What is your system for backing up family photos and video?

I use Google Photos and once a year I do a Google takeout to a hard drive and put that drive somewhere safe.

I tweeted about this a while back and several people had good replies: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1445408384472211464

For context, this was after facebook was down for a day. I think the odds of Google deleting all my photos is pretty low, but the odds of me losing access to my Google account for legitimate or non-legitimate reasons is much higher.

1. copy to hard disk

2. buy a new drive every year and copy it forward

3. store a copy with relatives

Note that a cloud provider:

1. can shut off your access at any time, by accident or on purpose, and you have no recourse

2. will sell your data to anyone at any time

3. will give it to any government for the asking

4. will leak it to any hacker

5. will allow employees of said cloud provider to browse your data

6. will scan it to use it to sell you ads

7. will scan it looking for anything they don't approve of this week, and take "corrective action"

8. if you've got terabytes, good luck trying to download it

For posterity and "the test of time," I really think you need to create physical photo books. My wife and I have used Blurb for that. It's not cheap, and it's a lot of work, but I'm skeptical that our digital photos will outlive us for very long, for the reasons already mentioned.

I've found that the greatest benefit of cloud storage is not as a backup, but as our primary place to keep and look at photos. We started uploading and organizing everything in Flickr a few years ago, and now we spend more time enjoying our photos with Flickr's web and mobile apps than we ever did when they were scattered across our laptops and backed up to an external hard drive.

I still have the photos stored locally on my laptop and an external hard drive, and I fully expect that I'll need to upload them again to another service (maybe Google Photos, if that still exists) when Flickr finally fails as a business.

(Very) old school: you get a multi-TB disk of some sort, doesn't have to be fast or high quality.

Back up the media to that disk, and then take it down to your safe deposit box. No absurd monthly fees, no Terms of Service, it's off-site so if your house burns down, you're covered.

"Your what?" Yeah, the banks still have those. Mine costs $15 a year. If you die, your next-of-kin will have to bring in a death certificate to get access to it. They'll have lots of other hassles, believe me.

Forget being trendy and having it in the cloud. How often are you going to access it? "Never", right?

You do have to go in every few years and replace it with the latest & greatest, and you'll probably have more media to backup anyway.

Synology NAS, using Synology Photos (installed on my phone + wife's phone for photo backups). The NAS is backed up nightly using Synology C2. I also have a local standalone disk. We also both use Google Photos - although not all photos on here and ideally I wouldn't use it, the utility is so strong it's hard to say no to it.

I did used to use Mylio [1] which is a really lovely solution that uses a sort of internal P2P approach - your images don't go near a cloud host if you don't want them to. It just keeps your "vaults" updated with each other - a vault can be on a NAS / desktop / mobile. The issue I had with it was that the mobile scenario is a bit shonky - required you to have your phone on at the same time as one of your other vaults in order to sync mobile photos, and that proved too fiddly to maintain.

[1] https://mylio.com/

For me the most important part is to keep it simple and not dependent on the one tech person of the family paying for some cloud storage.

Unlike other mentions in the comments what you don't want to have is custom scripts, git, backups tools, strong encryption, cronjobs running on some server that will go away eventually. A labeled, unencrypted HDD in a closet in two different locations will most likely do the job just fine. If you want to throw in your cloud backup that you take care of that will be a nice bonus but I wouldn't rely only on a "tech" solution.

We've been building ente[1] as an e2ee alternative to Google Photos.

Posterity is something we've been thinking deeply about. Our infrastructure is designed to support successors, similar to GitHub[2]. But since cloud storage is expensive, successors will have to choose between exporting a local copy[3] or paying for the newly accumulated data.

We are still designing this "feature". If you think we can do better, please let me know. We would be grateful for any feedback. :)

[1]: https://ente.io

[2]: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...

[3]: https://ente.io/faq/migration/out-of-ente/

First, I'd recommend thinning out - multiple terabytes sounds very extensive and can be thinned by removing duplicates and by using better compression like webp or x265, removing unnecessary raw-files, etc.

My personal backup is the usual 3-2-1: 3 backups, 2 places, 1 offline. I have one copy on my local harddrive (that I work with), one automatically synced copy via seafile on one of my dedicated servers (which also maintains a few months of history in case I accidentally delete something) and I have one external, offline harddrive at a relatives house, that I sync to every half a year or so. Since I'm paranoid, my dedicated server is backed up to an external storage every night as well via borgbackup. If you don't want to spend a few bucks a month on backblaze or another service, just use a local NAS - as long as you have one harddrive offline and external as well (in case of a ransomware attack that crypts all files).

Important: My files and backups are fully encrypted and it's imperative(!) that you backup all documentation, all config files, all settings, all cronjobs, all executables that have something to do with the backup and restoration process unencrypted with every backup - in the desaster case, nothing sucks more than trying to find the right settings again.

Case in point: I originally used a custom shell script and encoded the files with openssl. However, the default hash scheme was changed between openssl 1.0 and openssl 1.1 (or something like that) and when it came to restoring after a harddrive failure, this took me like a weekend to sort out.

As for posterity: it's up to you if you encrypt the external drive at a relative - if you're fine with a burglar having the images and you cannot be ransomed with them (e.g. due to nudes), just write what is on the harddrive clearly and you're fine.

Spent roughly 1k on a nas system at home which gives me 6tb of redundant storage.

It's raid 0 (2x6tb) with 2 separate backups done nightly/weekly, one in the house and one done in the garage.

The speed of access is unmatched to any cloud system, in the long run it'll be cheaper than online (assuming £10 per month for 6tb of storage).

I made the plunge after trying a few cheaper options plus cloud. I'm happy with the investment and haven't looked back, it's been rock solid. Synology.

The same system could probably be had for less now, the nas box also acts as my docker server which has been running without issues for 2 years. Most importantly it's not a full time job maintaining it, I spend maybe an hr a month if that checking up on it.

Comes with duplication detection and everything you'd need without learning shell can be done using the nice gui. It's just nice having a system anyone can use, no shell scripts in place at all. It just works.

I'm surprised how technical and homegrown all these solutions are (well, it's an HN crowd so maybe I shouldn't be). I'm a techy too and pretty into photography, but I've gone the other way.

I store all my photos on a desktop computer and use BackBlaze to automatically keep everything backed up.

It violates the 3-2-1 rule but in the 10ish years I've been using this approach I've had tons of harddrive failures, had to restore some backups due to my own mistakes, but I haven't lost a single image.

I used to do complicated sync stuff but I found that the more moving pieces there were the more I would lose photos for various reasons.

