I never want to lose photos I’ve taken over the years. What’s the best solution to make sure they’re saved?
Follow the storage rules:
3-2-1
3 or more copies
2 or more different medias
1 or more off siteMore practical: the main version is on my desktop PC. That one gets synced automatically to my NAS. This NAS makes a nightly incremental backup to a cloud provider.
Once you have a setup like this, maintaining it is peanuts. Pay the bills on time and setup email alerts to let you know if drives are going bad or you’re reaching your storage limits.
You do need to ensure you’re testing your recovery plans once in a while. A backup is worthless if you can’t restore it
There is a 3-2-1 tactic for backups, which should be pretty safe. Lots of articles if you search for it. Basically I backup all my data to two SSDs and one HDD. And once more to cloud, which is iCloud in my case.
I use Google drive to backup my pics and memes because I don’t have enough to warrant getting anything bigger. I have the $2/month Google One subscription because the free one was barely too small. I can’t get rid of memes tho.
I have a Synology server. I have an external drive. I have an extra 2TB drive on my PC. I have two large storage thumb drives. I have a Google photos account. I have an Instagram, I have a pixelfed account. I have a drop box account. I have a mega account. They all hold my photos. Do you want more? 😂
Some sort of order. Chronological will do, but maps are also nice
NAS + Syncthing
I have a server in the garage with a big RAID array, and I run a Nephele WebDAV server on it. All my PCs, and my family’s PCs back up to it every 3 days.
It also streams all my movies and TV shows on a Jellyfin server.
Also, to be extra cautious, I have a server at my in laws’ house with a 20TB hard drive that I periodically sync that RAID array to.
(Full disclosure: I am the author of Nephele.)
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Backup to Synology Photos / Drive which backs up to AWS Glacier
I use duplicity to do incremental backups that are encrypted with GPG keys. I then back everything up onto a second hard drive. And then I make a second copy that gets uploaded to backblaze B2. In theory it’s all encrypted and safe there. I then have a copy of my encryption keys on a CD, thumb drive, as well as a printed out copy that is stored in a safety deposit box.
I have my own script that I want for duplicity, but I’ve heard duplicati is it GUI that’s easy to use, but I have not used it.
Both.
Though i don’t really care if the HDD is external or internal, just that it stores data physically.
Apple ecosystem so: iPhone > iCloud Photo Library (imported all digital photos over the years through iPhoto, later Photos) > Mac Photos app (set to download all originals) > Time Machine backup on my Synology NAS with redundancy
And because I’m a belt and suspenders kind of guy:
iPhone > Synology Photos backup > Synology C2 cloud backup
Tip: Have a look at osxphotos, an open source software you can run on your Mac and export all your Apple Photos to your own full structure, including any metadata. So you get a copy that is independent on Apple photos and can be used in any photo library system later, if need be. I send that export to my Synology and C2 every day. I guess I just don’t liked Synology photos backup from phone, had to manually open it all the time.
Interesting. I’ve not had any issues with the Synology Drive app on my phone (just checked and everything is there) but this approach could work too…
I wouldn’t necessarily trust a cloud so I would encrypt my files before uploading and wouldn’t use the cloud as my only solution. Because they guarantee for nothing and could just delete your account or their service. But it can expand your backup with another layer.
(Haven’t found my perfect solution, just some thoughts)
What do you use instead?
Like I said I haven’t found my ideal solution yet. I’m using multiple offline harddrives at my home and at my parents home. So my backup is more or less save from most problems/attacks. But its not really up to date and its a lot of manual work always pluging them in when I want to make a backup und copying the files.
When I reached Google Photos max capacity, I invested in a good 4 bay Synology NAS with 16TB. I left the old photos and documents in Google Cloud but all new ones go to the NAS.
I’m really happy with the NAS. I’m aware I could have saved money with a homebuilt one, but I wasn’t botheres tinkering.
i fire up syncthing every once in a while, mainly because of pictures of my cat. i store it all on my main PC, and am planning to implement my NAS as well soon.
Master copy on my desktop
At midnight, my cron job kicks in and mirrors it to
- hard drive
- makes a backup to another machine via restic
- makes another restic backup to backblaze
I use: 1 copy in my primary SSD on my laptop 1 copy in my secondary SSD on same laptop, which autosyncs to: 1 copy in OneDrive family plan 1 copy on an external SSD
Kind of based on the 3-2-1 method.
