflow around using the recognizer to tag the photo in its EXIF/IPTC metadata, and then load that into the organizer.

eddieroger 4y ago

Lots of reminders to make backups and alternatives offered, but I think it's fair to expect something from Amazon here since Photos, being a Prime benefit, is a paid service, which should come with a reasonable expectation of stability. It's a shame Amazon doesn't have an easier way to find formal support.

ppetty 4y ago

Does anyone know if iCloud (photos) storage is AWS S3? Curious if using both iCloud & Amazon Photos is a decent redundant backup plan in addition to a local copy. Or if I have iCloud & Prime, why not? (I also use Backblaze.)

timvisee 4y ago
I believe iCloud uses Google's cloud as storage backend.
vdfs 4y ago
What if a strong solar EMP wipe all storages on earth? you need redundancy on at least two other planets (I would suggest the moon but it's close to earth)
wenyuanyu 4y ago
I think Apple uses GCP as well. A photo is probably replicated twice across AWS and GCP by Apple, and AWS and GCP will then replicate it at least 5 times on their own side onto different racks or even AZ.

flykespice 4y ago

That is why always you should synchronize your cloud with a local backup storage, always remain skeptical on cloud-backed storage as you are relying on someone else keeping it up (it can go anytime). Cloud storage is just as volatile as your physical storage breaking or getting lost.

komali2 4y ago

That super sucks. Stories like this (but about Google Photos) led to me setting up the following backup strategy. 1. First, all photos are on a fat external harddrive connected to a homelab server. When I come home with photos, I dump them onto this (TODO to find a way to automatically copy them into the proper spot off the camera upon the camera being plugged in, or a different spot if the gopro is plugged in) 2. Once a day, these are rsynced to a separate set of harddrives, which serve self hosted photo software I use (similar functionality to google photos. Looking for a replacement that lets me create arbitrary albums of photos, and then create web pages pointing to those arbitrary albums, that's FOSS. Currently evaluating photoview and librephotos) 3. Once a day, all photos are backed up to a backblaze b2 bucket using duplicati. with several previous versions also kept. 4. Once a year, a fucknormous external drive is purchased, all photos dumped onto it, and mailed to my parent's house, where they put it into a firebox. 5. Oh, and all my photos are also uploaded to google photos, because why not I'm very much a scrub when it comes to sysadmin tasks and was able to set up all of the above with about... I don't know, no more than 100 hours of effort I'm sure, probably less. I recommend at least looking into consumer backup services like the one by backblaze!

twawaaay 4y ago

And people laugh when they hear about my USB HDD docking station and a fleet of 3.5" HDDs backup setup....

EdwardDiego 4y ago
3.5" HDDs? Aww, I got all excited because I read that as 3.5" FDDs, and got nostalgic for the noise... and installing Windows from like twelve of the bastards.
- petodo 4y ago
  Yeah, nothing like CRC error nostalgia.
petodo 4y ago
I dont laugh, just hope you store it at different locations.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  One is always co-located at parents in law. Whenever I drive there with my family I take the newest backup and rotate it. Just in case I was robbed or had a house fire.
Toutouxc 4y ago
And then you read up on bit rot and HDDs dying when not used for a long time, and there goes the fuzzy feeling. :(
- greendave 4y ago
  Just wait until you read about what happens to those cold-storage SSDs!

kypro 4y ago

Why is this getting so heavily upvoted? Are we sure OPs title is even correct? This may be user error? It's possible the photos are still there, or if they are gone, perhaps Amazon can restore. OP, did you try to call / contact Amazon before you posted this?

EdwardDiego 4y ago
...they literally posted a link to their question in an Amazon forum... ...which is listed as the first port of call for support.[0] > For more help, try our Amazon Drive & Amazon Photos forum But hey, maybe I missed the prominently displayed phone number somehow, so if you can help me find it, it'd be much appreciated. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GDMHBWK3M5RAV5TY https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

thrdbndndn 4y ago

It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread. I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.

owlninja 4y ago
And a follow-up will likely not make the front page.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
I'd be freaking the fuck out too, tbh. These days you tend to get better support from the megacorps if you tweet or post on HN, it can bypass the obligatory outsourced support layer.
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  Oh I totally agree. I do wish I have such luck when posting on HN though, often ended up with zero upvotes and no replies.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    The stories that get helped often start with the premise that a company has destroyed the person's life/business and the company is hated by a large portion of people here. That will get the most upvotes, visibility, and sometimes a company will reach out.
    - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
      Bitcoin just ate all my cat videos! But they were backed up to Ethereum, but Ethereum might be declared a security, so they'll be gone too! At least I've also got them on XRP.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It might be true about some other big tech companies but AMZN is exceptionally obstinate.