Use Google Photos on my android phone, then use gphotos-sync[0] to sync the files to a hard drive on my DIY NAS. Contents of hard drive are periodically backed up with restic[1] to B2[2].

My reasoning is that I don't trust Google to not lock me out of my account at some point, so having both a local and a remote backup gives me piece of mind. I periodically check the offsite backup to check that it's still all working. Total cost for about a terabyte of files (it's not only photos and videos) is about $6/month, which is pretty reasonable.

[0] https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

[1] https://restic.net/

[2] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

While it won't yet solve all your backup needs (still early days), a few friends and I have been working on a privacy focused competitor of sorts for Google Photos, but a bit easier to share your albums with friends and family. It is free for the time being, but it will be a paid solution as you're not paying with your data. It's also E2E encrypted. While all photos are currently hosted by us, we're also exploring letting you to connect the app to your own cloud or storage solution for those that want full control. If you're interested it's called StoryArk https://storyark.eu/

I have 3 NAS systems based on Freebsd + ZFS where all system are over 10 years old on 3 different locations. My home, my parents home, and at my co-location.

It is just ZFS snapshots with replication. I wrote my own shell scripts for this that takes daily/hourly snapshots. This scales well with multiple TB's, bandwidth is no issue as only changes from last snapshot(s) are replicated.

After 10 years, I've replaced only 2 hard drives of about 30. I do upgrade FreeBSD once every second or third year. Nothing else, it just keeps going.

This project has probably costed me max a week in configuration & setup & maintenance over the 10 years.

In addition what everyone else has mentioned, my plan (yet to be implemented) is to slowly organize the photos into albums, e.g. "Family vacation to Hawaii, 1995".

For pics that don't fit neatly into an album theme I'll group them by date, "Family pics 1995-1996" based on their quantity.

Then I'll print photobooks, adding info where possible about location, date, and people. Basically, recreating physical photo albums. I'll print 2-5 copies of each album, depending if I expect to send copies to other family members or not.

Having physically-printed photos works both as a last-ditch backup and as easy access for anyone to browse. I nostalgically remember spending time as a kid flipping through my parent's and grandparent's photo albums - sometimes with them, but many times on my own. I want to ensure my own kids can have the same experience.

I have 3 layers:

Online: A big BTRFS "raid 1" (block-based mirroring) array. This is what Plex runs off of. If I lose a drive, I just replace it and rebalance. I run btrfs scrubs weekly.

Offline: I have a WD external hdd with a plain old ext4 hdd that I rsync all files to weekly. If my btrfs array shits itself, I just copy back over from this hdd.

Emergency: If the above process doesn't work (say: the external hdd is dead when I go to restore from it, or I can't physically find it, or my house floods and everything in the basement is lost, etc), then my fallback is:

I sync all truly critical stuff that can't be replaced (so, basically just family pics and videos) to S3 as deep archive storage class. Costs pennies. I don't do any fancy tar/archiving, encrypting, or compressing (since video and image files are generally already compressed). I figure the risk of people snooping at our family pics is smaller than the risk of me needing to restore from a backup and not being able to because of stupid reasons (lost gpg key, some kind of problem with tar, etc).

This is small, since most of my disk use is from things like rips I've made of BluRay/DVD's, FLACs from bandcamp or rips of music CD's, etc. Things I can recover with appropriate effort.

It took me several years in pursuit of a self hosted solution, that I don’t need too much time to maintain. I think the current solution is working very well for me.

I have a raspberry pi with a USB drive attached. The OS is ubuntu, so I can use ZFS. The drive is backed up to backblaze S3 using restic in a cron job. The backup and ZFS health is monitored with healthchecks.io

The data sync across all the devices including the raspberry pi is done using resilio sync.

I view my photos when I am home using an app written by myself: photograf (https://github.com/ptek/photograf) It runs on the same raspberry.

Regarding posterity...I think when we die no one will care much about our data. I recently wrote a will and this included documenting my bank accounts. A death notice is sent to the banks when you die and and whoever specified on the will can access these funds. This ticked a big box in my mind and resulted in me dropping some unecessary tech.

You have got me thinking though about my backup of family photos/videos. My backups are all too clever, encrypted and inaccessible at the moment. I feel inspired now to make sure photos/videos are easy for my family and future generations to access.

Google Photos with family sharing and Original quality with paid Google One. I used to have a NAS based solution which was backed up to S3 etc. I even wrote a photo browsing server for my NAS but became too complex as we increase family devices among people with different levels of skill.

The ability to search photos easily over time and the weekly "this week X years ago" reels are great value.

To save the environment in terms of redundant storage, I just upload them directly to the NSA cloud service. The free tier plan is pretty good.

Related question, how does everyone get the family photos grouped together in the first place?

My family are all taking photos on their own devices during a vacation, holiday, gathering, etc. and then someone creates a shared Album on Photos (iOS) where everyone just dumps all the photos taken. It's a complete mess in my opinion. WE have a shared album "Christmas 2018", "Holidays 2019", "Xmas'20", etc. depending on who named it.

Everyone else seems to like the ease of upload and ability to find past pictures. Getting the photos out of the apple app seems like a pain to me. I feel like there has to be a better way, but it has to work for the lowest common denominator (Grandparents, etc).

We have a couple people on Android and are essentially cut off from the family photo stream. When that happens everyone's mentality is, "get an iPhone".

Sync everything to Google photos -> Twice a year, do Google takeout and save it on a hard drive, throw hard drive in a fire resistant safe

It's cheap, easy and ransomware proof.

Since I am also an avid DSLR photographer, the first decision I made was to use Adobe Lightroom (Classic) as the "single source of truth" to manage all our photos.

This means obviously importing all photos taken via my DSLR into Lightroom, but also syncing all photos taken on our iPhones via the Lightroom Mobile App.

Lightroom Classic keeps all the (compressed) photos in the Adobe cloud for easy sharing and browsing, but also writes them out (unaltered) to a directory on my Local NAS.

This NAS gets automatically backed up via Arq Backup (https://www.arqbackup.com) to an encrypted Amazon S3 bucket. Additionally, once or twice a year I create a versioned copy of the NAS via Carbon Copy Cloner (https://bombich.com/) to an external hard drive. This hard drive is stored offsite somewhere safe.

In a nutshell, for around $12 a month + a NAS + a hard drive, we have all the convenience of the Adobe Lightroom cloud combined with a local copy on the NAS, a cloud copy on S3 (in case Lightroom cloud gets corrupted) and an offsite copy (in case our place and the whole internet burns down :-)).

I posted about my homebrew solution for photos/documents/scan archiving with a local NAS + encrypted offsite backup on a VPS last week at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29863822#29888273 . My use case is 300-400GB of photos which is affordable on a 4TB VPS.

