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The best decision for me is still to buy synology and store everything locally on Synology photos. No subscription, expandable storage, and full privacy. It is

The best decision for me is still to buy synology and store everything locally on Synology photos. No subscription, expandable storage, and full privacy. It is 100% worth the extra $ if you plan on subscribing for a loong time anyway

flakeoil 3y ago
> It is 100% worth the extra $ if you plan on subscribing for a loong time anyway I think many people forget about this. They pay for a monthly or yearly cloud storage subscription, but forget they have to pay this amount every year for the rest of their lifes if they want to keep their data. That's why I also use a Synology disk. I also have an additional lifetime subscription at a cloud storage provider (which pays back within 3.5 years). Sure they can disappear after say 10 years, but at least I have the Synology and I got a much better deal during those 10 years and can look for something else. Another thing, don't upload all pics you take immediately, only sync after you have cleaned out all the bad photos and near duplicates.
- yau8edq12i 3y ago
  To be fair, the underlying storage of the synology won't last forever. A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one, about ten years, as far as I know. You also need to pay for the electricity necessary to keep your server running 24/7, if you want a service level equivalent to a cloud storage service. All this adds up. The scales will probably stay in favor of the self-hosting options, but you have to take all this into account for a fair comparison.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Plus time spent upgrading, every so often.
  - diggan 3y ago
    > A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one, about ten years, as far as I know. It's unlikely that people are using SSDs for the main storage on a NAS though, commonly just used for smaller parts (think metadata in ZFS-land for example), not for the main storage. Precisely for that reason.
    - yau8edq12i 3y ago
      Hard drives last even less, what is even your point? I don't understand. Do you suggest they store their photos on magnetic tape or what?
      - jeffreygoesto 3y ago
        The ones in my QNAP lasted at least 12 years. I replaced it just recently. The only durable storages are acid free paper and microfiche afaik. And you need a controlled climate.
      - diggan 3y ago
        My point is regarding writes specifically. A HDD can typically survive longer than a SSD if they were both to receive the same amount of writes over time. SSDs use flash memory cells, which have a limited amount of writes you can do to them before they start to fail. Compared to magnetic disks in HDDs that don't have a finite lifetime of writes. If you are mostly reading data, then no worries, probably won't affect you. But NASs typically gets a lot of writes, so you want something more durable than SSDs (in terms of writes).
        yau8edq12i 3y ago
        How often do you move or delete your backed up photos?
        diggan 3y ago
        Or add to your collection. Depends on how many people you are who use the same NAS and how many photos you take. Sure, if you upload 10 photos a week and never do any other reads, go with a SSD for all I care, it'll last long enough.
        yau8edq12i 3y ago
        If you don't move or delete old photos, all new photos will be written to a new cell. The writes add up for cells, not for the whole SSD...
  - darkwater 3y ago
    > A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one, about ten years, as far as I know. Solution: a RAID system with 5 reliable disks and you replace 2 of them every 5th year, and the other 3 in the following 4 years.
    - vitus 3y ago
      This works great, until you have coordinated failures, e.g. due to a firmware bug that's dependent on the uptime of the disk (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243). RAID is only useful as long as you don't suffer more simultaneous disk failures than you've provisioned for (where "simultaneous" is dependent on your time-to-repair, since if it takes you a week to replace a dead drive, then two failures in the same week are indistinguishable from two failures in the same minute, in that you've lost the entire array).
      - darkwater 3y ago
        That's why I suggested replacing at most 2 disks at the same time. But you could just one extra year and replace all of them one by one. Or you can just use some dumb & cheap storage backend (in the cloud) as an extra backup layer, which you can easily replace at any moment if costs go wild or it goes bankrupt, without having to change the user experience.
        vitus 3y ago
