In aditions to uploading them to cloud or having them in cold-storage at home, you can also print some of the photos and store them in various places. If you want to store pictures of your children for example, a printed photobook sent to various family members is a nice gift and a safe way to keep the pictures for a long time even after your death or a meteorite crashing into your house.
TLDR: have multiple copies of everything. Printed copies on acid-free paper is great. Keep your original files of possible. If you can, store copies in more than one location.
My photos are all in Photos.app, so a copy is in iCloud and then on my desktop. The desktop backs up to a big local Time Machine array, and to (for now) Backblaze.
Currently a NAS (RAID1) + Google Drive unlimited via rClone. Unfortunately that is going away, and I am considering migrating either to tarsnap or B2.
Hard copies are of course an additional bonus but I'm not considering them "backup".
My strategy in general is that data should be in at least 2 distinct geographical locations at least 10km apart and managed by 2 distinct organizations (for example Backblaze and Google if you are using 2x cloud backup).
Maybe not HN enough, but my Photos are stored on my laptop. Together with all other data, they are regularly backuped to an external HDD. Works very well since I've owned my first computer.
I'm not who you responded to, but my incremental backups on an external HDD probably always date back at least half a year (seems to be a little over a year at the moment, limited by disk space).
I don't know if that's enough to guard against cryptolockers, but it seems enough to me. (Being on Linux also makes me probably a less likely target for cryptolockers, but that's not the case for everyone.)
It would be good to have a second backup in case the backup HDD fails, of course.
Exactly. Well, perhaps there is some evil kind of cryptolocker that will wait until the external HDD of my Linux laptop is plugged in before it encrypts everything.
Hasn't happened to me yet, but I've crashed my external HDD once, a second backup definitely makes sense.
Afaik that's exactly what these cryptolockers often do: after infecting a system they start encrypting things while sitting between the user and the OS to transparently forward file access. This also goes for any accessible network drives and external disks that are connected. Then, after a certain time has elapsed (or whatever other metric the malware author has chosen) the cryptolocker stops forwarding file access and holds you ransom.
In that scenario, if your backup drive is writeable from your infected machine, your backups are potentially fucked.
One way to guard against this would be for example a raspberry pi on your network that periodically connects to your (possibly infected) main machine and makes incremental copies over the network to an external HD connected to the Pi. (Meaning the Pi reads and determines what is new, what's is old and how to make the incremental backup.) This of course needs to be coupled to some sort of smart versioning scheme and regular inspection of the backups by the user.
I store them on a nas, but also do another cold copy to a simple usb connected 5T disk.
And I also do make use of google cloud and apple cloud where available. Is that a problem? I'm honestly not sure. They're just innocent photos I would not mind if they leaked.
I let all important photos be made into a photo book. None of the available backup strategies are robust, safe and future proof enough for this task (I'm talking about pictures of my family, kids etc.).
Moreover, my experience is, that if you have them in a physical book, you tend to look at them way more often yourself and with others.
Bonus point: I only have to do it once per picture. No need to migrate to another backup strategy, another provider and so on.
I've been using this fully automated system for the last 5 years.
I store my photo archive on a Synology NAS at home which syncs to Dropbox and uploads a copy of each photo to Google Photos for browsing and sharing. I'm hoping to switch to Backblaze, from Dropbox, once Synology Photos is available and drop Google Photos as well.
I've documented the entire process and include source code on Github.
Github repo to automatically organize photos based on EXIF:
I store everything on my computer and manage them with shotwell. Every week, I use rsync to make a backup to my server, which in turns has a Cron job that backs up everything to an external drive. At one point, following a tutorial[0] I used IBM cloud services to make encrypted backup, but my photos size has outgrown the free plan. I just gave up.
I have a PC that I'm using as a NAS with a NextCloud instance. For the storage I'm using a ZFS pool made of two HDDs in mirror mode (but since I'm using a Linux distro, if I would have done it today I would have used BTRFS due to it's better support on Linux. I'm still with ZFS because that pool is a leftover of a previous attempt at storing my photo archive). I have yet to configure an offsite backup, which is crucial in this scenario since putting everything on a NAS makes it a single point of failure
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadhttps://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/
TLDR: have multiple copies of everything. Printed copies on acid-free paper is great. Keep your original files of possible. If you can, store copies in more than one location.
Hard copies are of course an additional bonus but I'm not considering them "backup".
My strategy in general is that data should be in at least 2 distinct geographical locations at least 10km apart and managed by 2 distinct organizations (for example Backblaze and Google if you are using 2x cloud backup).
I don't know if that's enough to guard against cryptolockers, but it seems enough to me. (Being on Linux also makes me probably a less likely target for cryptolockers, but that's not the case for everyone.)
It would be good to have a second backup in case the backup HDD fails, of course.
Hasn't happened to me yet, but I've crashed my external HDD once, a second backup definitely makes sense.
In that scenario, if your backup drive is writeable from your infected machine, your backups are potentially fucked.
One way to guard against this would be for example a raspberry pi on your network that periodically connects to your (possibly infected) main machine and makes incremental copies over the network to an external HD connected to the Pi. (Meaning the Pi reads and determines what is new, what's is old and how to make the incremental backup.) This of course needs to be coupled to some sort of smart versioning scheme and regular inspection of the backups by the user.
And I also do make use of google cloud and apple cloud where available. Is that a problem? I'm honestly not sure. They're just innocent photos I would not mind if they leaked.
I let all important photos be made into a photo book. None of the available backup strategies are robust, safe and future proof enough for this task (I'm talking about pictures of my family, kids etc.).
Moreover, my experience is, that if you have them in a physical book, you tend to look at them way more often yourself and with others.
Bonus point: I only have to do it once per picture. No need to migrate to another backup strategy, another provider and so on.
I just dump everything in and forget about them as "another" backup.
I store my photo archive on a Synology NAS at home which syncs to Dropbox and uploads a copy of each photo to Google Photos for browsing and sharing. I'm hoping to switch to Backblaze, from Dropbox, once Synology Photos is available and drop Google Photos as well.
I've documented the entire process and include source code on Github.
Github repo to automatically organize photos based on EXIF:
https://github.com/jmathai/elodie
Series of posts on Medium (to be read in order):
https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
https://medium.com/@jmathai/introducing-elodie-your-personal...
https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin...
https://artplusmarketing.com/one-year-of-using-an-automated-...
https://medium.com/vantage/how-to-protect-your-photos-from-b...
* Synology DS Photo and PhotoStation for local storage
* Google Photos Uploader to sync DSLR photos to Google Photos
* copy of synology photos to an external USB drive
* Backblaze backup of everything on the Synology
(disclaimer: I came here for that)
1 year, definitely. 5 years, probably. 10 years, not so sure. 20 years, insufficient data.