In short, I have an old desktop-turned-NAS with ZFS that will tolerate 2 physical drive failures and access my photos over a network share. It runs a weekly cron script to copy an iterative, encrypted borg backup of the photos offsite over sshfs to my VPS. I can mount specific date's snapshots over sshfs back to the nas/another machine if I ever need to recover anything without having to enter the password on the VPS.

It's a good question on what would happen if I died. Thanks for getting me to consider this. My spouse wouldn't have a clue with the VPS or how to fix the NAS but could pay someone to easily copy the data off. I should leave a note taped inside the case. For now I'll plug an external ntfs drive into the NAS and if needed she could plug that into any other device.

External HDD that's backed up to Google Drive. If the drive fails, it's safe at Google. If google cancels my account, I had it on my local HDD. External drive is pretty cheap and so is Google Drive storage.

I trust survival of the fittest on my digital data, scattered around a small pile of old laptops, a box of unordered hard drives that used to belong to a RAID, and the current working computers.

Life is already complicated as is.

Stored on a Synology NAS, and indexed by PhotoPrism. I backup the entire NAS to a Google cloud encrypted bucket every night, and once a quarter or so update a backup on a solid state drive I keep in a safe.

I wrote Timeliner [0] and am writing its successor, Timelinize [1], to download all my family's stuff to our own computer.

[0]: https://github.com/mholt/Timeliner

[1]: https://twitter.com/timelinize

Basically iCloud plus AWS S3. Every so often I dump old ones into S3, zip them and put them in the glacier instant retrieval tier. Super easy to use (drag and drop) and cheap as hell. I pay less than a dollar per month right now.

You’ll obviously need to leave keys, instructions etc for your next of kin. Or put a hard drive in a safe deposit box.

All computers in the house backup regularly with borgbackup on a small servers (a 2010 Macbook with an attached USB drive). This is done by hand, but there is a script that periodically checks that no backup is falling behind.

Then I have a custom script that encrypts and replicates all the borgbackup repositories on Google Drive (where I have unlimited space because my previous university still hasn't deleted my account).

Ideally I would also replicate everything on a drive at some relative's house, but I haven't had time to set up this yet.

Overall I am rather pleased with this setup. This is for general backup of everything. Specifically for photos, I have a script on both my and my wife's Android phone that copies all photos and videos to a shared directory on the MacBook, and she periodically organizes all the photos there. Then they fall in the main backup.

Well, I don't store photos or movies, but there is some audio data and total system backups. I'm currently using Cloudberry + Wasabi and pay about $10/month for 1.7TB data on a European server. There is no good way around paying if you want some cloud storage to protect against fire damage, etc. You could ask friends to host servers for you in exchange for you offering disk space for them, but this is very fragile and incurs too much administrative burdens in the long run.

If I were you, I'd delete 90% or more of those photos and videos to save running costs. I don't know how enthusiastic you are about watching photos of yourself when you were shitting your pants as a toddler, but, speaking for myself, I'd consider being urged to watch even a small fraction of what you have at family reunions some form of torture....

> What is your system for backing up family photos and videos to stand the test of time?

In addition to the other good answers, a box full a printed photos will stand the test of time.

1. Encrypted external USB drive as a live copy

2. Encrypted external offline USB drive onsite

3. Encrypted external offline USB drive offsite

4. Upload of an encrypted archive to the cloud storage

It's all manual so sometimes some backups are months old. Haven't lost a single digital photo for almost 15 years now, and have gigabytes of obsolete photos...

We pay for Apple iCloud 2TB plan. Sync all photos & videos to local external hard drive. And then periodically copy local Photos library to NAS.

Then I share my Amazon Prime backup with my wife. All our photos are backed up there but not videos.

For videos, I upload edited videos on YouTube as unlisted or private. And some of better videos as public on Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram.

And finally I try to share as many photos and videos in emails, Whatsapp, with friends and family. Sort of distributed back up in the worst case scenario.

(Also never delete any photo or video unless you really don't want anyone to see it ever. I used to extensively prune my library but wish I had not. Storage will likely keep getting cheaper. And AI will get better and it will be able to create better slideshows and edited videos.)

I use iCloud, and would pay for a solution that allows me to automatically archive on a monthly basis to Amazon Glacier. Anyone know of such a solution?

I’m looking to improve, simplify, and more efficient but here is my present setup for our family (no extended family yet).

We use Apple Photos as the primary, of which I export a backup once a while (at-least yearly for sure). Because Apple has’t solved what everyone ask — a way for two or more users to merge Photos, I use Dropbox[1] on the other devices (wife, daughters) to collect into “Camera Uploads”.

I split the content into “Screenshots” (PNG), Videos, and Photos with Hazel[2]. Photos to imported to the Primary Photos Library, Screenshots, and Videos are either deleted or sorted weekly (few minutes), monthly (30-min-ish), quarterly(30-min-ish), and yearly (about 3-5 hours on a day around the end of the year, with the other digital clean-up task) during my digital chores that I do. My daughters produces a lot of them that I need to throw out. She can position her iPad and video-shoot while she talks her way cleaning her desk for an hour.

The photos and videos are now in my primary device iMac (for now), with a second backup on a 2012 MacMini running many other digital errands. The 2TB iCloud+[3] is good enough for now.

I would definitely love to clean this steps and move to a more non-proprietary format (read non-Apple) to Open Source tools/process.

I tried Google Photos because it was easier to combine and I even had one of their large plan but it turned out to be one of the messiest thing I tried. Stopped using them[4].

I will be reading and learning from the other interesting comments in this thread. Thanks to all.

1. https://www.dropbox.com

2. https://www.noodlesoft.com

3. https://www.icloud.com

4. https://brajeshwar.com/2021/how-to-delete-all-photos-and-get...

Every year I do a photo book. Used to use apple but they discontinued the service so now it’s snapfish. It’s a lot of work to create but worth it

Hard drives with multiple copies in different places, and you need software to manage those photos and video for you, google Picasa was good in the old days, until google kills and replace with google photo. All major players provide photo cloud service, and for some people think the problem is solved, while some believe the digital assets should be taken care by themselves, store locally, backup locally, that is the primary, and cloud backup is the tertiary backup, a good complementary.

The price of existing cloud storage is too high, and some of the companies(Shoebox, Canon Irista) doing the business gradually shutdown the services, this is a money losing business, it’s not the efficient way to manage huge amount of assets centralized (flicker CEO’s open letter sent last year confirmed this), they have to either make it more expensive, or make you the product. Cloud service is convenient for the user, people don’t need to buy expensive hardware, don’t need to be the professionals to maintain that, don’t need to worry about the energy fee to keep it run 24x7, but things are changing, single board computers are getting cheaper, more powerful and more energy efficient, storage are getting cheaper with larger capacity, software are getting more intelligent, people are having more and more concerns about the privacy, it’s now viable to host the Photo service, your private cloud, at your own place.