softwaredoug 4y ago

A 'better than nothing' but very easy thing I do is use two cloud providers for photo storage. Since my photos are all phone based, backing up to any cloud provider is pretty straightforward.

onphonenow 4y ago

Wow - this is really not great. Amazon support is usually pretty ok though this is a weird case - any luck getting in touch w anyone?

riskable 4y ago

This is why I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously on all my devices. If one of them screws up I've always got the other one. What I need to do though is get them all copied to my home backup server (the HTPC) on the regular...

patrakov 4y ago
> This is why I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously on all my devices. If one of them screws up I've always got the other one. That's insufficient. If one of then screws up, deletions will likely propagate to the other.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  That’s not how it works.
- fullstop 4y ago
  Deleted photos in google photos are not deleted. They go into a "trash" folder with a retention period of, if I remember correctly, 14 days. So, yes, they could propagate but you have time to correct the mishap.
- hassancf 4y ago
  Exactly. And if it’s a local backup, that local backup needs to be taken offline, to avoid the same issue if things get deleted in the cloud
  - aftbit 4y ago
    Or use a versioned backup so you can recover from deletes or corruption. ZFS snapshots, restic versions, even rsync + symlinks can work.
- bilekas 4y ago
  > That's insufficient. If one of then screws up, deletions will likely propagate to the other. That's not the setup described at least. It's both of the services withing in parallel. > I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously Your scenario would depend on Google being a backup for Amazon or vice versa.

fallingmeat 4y ago

This is why you should always synchronize you cloud with your other cloud, and the NAS in your closet, and floss after every meal, and take daily vitamins.

dboreham 4y ago
Quick note that "synchronize" may not be quite right -- if Amazon deletes all your photos you don't want to sync those deletes anywhere else.

Mizoguchi 4y ago

The old 3-2-1 backup rule is still relevant today.

andy_ppp 4y ago

This happened to me with Lightroom, I’m still being charged £10 per month and they can’t find the account. I cannot get through to support either.

vxNsr 4y ago
Chargeback? Or are you hoping to resolve it and get the photos back some how?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

josefresco 4y ago

Anyone have a good iCloud backup option? I finally "gave in" and stopped manually pulling photos off my iOS devices and subscribed to iCloud. However I'm worried I'll get screwed or mistakenly delete something.

johnnyballgame 4y ago
Install iCloud app locally and sync them. Then backup your local folder to another device or cloud. Backblaze B2 is a great cloud option for raw storage.
- presto8 4y ago
  Exactly what I do. I use an old Mac Mini with an attached 5 TB USB drive. This provides a mirror of the iCloud data. For versioning, add a separate drive and use Time Machine. This provides versioning. For offsite backup, B2 or other backup provider.
- asdff 4y ago
  Does icloud drive contain the photos? My issue with icloud was that as far as I was aware, I could only sync photos via the Photos mac app, or web page downloading a zip archive a few gb at a time. Both options ended up failing for me unfortunately. The Photos app would quit instantly when I set it to sync the library because I guess it was too large perhaps. The web page downloads would time out a few hundred mb in. I tried using third party command line tools for icloud downloads, and they too would time out.
sgjohnson 4y ago
iCloud doesn’t really back up photos. It’s more of a sync. If you’ll manually delete a photo from your phone, it’ll be deleted from iCloud too.
- ghaff 4y ago
  The conflation of sync and backup can actually be really dangerous. You don't want a primary backup to have the opportunity to delete files because they (apparently) have been deleted on the primary.

clevedotoner 4y ago

One of my worries that keeps me sleeplessly awake at nights sometimes is the possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not. A sufficiently strong solar flare can essentially put us back a few centuries electronically, and a few millenia socially, instantly. Wonder if there are stress tests on cloud storage that account for this possibility by means of adequate insulation or whatever it is that can counteract a solar flare.

davidmurdoch 4y ago
Isn't a lot of our critical stuff backed up to tape drives still?
- ghaff 4y ago
  "A lot"? Sure, I guess. But as someone who stores multiple copies of everything both onsite and in the "cloud," I certainly don't have local tape backup and I doubt that Backblaze does either.
  - davidmurdoch 4y ago
    I mean "critical stuff" like banks and government data, not regular users.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      I'm guessing a lot of "critical stuff" is not backed up on tape libraries these days. But I may be wrong. Do any cloud providers use tape at all?
rafabulsing 4y ago
Could putting backups in Faraday cages protect against solar flares?
- warble 4y ago

postdb 4y ago

Can't really see the forum without a login. Anyone can just copy/past it here?