        Right. It's possible to stagger your replacements so as to avoid bad batches, or even to buy from different vendors for additional diversity (although for SSDs you have much more divergent performance characteristics), but when you're talking about rotating disks one at a time that's a lot of non-negligible overhead. Depending on how much data you have to archive and frequency of access, it may very well be worth the cost to entirely offload opex and capex to cloud storage. AWS Glacier Deep Archive in us-east-1 is $1/TB/month (GCP and Azure offer comparable pricing for archival storage). If you have 5x 4TB SSDs that, say, run you $200 each, and you run RS(5,3) then you're storing 12TB of data for $1000 of capex for 5-10 years. Meanwhile AWS would set you back $144/year, so the breakeven on capex alone would be if you would normally rotate your disks every 7 years.
  - upcoming-sesame 3y ago
    My bigger risk is fire/theft/flood. If data is only stored at my house
- krick 3y ago
  This doesn't sound like a fair comparison for this product. It's true about most subscription services, but if you are ok with 50 GB, then 50 years of storage will cost you $1500, which is pretty much a cost of single Synology station with some drives, WITHOUT amortization cost, if you consider that your drives are not forever and probably need backups anyway. Of course, you'll store much more on a NAS, but if your onlt problem is subscription cost, you don't gain anything by switching to Synology. I personally am considering Ente right now, since having E2EE Google Photos sounds actually pretty cool, despite the fact I have a NAS (a Synology NAS, for that matter). However, my reasons to not using the NAS as you could are different: this is really the place where I store everything, so I prefer having it accessible from local network only. Not sure how you guys feel safe putting something like Synology on the open internet. (Also, I currently don't run it 24/7 anyway, but that's for different reasons, which I hope will become obsolete when I find a better place for the NAS at home.)
sen 3y ago
Yeah I tried all sorts of photo services and ended up going for a Synology. You can pick them up very cheap in sales and don’t need the fastest drives or the latest CPUs if you’re only doing photo stuff and not transcoding HTPC media. With RAID and offsite backups it’s a solid and cheap (over time) system, and I don’t have to worry about some service getting bought out or shutting down.
- deanc 3y ago
  Sales. This must be an American thing. Have never seen any decent discounts on them here in Europe.
  - brnt 3y ago
    In the Netherlands we have them all the time too. Also on Synologys.
    - deanc 3y ago
      Don't think I've ever seen Synology on sale in Finland in the last 15 years. I have been looking fairly regularly on amazon.de too.
huijzer 3y ago
> It is 100% worth the extra $ if you plan on subscribing for a loong time anyway Have you taken depreciation into account in that calculation? Compute, memory, and storage are still getting cheaper each year due to manufacturing improvements.
joking 3y ago
It’s what I have, the only drawback I have is that if you want to free space on your device (at least on iOS) you have to delete photos and those are not available through the image picker in iOS anymore. It’s really a fault from iOS not having the option to select a image manager different from iOS photo app. I actually have 2 backups, google photos low quality backup, and the synology one.
schnatterer 3y ago
One advantage Ente provides to a local NAS is geo redundancy. If your nas gets destroyed eg by fire or water or stolen eg by burglar or even the police your data is gone. Synology offers their convenient C2 service, but IIRC has or had some cryptographic weakness. So I hacked my own solution with rclone and some cheap cloud storage. Well, something like Ente would have been much more convenient.
- ValentineC 3y ago
  > If your nas gets destroyed eg by fire or water or stolen eg by burglar or even the police your data is gone. Isn't this why offsite backups are important? Synology has Hyper Backup, and as you mentioned, there's also rclone. I personally think the biggest benefit to keeping photos as simple files (and maintaining my own offsite backups) is that I'm never at the mercy of one of the SaaS's microservices being down, features being nerfed, or a company being restructured or acquired. I do see the "peace of mind" that an automatic photo hosting/backup service gives. :) Well, one could always use them all (maintaining file backups and paying for a service like Ente) for real user-side redundancy and convenience.
  - schnatterer 3y ago
    TBH I totally agree with the peace of mind argument You'll have to have the time and skills to get it, though. For my less teach-savy family and friends I always have been at a lost what to recommend. Here, a privacy friendly alternative is huge, IMO. I often recommended to use Google as backup, because it's better than no backup and easy to setup on Android.
jacooper 3y ago
Sure, when you don't backups and the maintenance that's comes with them into account. Also accessing a home NAS outside its network is annoying as hell if you don't want to broadcast your home IP to the world or open yourself to attacks in your home network.