There are tons of open source alternatives there, but non of them provide competitive features like google photo, even though there are some backend services like photoprism that does a very good job on indexing the photo with AI, however the mobile APP is missing, and google also has the ecosystem to show photo/video on google home and chromecast.

We've been building Lomorage (https://lomorage.com) trying to fill the gap, it's easy to setup a self hosted service(Still need a lot of work to make it easy for non tech users), cross platform, has iOS and Android mobile APP, can setup multiple accounts, some basic AI search(not polished and need more work), there are other features missing, but it's stable enough for daily use. Would appreciate you try it out and give some feedback.

The solution I've used for the last 2-3 years:

1. a cronjob on my android phone (via termux) does an rsync to a VPS

2. the VPS has a cronjob to sync everything with S3

3. the frontoffice tool for people to access those photos is my open source Dropbox like frontend that is bring your own backend: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash My wife and I got an account and family members can access it through shared links.

The S3 bill goes to a shared account so that If I die, the VPS will probably be quickly removed but S3 should stay in there with my wife paying for it.

Parallel question: formats

I keep all my photos in the "native" format, which is basically JPEG and whatever my iPhone is spitting out these days. They are currently editable (which for me is mainly crops, with occasional other fix ups). I scanned all my old negatives, APS, and slides and just had them all issued as the lowest compression (highest resolution) JPEG (I didn't have a huge choice of formats).

But I have a bunch of videos from film tape, and cards. What's the best equivalent (supporting simple crops and edits) that might reasonably be editable in future?

I burn 25 GB M-DISCs every few months.

If I were being properly rigorous I'd be burning three copies and putting two of them in different physical places.

Printing out the occasional photo book of our favorites is also a part of the strategy - if our grandkids want to see photos of our lives after we're dead, they won't need to worry about lapsed hosting bills or ancient storage technology. They can just look at the book.

Obligatory reference to my rant about data preservation:

http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html

For video files - a little off-topic - I created an app for dealing with huge number of video files: Video Hub App which lets you see previews from your videos (even if the files are scattered across many offline hard drives). Might come in handy for someone.

https://videohubapp.com/en/ - MIT open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

Tech solution: iCloud, which mirrors them across all devices, then automatic backups of a Mac and a PC where those files are stored into a RAID nas.

Non tech solution: I just print everything. I refill canon cartridges, making the cost of ink negligible and buy cheapish 4x6 photo paper, and I just print like crazy. After some basic calibration, the prints are quite good enough. I guess longevity of the aftermarket inks is still to be seen. Wife enjoys just picking up some prints to send friends and family. She snaps a pic of whatever she sent, and I reprint those.

The main storage ("media" partition of ~450GB hosted on a DL380G7 with a DS4243 array (mdadm/lvm) "under the stairs") is kept in sync (using rsnapshot) with a secondary storage (SS4200 with an external eSATA enclosure) in another building on the farm - but hosted on the same electrical branch and connected to the same physical network so it is vulnerable to any spikes which make it past the quite elaborate power filtering I installed when I got fed up with repairing or replacing hardware after every thunderstorm. There is a separate backup to a set of spare drives on the DS4243 meant for quick access, e.g. when some experiment has gone wrong. Separate from this I make encrypted regular backups to online file hosting services (currently using free accounts on Mega) as well as to storage hosted by family abroad. I've given up on making backups on DVD a long time ago since this was simply too much work for the relatively small benefits.

The chance of all of these versions becoming unavailable is low enough for me not to worry. If I end up under a tree some day nothing changes in the short term, the data will be available to those who have not yet met their tree. In the longer term I'd expect someone to either pick up where I left off or move the data to some storage which befits their level of expertise and needs. I don't want to force them into any contract with any provider, nor can I decide what they deem to be worth keeping.

I am working on a fully decentralized application to solve this problem. The application is a cross-OS Nodejs app that provides an OS like GUI in the browser to display the file system of the local machine and other trusted machines. Network file copy is currently broken pending completion of a major refactor.

https://github.com/prettydiff/share-file-systems/tree/master...

Tangential discussion: my daughter recently asked to look through our family videos and we've been getting through them the last few nights. It's wonderful. Both kids are enjoying seeing themselves being ... themselves, embarrassingly unbound by the learned shame and anxieties that come from moving into teenage-hood.

I'm glad my backup and storage setup has stood the test of (thus far a relatively short) time.

Most videos are from mobiles, and I use syncthing on each device to automatically back them up to NAS. The NAS has an external USB drive to which back ups are directed, plus another NAS in the shed as a secondary on-site backup - which also has an external USB HDD that gets backed up to. All of the backups other than mobile device to NAS via Syncthing are done with crontab'd rsync scripts.

I then irregularly rotate portable USB-caddied HDDs from my parents and in-laws houses and backup to them as well. This rotation is well overdue, thanks for the reminder.

I don't do cloud. It feels too ephemeral in the context of my history with online services - I change my mind and switch around a bit, and lose interest here and there. I'm the kind of person who would host their own email server if I wasn't already gigabytes deep in a grandfathered free custom domain plan from Google. (I do actually host my own email server using Citadel, but it's a domain that's very rarely used and entirely non-critical).

Love this question - been through a few iterations. For context I'm an amateur photographer (portrait) so I have a lot of RAW files that I tend to keep (almost 3TB now since 2010) from my various Nikon cameras (D90 and D7100 - not amazing but they do the job!)

I have a primary SSD for my OS and applications, a secondary SSD where I store my latest/active Lightroom catalogues/files and a large 4TB (spinning disc) hard drive for local backup.

After a shoot I'll import the files onto my secondary SSD and then manually copy them over to the local HDD once I've done my picks and culled things a bit. That HDD is automatically backed up to Backblaze so there's always an original copy of the files either local or in the cloud. Any images that I edit/pick/export will be manually uploaded to Google Photos (usually in it's own album) and I try to annually pull down files from Google to go into another 'jpg/exported' folder on my HDD that's backed up to Backblaze. My wife and I also have our iPhones backing up to Google photos automatically plus we have Apple storage/backups - so we tend to have double coverage on most things.

Some of it is a bit overkill probably but I'm particular about having access to all my photos and I've definitely gone back to look at and edit old photos/shoots so it's worked out ok for me so far.

I uh, kinda just don't. I save some pictures to Google drive and otherwise just embrace ephemerality.

