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What I look for the most in a backup solution for something as precious as my personal / family photos is the stability of the company. Will it be there in 5/10

What I look for the most in a backup solution for something as precious as my personal / family photos is the stability of the company. Will it be there in 5/10/20 years? Regardless of the solution, redundant backup is an absolute must for me. I will never depend on 1 solution for any of this no matter what the price. My current solution is this: * all photos go to Dropbox about once a month or if there is a large batch (birthdays etc) * redundant backup to a RAID server in my house (3 TB drives) right now about 50% full * I also compress really important photos and send them to an FTP server on a VPS with limited web access (no httpd)

foobarian 12y ago
I ended up rolling my own too. Videos were a big problem, online solutions cost a lot for the videos my family takes. I ended up throwing them on a server with pared disks synced using rsync (not raid because raid doesn't protect from file deletion). For presentation I have a bunch of scripts to import and index in bulk from idevice backups (which catches things received thru MMS from the nanny or family) and convert to webm format or create thumbnails. Once all the metadata is in a db, a simple rails app shows them with paging, date ranges etc. Would be really nice to have more features like curation, galleries, rotate, and so on like online apps have. But as long as I have full control upstream I'm happy.
knodi123 12y ago
is there much benefit to compressing your photos?
- DavidAdams 12y ago
  I would think that if they're jpegs, they're already about as compressed as they're going to get. Like putting a brick into a stuff sack.
- BorisMelnik 12y ago
  its more organizational for me than anything. the fact that they are "inside" a gzip/tar or zip file kind of keeps them categorically together. It does usually end up saving some space, not a ton.
toomuchtodo 12y ago
Have you thought about saving your critical photos into AWS' Glacier instead?
- BorisMelnik 12y ago
  no but only because I haven't tried it yet. I just checked it out and it does look interesting. I'm so comfortable and confident in my current system its one of the biggest barriers to change.
hobarrera 12y ago
> FTP server It's not 1999 any more, don't use something so awfully unsafe for BACKUPS. Look into sftp if you must. I'd also like to suggest tarsnap for this sort of cold backup, I don't know what you're paying for a VPS; but my comparisons showed it to be cheaper - which is a good thing considering that it's also really really secure.

foobarian 12y ago

I ended up rolling my own too. Videos were a big problem, online solutions cost a lot for the videos my family takes. I ended up throwing them on a server with pared disks synced using rsync (not raid because raid doesn't protect from file deletion). For presentation I have a bunch of scripts to import and index in bulk from idevice backups (which catches things received thru MMS from the nanny or family) and convert to webm format or create thumbnails. Once all the metadata is in a db, a simple rails app shows them with paging, date ranges etc. Would be really nice to have more features like curation, galleries, rotate, and so on like online apps have. But as long as I have full control upstream I'm happy.

knodi123 12y ago

is there much benefit to compressing your photos?

DavidAdams 12y ago
I would think that if they're jpegs, they're already about as compressed as they're going to get. Like putting a brick into a stuff sack.
BorisMelnik 12y ago
its more organizational for me than anything. the fact that they are "inside" a gzip/tar or zip file kind of keeps them categorically together. It does usually end up saving some space, not a ton.

toomuchtodo 12y ago

Have you thought about saving your critical photos into AWS' Glacier instead?

BorisMelnik 12y ago
no but only because I haven't tried it yet. I just checked it out and it does look interesting. I'm so comfortable and confident in my current system its one of the biggest barriers to change.

hobarrera 12y ago

> FTP server It's not 1999 any more, don't use something so awfully unsafe for BACKUPS. Look into sftp if you must. I'd also like to suggest tarsnap for this sort of cold backup, I don't know what you're paying for a VPS; but my comparisons showed it to be cheaper - which is a good thing considering that it's also really really secure.