flakeoil 3y ago

> It is 100% worth the extra $ if you plan on subscribing for a loong time anyway I think many people forget about this. They pay for a monthly or yearly cloud storage subscription, but forget they have to pay this amount every year for the rest of their lifes if they want to keep their data. That's why I also use a Synology disk. I also have an additional lifetime subscription at a cloud storage provider (which pays back within 3.5 years). Sure they can disappear after say 10 years, but at least I have the Synology and I got a much better deal during those 10 years and can look for something else. Another thing, don't upload all pics you take immediately, only sync after you have cleaned out all the bad photos and near duplicates.

yau8edq12i 3y ago
To be fair, the underlying storage of the synology won't last forever. A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one, about ten years, as far as I know. You also need to pay for the electricity necessary to keep your server running 24/7, if you want a service level equivalent to a cloud storage service. All this adds up. The scales will probably stay in favor of the self-hosting options, but you have to take all this into account for a fair comparison.
- stavros 3y ago
  Plus time spent upgrading, every so often.
- diggan 3y ago
  > A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one, about ten years, as far as I know. It's unlikely that people are using SSDs for the main storage on a NAS though, commonly just used for smaller parts (think metadata in ZFS-land for example), not for the main storage. Precisely for that reason.
  - yau8edq12i 3y ago
    Hard drives last even less, what is even your point? I don't understand. Do you suggest they store their photos on magnetic tape or what?
    - jeffreygoesto 3y ago
      The ones in my QNAP lasted at least 12 years. I replaced it just recently. The only durable storages are acid free paper and microfiche afaik. And you need a controlled climate.
    - diggan 3y ago
      My point is regarding writes specifically. A HDD can typically survive longer than a SSD if they were both to receive the same amount of writes over time. SSDs use flash memory cells, which have a limited amount of writes you can do to them before they start to fail. Compared to magnetic disks in HDDs that don't have a finite lifetime of writes. If you are mostly reading data, then no worries, probably won't affect you. But NASs typically gets a lot of writes, so you want something more durable than SSDs (in terms of writes).
      - yau8edq12i 3y ago
        How often do you move or delete your backed up photos?
        diggan 3y ago
        Or add to your collection. Depends on how many people you are who use the same NAS and how many photos you take. Sure, if you upload 10 photos a week and never do any other reads, go with a SSD for all I care, it'll last long enough.
        yau8edq12i 3y ago
        If you don't move or delete old photos, all new photos will be written to a new cell. The writes add up for cells, not for the whole SSD...
- darkwater 3y ago
  > A cheap SSD might reliably last five years, a nice one, about ten years, as far as I know. Solution: a RAID system with 5 reliable disks and you replace 2 of them every 5th year, and the other 3 in the following 4 years.
  - vitus 3y ago
    This works great, until you have coordinated failures, e.g. due to a firmware bug that's dependent on the uptime of the disk (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243). RAID is only useful as long as you don't suffer more simultaneous disk failures than you've provisioned for (where "simultaneous" is dependent on your time-to-repair, since if it takes you a week to replace a dead drive, then two failures in the same week are indistinguishable from two failures in the same minute, in that you've lost the entire array).
    - darkwater 3y ago
      That's why I suggested replacing at most 2 disks at the same time. But you could just one extra year and replace all of them one by one. Or you can just use some dumb & cheap storage backend (in the cloud) as an extra backup layer, which you can easily replace at any moment if costs go wild or it goes bankrupt, without having to change the user experience.
      - vitus 3y ago
        Right. It's possible to stagger your replacements so as to avoid bad batches, or even to buy from different vendors for additional diversity (although for SSDs you have much more divergent performance characteristics), but when you're talking about rotating disks one at a time that's a lot of non-negligible overhead. Depending on how much data you have to archive and frequency of access, it may very well be worth the cost to entirely offload opex and capex to cloud storage. AWS Glacier Deep Archive in us-east-1 is $1/TB/month (GCP and Azure offer comparable pricing for archival storage). If you have 5x 4TB SSDs that, say, run you $200 each, and you run RS(5,3) then you're storing 12TB of data for $1000 of capex for 5-10 years. Meanwhile AWS would set you back $144/year, so the breakeven on capex alone would be if you would normally rotate your disks every 7 years.
- upcoming-sesame 3y ago
  My bigger risk is fire/theft/flood. If data is only stored at my house
krick 3y ago
This doesn't sound like a fair comparison for this product. It's true about most subscription services, but if you are ok with 50 GB, then 50 years of storage will cost you $1500, which is pretty much a cost of single Synology station with some drives, WITHOUT amortization cost, if you consider that your drives are not forever and probably need backups anyway. Of course, you'll store much more on a NAS, but if your onlt problem is subscription cost, you don't gain anything by switching to Synology. I personally am considering Ente right now, since having E2EE Google Photos sounds actually pretty cool, despite the fact I have a NAS (a Synology NAS, for that matter). However, my reasons to not using the NAS as you could are different: this is really the place where I store everything, so I prefer having it accessible from local network only. Not sure how you guys feel safe putting something like Synology on the open internet. (Also, I currently don't run it 24/7 anyway, but that's for different reasons, which I hope will become obsolete when I find a better place for the NAS at home.)