Another side to this problem is that so many online services are structured as a contract between one person and the company, when what I really want for family photos and documents is something much more family-focused. In particular, if I die, it should make zero difference to the relationship.

I sometimes wonder how much of the way things are is because that's just how the US legal system is, and how much of it is because that's the worldview of the childless twentysomething singles who built these systems. (No judgment: I know when I was a twentysomething childless single building things, I had a person-centric world view, not a family-centric one.)

(An extreme example of this problem is the oculus quest, a device that is begging to be shared between family members, but it requires a Facebook account to use. Further, it is a breach of the terms to have a family facebook account. Nobody in our family with a facebook account - i.e. the older people - wanted to sacrifice theirs to the quest.)

It's weird/sad that a family doesn't have any sort of legal personhood, but a corporation does. A joke solution here might be to incorporate my family and have all these digital assets belong to the family corp. I'm not even sure if I'm joking.

I store them on my NAS, and my NAS has a synchronisation with Amazon Glacier which is a very cheap storage service that is designed for cold backups, meaning if you want to request a backup it can take 24 hours for Amazon to provide it, unlike Amazon S3 where you can access the files instantly but is 10 times more expensive. But you should only need to request a backup if your house and your NAS get robbed which hopefully happens very occasionally in your lifetime.

What I use is an old PC running a NextCloud instance. It has an SSD for the OS and the data sits on a ZFS pool made of two HDDs in mirror mode. I chose ZFS because I was worried about silent data corruption (it happened before in my large photo archive even if it isn't nearly as large as yours) and because when I set this up, there was still a lot of discussion on whether BTRFS was reliable or not. If you wish to replicate this now, I think you should re-evaluate BTRFS (assuming you will be using a Linux distro).

For the cloud backup, I think that you will be saving money by using backblaze [1].

As for the solution for posterity, if you're worried about the possibility of next generations not being able to pay, the only solution I see from the top of my head is to print the photos. Given the amount that you have this would be a daunting task, so only print the ones that you find the most valuable and look for a "safe and stable" (whatever this means... :D) place where to store them.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

We are a no-google/apple house. My photos come from various phones and two cameras. The phones all have the same Mega account on them and the photos get synced to "Phone 1", "Phone 2", "Phone 3" folders, and the whole Mega account syncs to a desktop.

The cameras have Wifi cards and sync to the desktop that syncs to Backblaze.

On new years day each year, the desktop gets archived to a external HDD and put in a safe.

My PC has a specific drive/partition (a single hard drive which has a single large partition)allocated to long-term archival use - in other words, a 'write once, keep forever' policy.

That partition is backed up daily to two separate external USB hard drives using rsync.

That gives three separate copies. One of those copies is also rsynced to a separate laptop, so a total of 4 copies.

I don't store archival stuff like videos, photos, music in my personal directories and scatter them all over the place. An archive is an archive and needs to be centralised and then distributed outwards from there.

Is there a good solution for posterity? For example, once I die

Unfortunately, you can't control posterity from beyond the grave. What you consider priceless is something that your descendants maybe can't wait to get rid of. I learned this lesson when my brother died. I started off trying to keep as much as possible of his stuff, but as I sorted through it I found that it was worthless to me so I ended up discarding about 95% of it. I saw that when I died, somebody else would do exactly the same thing with all of my carefully-hoarded information.

I have been using Google Photos for the past 9 years with no problems. Last year I decided to try out OneDrive, if any of you are using OneDrive, please leave a backup somewhere else or, at least, don't use the selective sync feature, which only syncs some files and folders locally. I used to use the selective sync, then I toggled it by accident, OneDrive created all the folders and was downloading the files when I decided to interrupt it and turn on the selective sync again. A few months laters, I found out that this little incident made OneDrive assume that my newly created empty folders were the right thing to backup and I've lost a decade of photos. Yes, I know it's 100% my fault, I should've known better than to trust microsoft with anything. And let's be clear, when I say trust, I don't mean that I blindly trust Google either, I just trust them to be competent.

Seeing the OPs question, I'd might add another feature which I feel is tricky. Backup of data is pretty simple (I guess most HN user could easily make an simple upload/backup app for photos quite easily).

- But what about searching... That moment when you're looking for a specific moment or latest photos of your dog? or pool to find a specific pool.

- Dupe detection.

Those unique features that for example, Dropbox is an inferior tool for the job.

I use a combination of Google Photos and Dropbox. GPhotos is great for searching photos, sharing, and viewing on Chromecast. But I don't like that they can transcode your data. Supposedly they don't if you have the storage space, but an accidental app setting can still mess things up.

Then there's Dropbox. It automatically uploads all my raw data, and syncs it across multiple devices. So at least I have local and cloud backups of all my raw photos/videos. A picture taken on my phone camera will immediately appear on my PC desktop hard drive, as long as it's on. The downside is searching through photos can be a slog compared to GPhotos, but that's why I use both.

I used to use Picasa many years ago, but haven't reinstalled it on a newer computer. I've been meaning to run it through my Dropbox collection again to make it easier to sort through locally. IMO, it's still the best photo management software. As far as I know, it's still the only one that does facial recognition locally and without a subscription.

I use a NAS and cloud storage. I recently got a new Synology NAS and, since it supports Docker, it’s straightforward to run nearly whatever software you want.

They have a decent enough Photos app for browsing / sharing photos.

For offsite backup, I send to B2 which is ridiculously cheap, but I pay for, so I’m not the product. I haven’t put Cloudflare in front of it, but that’s something extra folks do.

Same plan for ALL data.

Recent Local + Recent in Cloud(DropBox) --> Copy on Home NAS (Synology) + Local NAS weekly Backup (External USB) --> Continuous Cloud Backup (BackBlaze) --> Offsite Copy Annually

Copy all important and historical data to a cloud storage solutions. Currently using DropBox

Export photos to home NAS (Dual Drive) and NAS Backup to external drive weekly. Daily backup all local drives to BackBlaze

Once a year, copy all photos and important data to a larger encrypted USB HDD for one year storage off site at parents home. I swap the drives about once a year. This is my I need it quick recovery copy should the house burn down.

For encrypted storage, I use only local OS encryption. Got burned by TruCrypt/VeraCrypt not supporting new OS.

I'm paranoid about data loss, so I have a (IMO) pretty darn good backup regime. It's robust and easy. The main thing I worry I'm not protected against is bit flips.

My wife is the one who takes most of the photos in our family. For her computer (MacOS):

1) Back up her computer to USB hard drive via Time Machine every day or two.

2) Back up her computer to a USB hard drive in her office (via Time Machine) when she takes it in, about once per week.

3) When her drive starts getting full, move photos to a larger USB media drive attached to my computer. (Every year or so.)