Iwan-Zotow 4y ago

Bon Appétit!

iLoveOncall 4y ago

> carefully curated 55 photos a day, every day, for 12 years, does not sound "carefully curated" to me.

krzyk 4y ago

I'm surprised that there is something like Amazon Photos, this is literally first time I hear about it.

xyst 4y ago

This is what happens when you give the intern prod access

PaulHoule 4y ago

Must have gone the same place two-day shipping went.

debacle 4y ago

My wife just purchased a 10tb ssd as a "backup" for Amazon Photos. I think it's likely worth it considering the value of basically the history of our lives.

dboreham 4y ago
You need to buy one too, and put it in a different building than hers.
mindslight 4y ago
wat? SSDs aren't quite to 10TB yet, at least consumer ones. Do you mean multiple SSDs in an enclosure? Because I sure hope you didn't end up with a fake. Fakes have hacked firmware that makes it report the wrong capacity, and you only find out when you go to retrieve your data. Additionally, I've heard SSDs aren't great long term backup mediums, compared to mechanical hard drives. I personally use both.

bilekas 4y ago

It's not clear from the question what the problem could have been, but I would be REALLY surprised if the app would be responsible for removing the photos in storage. The app is just a front-end, deleting data (with Amazon photos and even S3) is not easy to do by accident without user input. Is it just resynching the application (metrics updating) ? Super curious the issue.

VLM 4y ago

From a scalability standpoint how does one accumulate, and then utilize, a quarter million photos? I'm a bit older than most, but that would be a photo every other hour since the minute I was born... Kind of a digital hoarder moment. Which is relevant because my entire archive fits on a flash drive and I have a couple flash drives and its no big deal at that small of a scale. But a quarter mil pics will take some serious storage. Now I could imagine if you owned five security cameras and stored a snapshot every minute for a month, that's about a fifth of a million photos, but that's all autogenerated and if you lose your complete set you'll have a new set in a month anyway.

delfinom 4y ago
They could be a photographer. Often they'll take numerous photos in a very short time span to capture a bunch of movement and angles just so they can pick the best of the bunch later Why do they keep everything? Idk, /r/datahoarder is a subreddit that exists though so the mindset is out there
- aftbit 4y ago
  IMO... why not? 250k photos at 10MB each is only ~2.5 TB. That easily fits on modern hard drives. You can even buy SSDs that would fit that for under $500. If you are a professional photographer, then you absolutely should keep everything you ever shoot, just in case one photo is ever worth it. Even if you're an amateur though, that's not really that much storage in the grand scheme of things.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    It’s a complete pain if you use a laptop as your daily driver. You don’t want the entire drive filled with photos, and using an external drive with Apple Photos is a PITA as the integration with iCloud doesn’t play nice if the drive isn’t reliably attached. Apple would make a lot of lives easier if they made a tidy way of exporting images from Photos easier to automate. And while they are there, a photo file structure that wasn’t horrible, with photos names something like ‘date-time’.

nicoburns 4y ago

Amazon have been sending me repeated email telling that it’s photos service is shutting down for over a year now. Have you not been getting those?

jwineinger 4y ago
From what I can find, Amazon Drive is shutting down at the end of 2023 but Photos is not. So you've got until end of year to download non-photo/non-video files from your Drive before they're gone. https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23943055011 https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23943055011
- nicoburns 4y ago
  You seem to be right. I wasn't actively using either product so I didn't pay too much attention to the details.

sirius87 4y ago

Stuff like this terrifies me. I'm personally reaching a point where I'm considering investing in an offline NAS with a RAID array and replacing disks every few years to be safe (or based on SMART tests). Imagine uploading all your photos to a cloud provider, then having 5% of your files disappear. How would you even know your photos are missing if its a small %? At least when your local filesystem is corrupted, you know what you're losing.

lostlogin 4y ago
Synology. Rsync images to it, upload to Backblaze at midnight and alerts set up to come through on failure. Not cheap, but it’s a beautiful thing.
aendruk 4y ago
I went that route but wasn’t able to sleep soundly until eventually setting up a replicating NAS at a family member’s house.
B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
> How would you even know your photos are missing What if you never found out in your lifetime? (seriously, I have dire doubts about the usefulness of our hoards ...)

