3 ms·

Connected, but quite different to this subject, is how to long term store photos (cloud does not count). HDD still seem to be the best solution, but not sure ho

Connected, but quite different to this subject, is how to long term store photos (cloud does not count). HDD still seem to be the best solution, but not sure how often should I rewrite them

Mistletoe 1y ago
Print out the ones you like and put them in an album or on the wall. Think how many photos you have that are like that in a family and still around, when all the rest are gone on dead phones or computers somewhere.
- axiolite 1y ago
  You can't get a perfect digital copy of a printed out photo. You're subjecting yourself to generational losses for no good reason. If you're a fan of paper, you could base64 encode the digital photo and print that out onto paper with a small font, or store the digital data in several QR codes. You can include a small preview too. But a couple hard drives or microSD cards will hold many millions of times as many photos in less physical space.
  - pastage 1y ago
    Doing paper backups is hard I could not store much data on paper when I last tried with QR codes. You need to to multiple QR codes since they are only 2KB each. There are some threads about it on HN, but I have never seen anyone do megabytes per paper https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31149427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31149427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669425 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=paper+backup https://hn.algolia.com/?q=paper+backup Cuneiform tables do it in clay.
    - axiolite 1y ago
      PaperBack claims 0.5MB per page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883531 It's likely not possible to do much better. I never said that was the most practical method.
- 20after4 1y ago
  Photo prints will yellow over time, a lot. You have to choose paper and storage environment carefully if you want them to last. Hard drives are probably better than paper as long as the power grid is powered and there are still computers with the right kinds of ports to read them.
satellite2 1y ago
M-DISC. It's more expensive by size but for (private I'm assuming) pictures it doesn't make a difference.
- p0w3n3d 1y ago
  TBH i've never heard about it before. And I even have a drive that records it! Thank you!!!! However what I've been thinking before you wrote about M-DISC - was making a set of HDD that I'd dump my photos and videos and rewrite each year for example, i.e. copy from one drive to another. This copying 4TB of data should be enough to store them for a few years. I'm mostly concerned with family photos and videos, and maybe music, but I tend to buy CDs of the most important music for me. I'd say that other data would be expendible...
  - skinner927 1y ago
    You’ll want to protect yourself against bit rot too. Don’t go copying bad files every year.
    - p0w3n3d 1y ago
      bit rot... What about good filesystems? Like ZFS which has checksums. Or maybe a zip with additional recovery data... I wonder if there is a ready-made solution that allows this to not require me scripting (and losing those scripts later or failing to run them because Bash was upgraded from 4 to 5 and Python from 3 to 4)
      - satellite2 1y ago
        At least if you don't encrypt and those are jpeg it doesn't matter. I lost two discs at once with theWD debacle a few years back and couldn't recover anything as I encrypted the disk. Another drive that got bad, I easily recovered 90% of the files using foremost. So no encryption on the local backup for me, only the emails dump by encrypting the zip that contains them. It's not perfect but that's the compromise I (think I) have to make. (The remote one is encrypted though)
Havoc 1y ago
Could also add par files for additional layer of safety. Plus ofc use zfs or similar with checksums

Connected, but quite different to this subject, is how to long term store photos (cloud does not count). HDD still seem to be the best solution, but not sure how often should I rewrite them

Mistletoe 1y ago

Print out the ones you like and put them in an album or on the wall. Think how many photos you have that are like that in a family and still around, when all the rest are gone on dead phones or computers somewhere.

axiolite 1y ago
You can't get a perfect digital copy of a printed out photo. You're subjecting yourself to generational losses for no good reason. If you're a fan of paper, you could base64 encode the digital photo and print that out onto paper with a small font, or store the digital data in several QR codes. You can include a small preview too. But a couple hard drives or microSD cards will hold many millions of times as many photos in less physical space.
- pastage 1y ago
  Doing paper backups is hard I could not store much data on paper when I last tried with QR codes. You need to to multiple QR codes since they are only 2KB each. There are some threads about it on HN, but I have never seen anyone do megabytes per paper https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31149427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31149427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24669425 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=paper+backup https://hn.algolia.com/?q=paper+backup Cuneiform tables do it in clay.
  - axiolite 1y ago
    PaperBack claims 0.5MB per page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883531 It's likely not possible to do much better. I never said that was the most practical method.
20after4 1y ago
Photo prints will yellow over time, a lot. You have to choose paper and storage environment carefully if you want them to last. Hard drives are probably better than paper as long as the power grid is powered and there are still computers with the right kinds of ports to read them.

satellite2 1y ago

M-DISC. It's more expensive by size but for (private I'm assuming) pictures it doesn't make a difference.

p0w3n3d 1y ago
TBH i've never heard about it before. And I even have a drive that records it! Thank you!!!! However what I've been thinking before you wrote about M-DISC - was making a set of HDD that I'd dump my photos and videos and rewrite each year for example, i.e. copy from one drive to another. This copying 4TB of data should be enough to store them for a few years. I'm mostly concerned with family photos and videos, and maybe music, but I tend to buy CDs of the most important music for me. I'd say that other data would be expendible...
- skinner927 1y ago
  You’ll want to protect yourself against bit rot too. Don’t go copying bad files every year.
  - p0w3n3d 1y ago
    bit rot... What about good filesystems? Like ZFS which has checksums. Or maybe a zip with additional recovery data... I wonder if there is a ready-made solution that allows this to not require me scripting (and losing those scripts later or failing to run them because Bash was upgraded from 4 to 5 and Python from 3 to 4)
    - satellite2 1y ago
      At least if you don't encrypt and those are jpeg it doesn't matter. I lost two discs at once with theWD debacle a few years back and couldn't recover anything as I encrypted the disk. Another drive that got bad, I easily recovered 90% of the files using foremost. So no encryption on the local backup for me, only the emails dump by encrypting the zip that contains them. It's not perfect but that's the compromise I (think I) have to make. (The remote one is encrypted though)

Havoc 1y ago

Could also add par files for additional layer of safety. Plus ofc use zfs or similar with checksums