For my computer (MacOS), including USB media drive:

1) Back up to a "main" and "redundant" USB backup drives continuously (every hour or so) using Time Machine.

2) Back up Mac hard drive, but not media drive, to "main" USB backup drive every night using SuperDuper.

3) Back up to the cloud continuously using BackBlaze.

4) Swap "main" USB backup drive with an identical drive stored in a safe deposit box (every 3 months).

This provides a nice combination of convenience, redundancy, and recent off-site backup.

This is what I've been doing for the past couple years:

1. Pictures are either manually copied to a staging folder on my storage server (for DSLRs) or automatically synced there via Syncthing (for smartphone cameras). For the latter, Syncthing is set up to preserve deleted files in case of accidental deletion.

2. The storage server runs zfs and takes 10-minutely snapshots of all datasets, which are replicated to 2 servers using zrepl: one sitting upstairs and another I rent from Hetzner halfway across the world. Replicated snapshots are kept for 2 years. Everything uses zfs' native encryption, but the replication targets do not have the key.

3. For the really important pictures and other documents, I create 2 additional backups: an encrypted backup to Backblaze B2 via rclone and burning them to M-DISC blu-rays. This is sort of a last ditch thing in case a zfs bug renders the primary backups unreadable.

I have rsync cron jobs that backup to an Olimex NAS [1]. Their mainline support is great and the box has been running find for a few years already. The only problem is, it only supports 2.5" HDDs, so you are limited to 4TB. Power consumption is less than that of my dish washer on standby.

From then on, I backup to Google Archive Cloud Storage over restic [2]

[1] https://olimex.wordpress.com/2020/03/13/bay-hdd-sdd-is-easy-...

[2] https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/storage-classes

2x4TB WD reds[1] in RAID1 on an old (ca. 2008) desktop I turned into a low-spec Linux box. These days I just keep it powered off most of the time, so I don't even really pay for electricity. Unfortunately even though I'm using reds, which are designed for NAS use cases, I've had two drives fail since I set up this rig in 2015, which I suppose puts me at ~$30/year, though I use the 4TB for lots else as well. It's durable enough for me since it's easy enough to notice when a drive fails and very unlikely that the other will fail before you can replace it.

[1]: https://www.microcenter.com/product/634744/wd-4tb-red-plus-5...

We sync a shared folder with dropbox. Backup with backblaze.

Our local "copy" is basically our personal laptops. This has required manually upgrading our SSDs over the years though because we have around 1TB of photos and videos.

Our off-site copy is backblaze. We don't keep a non-cloud off-site copy.

Historically, I first used a Synology Diskstation NAS (DS620) with 6 bays and 6 x 1TB data center grade HDDs to keep secondary copies of photos and self-recorded videos (I don't have an urge to archive any commercial movies, as I could just buy them again if they got lost). The Synology GUI sits on top of a Linux variant and is easy to use and worked well, and is maintaned reasonably well (I don't use most of its functionality, you could run your intranet on it but if that's what you like, I'd recommend you buy two of them and separate concerns).

After that I decided to migrate as much of my hardware as possible to 19" racks. So next, I upgraded to a Synology NAS RS819 (4-bay, 4x4 HDD = 16 TB raw capacity, 12 TB in a RAID5 setup). This lasts for quite some time, as I'm not much into movies. Importantly, the NAS is normally physically _not_ connected to any networks except when I transfer a new batch of photos for archiving.

Some historic material is on a DAT tape in a fireproof safe but that is close to its expected end of life, which is fine as there are HDD copies.

To view the photos, I access a subset of commonly viewed media on another 19" server, so the NAS is truly for archival use only.

What would be nice, but is not yet implemented is a second site to add redundancy and protection from disasters (of course a backup should be offsite per definition). The two sites could synchronize over rsync. But I am still too concerned of the attack surface when putting archival machines on a network. A solution could be the following: some friends recommend Google's "cold storage" as a tertiary cloud storage, which is affordable, and they use scripts to encrypt their data; I think that is a good idea.

The question regarding mechanisms to manage things in case of one's death is an excellent point raised by the poster - I bet a lot of valuable information assets have already been lost due to people passing away when their relatives are not IT savvy to rescue them (or the deceased didn't take precautions to leave passwords and instructions behind).

I actually print out my favourite photos and put them in albums (mounted on little sticky tapes). Safe against all digital corruption, and provides a nice little hobby for evenings in front of the TV. Of course I have the digital versions on a couple of hard drives.

I make a photo book once a year with the best photos from the year. I use Amazon photos, google photos, etc but the hard copy book is the only one I’d expect to still be around in 100 years.

For an offsite backup, I should start printing 2 and storing one copy at a relative’s house…

Synology DS720+ w/ 2 disc Raid 1 mirror.

Nightly update to Backblaze B2 using Synology Sync.

Considering a third local copy stored at a family / friends and updated yearly.

This requires almost no work on my part... just the occasional copy over of pics from phone / camera to my network drive.

I have a raspberry pi with a 1TB USB stick, which is enough space for me atm.

I use SFTP to upload new pictures from phones etc. to the pi. There are many apps that can do SFTP, like e.g. Foldersync on Android.

I have a shell script on the pi that runs once/day and uploads new files to S3 storage, after encrypting them with gpg.

I occasionally get a new USB stick and retire the old one, keeping it as a backup copy.

The whole thing actually works quite well and means:

- Local, unencrypted files I can access easily

- Encrypted files in the cloud, that no external parties can read

- Physical backups that I can put in a safe, or whatever

It’s here: https://github.com/ragnarlonn/savethepictures

9 disks in zraid3 holds my files, scrubs twice per month, ecc ram and cpu cache.

backup server galvanically disconnected, manually plugged in to synchronize, then scrub and shutdown, small window for catastrophe, chances of both servers getting killed at the same time is so small I'd probably be dead too.

main and backup servers are in two different locations (different power substations).

I just use rsync for doing the backup.

Family is connected to main fileserver. It snapshots once per week, so if they destroy something, I can get it back, it keeps two years of snapshots.

Once every 5 years I buy a new fileserver, the old one becomes the backup (assuming it is still healthy and not experienced any problems during it's service).

My friend and I built https://pixaver.com. It doesn’t address all of the points you note here, but it does offer some piece of mind if we get locked out of Google Photos.

A PC as file server and an Olimex A20 SBC Backupserver with 2 rotating ( one offsite) external encrypted sata harddiscs, rsnapshot and anacron that automatically backups all our servers, laptops and phones in the lan or known public ip.

I have about 6Tb of photos and videos that are stored on an on-site TrueNas Server. This includes my raw files, lightroom library and edits.