tyingq 4y ago

This space is frustrating with any of the cloud vendors as they originally offered a lot of storage for free, then had to resort to various strategies to claw that back after it got expensive. Google is especially frustrating for me. By default, an Android tries to sync all videos and photos up to Google photos. You can turn that off, but not in any sort of granular way. For example, you can't say "sync photos, but don't sync videos". You USED to be able to do this, but it's all or nothing now. Which I suppose drives revenue for the paid storage plans?

artificial 4y ago
I suspect photos are used for classification and training purposes.
justin_oaks 4y ago
While I still use Google Photos, there are times that I don't want pictures I take with my phone to be synced to the cloud. Since Google Photos does not allow such functionality, I installed a second camera app. That app allows me to choose where the picture are saved, so I save them to a folder that doesn't get backed up by Google Photos. It's annoying to have to do this, but at least I can finally choose what gets synced and what doesn't.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  I specifically use "Secure Cam" from GrapheneOS (mine came from Google Play) for this, as it is close to the stock pixel camera and doesn't suffer the lag some other camera apps have. -- edit I originally called the app "private cam" and said it was from fdroid, apologies! Forgot I had aliased it.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    Sounded good, but searching F-droid for "private cam" or "privatecam", etc, yields no result.
    - 4y ago

remote_phone 4y ago

I have 4 backups (and growing) of all my important digital things especially my photos. I have two separate overlapping backups and every few year I buy a new hard drive and put the old backup drive in storage. I will continue to do this until I die.

__bjoernd 4y ago

Commentator's voice: it had not.

wly_cdgr 4y ago

Periodic reminder to keep multiple offline backups of anything you actually care about. Although, you should also think about whether you really need to keep more than a few dozen or at most a few hundred photos of your total life.

serbanTeodor 4y ago

Is there a way now to pull all the data. This is scary and I’m right now buying USB for storage, but I don’t know how to bulk retrieve all my photos. I imagine they probably close any ways to export the data to not migrate to other service. All I can think is to do a Selenium program to go through all the entries but I think it will be a bitch to have it resume from a certain point and not miss something

godshatter 4y ago

This is a general question; is no one else worried about Amazon or whichever company trolling your photos with face recognition, building up a graph of who you are connected to, all in the name of "giving you a better shopping experience"? Or who knows what else they might do with the meta data or AI object recognition shenanigans. I guess I don't extend much trust to the companies that provide these services, especially if they are free. But then I don't take many photos nor share them around much. That might change the equation a bit if I was more into that. What photos I do take that I want to keep I download to my desktop. Maybe I'm just too damned cynical.

unixhero 4y ago
I am very worried about this. Yes. Facebook already did this since 2007, or earlier.
CharlesW 4y ago
> Maybe I'm just too damned cynical. FWIW, I don't think so. There's such a thing as healthy paranoia. Privacy considerations definitely factored into my decision to move my library to iCloud Photos from Google Photos a couple years ago. I still maintain more than one backup of that library — one local, and one to a cloud backup provider.
rchaud 4y ago
Amazon Photos for face recognition Amazon Alexa for voice recognition and eavesdropping Amazon subsidiary Ring.com to spy on your neighbor's driveway AWS pulling it all together to send this panopticon to your local police department.
brokenmachine 4y ago
>Maybe I'm just too damned cynical. Imagine if the nazis had access to the data that people store online now... There wouldn't be any Schindler's list, he'd already have been in jail because the algorithm said so. You can't opt out when everyone else has already opted you in.

Clasposite 4y ago

[flagged]

bobleeswagger 4y ago

My important stuff goes like this: PiBox w/ Mirrored SSDs -> Server w/ RAIDZ2 (at another wing of the house) -> Windows NAS -> Backblaze Unlimited Multiple SSDs and HDDs would have to go down at the same time, and there are hourly snapshots up to a month in case a roll back is needed. If you're relying on a third party in any case except total catastrophe, you're just waiting for that moment to come! This is why Backblaze is at the end, I depend on them when I have failed to provide availability myself.