sen 3y ago

Yeah I tried all sorts of photo services and ended up going for a Synology. You can pick them up very cheap in sales and don’t need the fastest drives or the latest CPUs if you’re only doing photo stuff and not transcoding HTPC media. With RAID and offsite backups it’s a solid and cheap (over time) system, and I don’t have to worry about some service getting bought out or shutting down.

deanc 3y ago
Sales. This must be an American thing. Have never seen any decent discounts on them here in Europe.
- brnt 3y ago
  In the Netherlands we have them all the time too. Also on Synologys.
  - deanc 3y ago
    Don't think I've ever seen Synology on sale in Finland in the last 15 years. I have been looking fairly regularly on amazon.de too.

huijzer 3y ago

> It is 100% worth the extra $ if you plan on subscribing for a loong time anyway Have you taken depreciation into account in that calculation? Compute, memory, and storage are still getting cheaper each year due to manufacturing improvements.

joking 3y ago

It’s what I have, the only drawback I have is that if you want to free space on your device (at least on iOS) you have to delete photos and those are not available through the image picker in iOS anymore. It’s really a fault from iOS not having the option to select a image manager different from iOS photo app. I actually have 2 backups, google photos low quality backup, and the synology one.

schnatterer 3y ago

One advantage Ente provides to a local NAS is geo redundancy. If your nas gets destroyed eg by fire or water or stolen eg by burglar or even the police your data is gone. Synology offers their convenient C2 service, but IIRC has or had some cryptographic weakness. So I hacked my own solution with rclone and some cheap cloud storage. Well, something like Ente would have been much more convenient.

ValentineC 3y ago
> If your nas gets destroyed eg by fire or water or stolen eg by burglar or even the police your data is gone. Isn't this why offsite backups are important? Synology has Hyper Backup, and as you mentioned, there's also rclone. I personally think the biggest benefit to keeping photos as simple files (and maintaining my own offsite backups) is that I'm never at the mercy of one of the SaaS's microservices being down, features being nerfed, or a company being restructured or acquired. I do see the "peace of mind" that an automatic photo hosting/backup service gives. :) Well, one could always use them all (maintaining file backups and paying for a service like Ente) for real user-side redundancy and convenience.
- schnatterer 3y ago
  TBH I totally agree with the peace of mind argument You'll have to have the time and skills to get it, though. For my less teach-savy family and friends I always have been at a lost what to recommend. Here, a privacy friendly alternative is huge, IMO. I often recommended to use Google as backup, because it's better than no backup and easy to setup on Android.

jacooper 3y ago

Sure, when you don't backups and the maintenance that's comes with them into account. Also accessing a home NAS outside its network is annoying as hell if you don't want to broadcast your home IP to the world or open yourself to attacks in your home network.