TrueNas is configured to automatically backup to Backblaze B2 (which is off-site).

After editing, all the exported JPGs are stored on Google Photos and shared with family. I like Google photos because of the content search and face detection features.

So that's 1 on-site medium and 2 off-site mediums. I used to burn the photos to archival disks and place them in the bank, but it got tedious.

Edit: I use Backblaze because it's the cheapest. Most Photo storage providers don't have support for Raw files. (If anyone has a recommendation let me know).

1. I have an Amazon Prime subscription, and we get Amazon Photos with it. Any photos taken on our phones are automatically uploaded there (I don't recall if these are original resolution or not)

2. Periodically I take photos and videos off our phones and store them on my desktop PC, imported into Lightroom. They are stored on 5400rpm HDDs in mirrored RAID config

3. I get terabytes of OneDrive space with my Microsoft package (I can't remember the name of it right now!), and it automatically uploads all the media from my desktop PC

4. I also have Seafile installed on the desktop, and it automatically uploads everything to my Seafile server, which uses Azure Blob Storage

I have a TrueNAS machine that hosts Nextcloud. All datasets are backed up to B2 with E2EE. Nextcloud has wonderful iOS integration. No other photo backup app I've seen backs up live photos and can restore to the camera roll. Monthly cost is low and no one else has the private keys.

I'm not close enough to the end to worry about posterity. If I die tomorrow then my keys are lost and all of my data is entropy. I expect to be motivated to have my data pass on in legacy but that will only happen if I have a kid who is willing to accept maintenance of familial digital archives. We're the first generation.

I print them... for xmas i printed 600 photos for about 60 eur, it was well worth it.

I have a 4 Tb disk in my main PC with every media on it. It's mirrored to a 1-disk local NAS. I rotate the disk on the NAS about once per week, putting the other disk in a big old safe that was already in the house when we moved in.

So at any one time there are almost complete 3 copies of everything.

There is no off-site backup. The safe is probably not super theft-resistant nowadays but it should provide some protection in case of fire.

I'm reaching near capacity on 4 Tb and don't exactly know where to go after that. I could upgrade all 3 disks to 6 or 8 Tb but I resent discarding the 3 4s that are in perfect condition. So IDK.

I am turning paranoid because my first thought about using someone else's storage, is, how much should I encrypt the archive so that ML can't run using my photo album as someone's training data.

My family "memorable" photos and videos are all stored on Telegram. We lost a bit when we converted the group to supergroup though. My mom is in her 80, really happy to navigate through the old ones when she likes. She can upload new media files to the group. I believe Telegram is the best tool that helps her: it's super easy, fast.

For the rest (e.g, snapshots, non-sense ) I have them copied between devices thanks to sync tools. I also do cold copies when I feel I need to do that.

I hope when I am 80 or 90, I would be still able to find my images on telegram then...

Photos sync automatically from camera to Dropbox Camera Uploads folder. I move them every now and then into a Dropbox/Photos folder (not syncd to local machine as it's too big) after organising them into month folders. These same organised folders are copied onto an external drive from local Dropbox Camera Uploads folder. This external drive is then Rsync'd to a backup drive that I keep in a safe.

I still have Dropbox as a backup this way so it's a cloud backup of sorts.

Not foolproof but it's super simple and good enough for me.

At this time, I have a local copy split across a Windows and a Mac. Both are backed up to Backblaze Personal plan. When someone from my immediate family wants to view an album, they have to download it. Not ideal at all, but that's our process today.

I don't use Google Photos for privacy concerns.

Now that I use Tailscale, I could consider setting up a NAT at home and make files easily viewable using NextCloud, but I worry I won't backup properly to Backblaze B2. Need to figure out how to schedule backups before I make the switch.

I use a NAS, raspberry pi, and s3 with the following workflow:

Photos are imported from SD card using a script. This script creates a new directory, captures some metadata, copies the photos in and creates thumbnails. This directory is rsynced to the NAS then encrypted, compressed and sent to s3. Nightly, from another location a raspberry pi with a large encrypted disk rsyncs the entire NAS.

All viewing and editing of photos is done against the NAS, and any changes are picked up nightly by the pis. The s3 copy acts as an immutable original.

NAS + USB HDD docking station plus couple HDDs in rotation.

While NAS has mirror on it, I do not consider it enough backup. I assume it will not save me from ransomware or a family member stupidly deleting a lot of data or from fire or from theft. It is mostly to give convenient access to it for my family.

HDDs are in rotation and one is always offsite with my family that I visit regularly. Whenever I travel there I make a backup on one of the HDDs and then bring the "old" drive back home to be reused on one of future trips.

Upload them to Google, Flickr and iCloud. Also have two local copies.

I have like 10 photos that are special to me physically printed out.

People are such hoarders when it comes to family photos and videos. You are never going to look at 99% of those photos and videos.

Currently I have an old NAS with 2 1TB drives in RAID1. At some point my drives will be full and I will migrate to a new system that will be slightly cheaper but requires a partner.

At some point I will buy a simple Raspberry PI (or cheaper system) with one multi TB drive using USB. A friend of mine will do the same. A cron job will run a sync on the drives at night. 50% of the drive will me mine, 50% of the drive will be his. So the system has redundant storage and it is off-site.

We keep all of our pictures on an external USB hard drive. At least once a month or after a large addition of pictures I back it up to my NAS ~30TB in the basement using rsync. That backup gets sent a few hundred miles away to a server (really, just an ancient, headless desktop running Debian tucked under a family member's desk!) with a large HD (12TB) via Syncthing. Syncthing is set to be one-way, pushing changes from my backup to the remote server only.

I use PhotoStructure for local management on external hard drives, BackBlaze for offsite backup, and a combination of Flickr and Google Photos for sharing the highlights.

Keep doing what you are doing. Also, from now on, at the end of each year, look through all your photos for that year, choose about 100, print them, and delete the rest.

Photos and videos are thrown into a multi-drive RAID 6 NAS with TB's capacity as the main central storage. RAID 6 offers redundancy against disk failure and easy plug & play replacement. An external USB backup drive attaching to the NAS does incremental backup daily. Periodically the data are snapshot to other USB backup drives and kept off site.

The NAS server has apps that offer backing up to various cloud services, but I choose not to use them.

Every time our phones reach capacity, I download all pics/video to my laptop. Then I plug in a portable SSD and copy them there in folder name "media until ". When I get to work next, I copy them to an identical portable SSD stored there, at which point I free the space on my laptop. This whole process happens about 3-4 times per year.

I'm currently using returned/refurbished Samsung T5's at about $100/TB.