sagebird 4y ago

When I hear individuals on talk about their backup routines they have developed, home nas servers, scripts that keep things synched, etc, I can’t help but to think about failed crypto ux attempts. I don’t like relying on monolithic monopolized corporate services as much as the next hacker— but I think there should be an easy to understand service for the 98% of basic users. If someone could make a service that detects and requests permission to connects to all of your cloud services and provides full backup service that includes whatever the best practices are it would seem like a win for those who don’t want to roll their own. A marketable “sticker” Ala “intel inside” ie - “open backup compatible” would be good to have with a simple but serviceable api. I think today there is little financial incentive for storage providers to make the data easy to access via machine. Ideally an api would not only allow incoming data to be quickly compared and synched… but would allow graceful and intelligent transfers or splits or duplication levels among stores, in the case that you want to change services or have your own backup.

deleted 4y ago
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ProAm 4y ago
The problem is no one wants to learn how to do it. Everyone wants the easy button. This is why we have the cloud, iCloud storage, google photos, amazon photos, back blaze, etc.... None of this is that hard to do, not one just wants to put a minimal amount of effort into learning how to do backups, or automate them or deal with DR scenarios. If this information is important to you it would behoove you to learn how to protect it. Otherwise its not that important to you. Obviously IMHO.
- asdff 4y ago
  It doesn't help that the OS vendors have been letting their own local backup tooling rot over the years, probably in favor of selling more cloud subscriptions. When is the last time Time Machine got some attention, when it was released 15 years ago?

ar9av 4y ago

Having used Amazon photos for a long time, I have had a bunch of issues. It is certainly (in my mind) not a replacement for Google photos, but is a possible second repository / backup. Advantages: unlimited full resolution backup Disadvantages: Poor facial recognition Unable to manually add tags Poor folder /album management Android app has stopped uploading photos and support hasn'tbeen able to fix it Upload from PC only using their app (which isn't great) Upload from PC has "lost" the database and subsequently uploaded at least 2 versions of the just under 1TB / 50k images / videos from my family The result is that actually finding or doing anything with the photos in the storage is not very easy, but at least everything is backed up there!

ihaveabeardnow 4y ago

it's not common, but not very rare either, that we go to view an old set of pictures on Google Drive and find some of them are corrupt and cannot be displayed. I've never reported anything to Google, because I don't really have any evidence to provide. All I know is, we didn't upload all these 'corrupt' photos 5/10/15 years ago. and I do not have backups of them all (which is on me)

zephrx1111 4y ago

I use Amazon Photo as yet another backup plan. I have my photos sync on OneDrive and NAS as well.

getoffmyyawn 4y ago

I used to seriously stress out worrying about the huge amount of family photos I have saved in cloud storage and what it would mean to lose them. I've got a local backup as well of course. Even that has to be upgraded every so often to make sure the hardware will continue to run reliably. A few years ago my (very non-technical) mother asked me to make and send her a photo album of recent pictures. My wife and I had so much fun doing it that we kept doing it. Choosing the best pictures, arranging them and making nice layouts and titles itself is a fun walk down memory lane. Now we have a shelf with about a dozen volumes of memories and we found we are far more likely to look at these than we ever were with photos in cloud storage. I like to think that if I lost all the digital copies, I would still be happy with what I have in these bound albums. I highly recommend this to everyone.

AdamN 4y ago
+100. The best and really only useful copy of your digital photo library is a curated set of prints, ideally as part of a book or a calendar.
- yaseer 4y ago
  +101. My wife and I now have an annual tradition of making physical albums of memories from the past year. Making the album in January is not just fun - it makes you mindful of fond memories at a time when you're likely to think "Geez, another year has passed so quickly". My only regret is realising I should have started the habit much earlier.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ghaff 4y ago
  I've made photo books but I really try to decrease the flow of paper and other physical things into my house. I'm behind at the moment but I heavily curate/edit and upload to Flickr which also lets me access photos when I'm not at home.

asdff 4y ago

I'm currently in a similar pickle with an icloud account. It's not lost, yet, but I can't pull the photos locally at all. The download links supplied on the icloud website time out a few hundred mb into the download. Third party command line tools also time out a few hundred mb in or so. This is a large library, so when I try and open up the Photos app on my mac and sync it there, the app quits immediately. I feel like its a ticking time bomb of a situation here with these data on this icloud account, and I also feel like I'm powerless and out of options to do anything about it, although I will stop using icloud and similar services as primary storage going forward.

memoryoak 4y ago

[dead]

btfo 4y ago

This is what you get for using proprietary software on hardware you do not own. You deserve it. You did it to yourself.

lebed2045 4y ago

I urge everyone to use external disk backup, possibly with prism opensource alternative to cloud photo storage. After Facebook deleted my acc for no reason and google locked my account due to payment system problems- you start to rethink who really own your memories in the cloud and how securely they stored.