I have my photos on my personal computer and some of them on my external hdd. I manage and edit them with lightroom. I backup everything from time to time on two external hdds with rustic. I export albums to google photos and personal (mine and my gf) stuff on onedrive. But it's only exports - lower resolution and after-edit jpgs.

[edit] only time I lost some image was because I have waited too long to copy it from my camera to the computer :)

One normal 16TB drive + two external 14TB backup drives which are being used in alternating order.

I would consider it the minimal defense against certain technical malfunctions. I should add another offline copy at some relatives, to protect against the 'house burns down' scenario.

Using an online service could help against the time between the backup cycles, but that is the least of my concerns and online services have their own set of problems.

I have a Synology's NAS for almost 9 years now. It has 2 4TB disks in Raid (SHR). Also I have a external 4TB HDD with a copy of everything in the NAS. The system is extremely reliable. I don't know if I'm lucky, but the first HDD took almost 7 years to brake. I simply replaced it and the system is still working 24x7x365.

As I have the MS Office subscription, the cellphone photos are also backed up in the OneDrive.

If you have terabytes of photos, be honest: no one is ever going to look at them. Pare them down to the good ones, get high-quality prints, and make a photo album. There's really no way to guarantee electrical devices will last without labor and cost. Although the idea of passing digital assets down as heirlooms has never existed before, so maybe there's an PaaS here that goes beyond Google photos.

Me & my wife are using onedrive to send everything to the cloud (basic plan).

Once we're close to filling up available storage, I turn on my local server which downloads it into its RAID disks (then I turn it off afterwards). I wipe my & my wife's onedrives and we repeat the process.

Once a year, usually around Christmas, we're sitting together and choosing photos that we want to print and put into family album.

I have about 1 TB of family photos and videos.

Copy 1: Desktop Computer

Copy 2: Backup 8 TB USB Hard Disk, always online

Copy 3: Backup 1 TB USB Hard Disk #1, always unplugged, rotated with #2

Copy 4: Backup 1 TB USB Hard Disk #2, always unplugged, rotated with #1

Copy 5: Microsoft Onedrive (Pay for 1.2 TB Storage)

Copy 6: Amazon Photos (unlimited photo storage for free with Prime)

Main purpose of the unplugged offline storage is in case of ransomware attack which could conceivably wipe out my online and cloud backups.

My wife and I have the Dropbox app installed on our phones, which automatically uploads all photos to that service (Remote Copy 1).

I have the Dropbox app installed on a desktop computer which is always running and syncing (Local Copy 1).

Once a week I hook an external drive up to the desktop and take a backup via windows-built in backup utility (Local Copy 2).

I have Backblaze installed on the desktop continually backing it up (Remote Copy 2).

Nextcloud on ZFS + rsync.net with rclone and crypto.

We create physical photo books, sometimes two copies. These are a (small, curated) subset of all the digital photos we have.

We keep the digital photos backed up on an external SSD and on iCloud (auto-synced from several devices), too.

Bottom line: we stopped trying to obsessively 'preserve' digital hoards. It's such a waste of our time, and is a questionable goal anyway.

I have more than 4 TB lifetime pCloud storage. Best option for storing photos and videos. Better than everything else out there.

We all have iPhones, so we use an app to automatically upload our pictures to the central nas. At the central nas a 24/7 sync runs to an external usb drive and other backup schematics to two other nas systems. Once in a while i copy (and encrypt) everything to another external usb drive. That usb drive then goes to another location.

I (well the whole family) use iCloud and Google One & Photos as a backup. I stopped using Amazon Photos, well, paying for it given that it syncs the photos just fine too and I have the videos in the other 2.

Every 3 or 4 years I get paranoid and I make a backup in a random HD drive that it takes me days to find, which for a backup it is not ideal.

- PhotoSync on all family devices uploads pictures to local ubuntu server

- Local server processes items and provides UI for family members

- Pics and videos get backed up to Wasabi (S3-compatible) storage using restic (incremental backups, no need to upload hundreds of GBs every night)

- Once in a while I back everything up to external HDD and store it in a drawer at work

I have ~50Gb so this works well for me:

- Local copy on desktop

- Google Photos (with upgraded storage) for "everyday" use (sharing albums with family, viewing on phone, etc).

- The "proper" backup is done with Kopia to B2 and Wasabi. I don't have a large amount of photos, so B2 is really cheap and its just a redundancy for Google Photos and Wasabi.

Independently of any technical solution, learning to not hold onto past personal memories can be beneficial.

Buy cheap NAS boxes for each family. Backup pictures to your NAS, then use remote sync to copy pictures to the other NAS. Now everyone has the pictures locally and it’s backed up remotely. Sync the pics you like to Google for convenient access. QNAP TS-130 is $140. 4TB is about $100.

> is there any way to guarantee these heirlooms remain intact and available

Are they actually heirlooms? If the goal is to keep these safe so generations can continue to not look at them, what's the point? If you haven't looked at something in years, odds are nobody wants to look at them.

Being an Apple household, we have two Time Machine drives, one in different building in case of fire etc.

I store photos and video on a Synology NAS in my home and vault to Glacier once a week.

However I recently realized that if I wanted to get the images back out of Glacier it would be ridiculously expensive. I’m looking for another option, hopefully something that is cheap and reliable.

Lots of good answers here already, but wanted to chime in. I recently bought a Blu-ray burner with M-disc support. Plan to buy or put together a NAS of some sort eventually, but also have been working through making backups of my most critical data onto M-disc Blu-rays.

Self hosted Nextcloud

I simply burn the photos in 100GB M-disc blurays. Then I bury them next to a tree in a zip lock bag.

Next to the usual 3-2-1 backup cycle I also keep a downscaled (around 5 Megapixels) full backup on my phone (SD card). The originals have several terabytes. Should everything else fail - at least some will survive. Also it's nice to quickly browse the collection.

My current approach is to store all photos and videos from mine and wife's phone to Microsoft OnDrive and Apple iCloud. The photos are then synced from OneDrive to my desktop PC as well.

Everything automatic, grouped into folders in yyyy-mm format

Yottacloud + systemd timer running rclone. It's been going for a couple years now, and is delightfully low code and low noise. Cheap, too, with unlimited storage for €7.99/month. Currently storing ~3 TB of raw footage.

I use permanent.org It also has a gallery feature https://www.permanent.org/p/archive/03pw-0000

For posterity, there is forever.com, they guarantee 100 years storage for one-time payment. It's like $150 for 12GB, so you must choose which pictures to store.

The sad part is that nobody will ever look at all those terabytes ...

I have about a years worth synced across my devices via syncthing and everything older than I move to an external drive(s) and AWS glacier. I have a little script that does it and only have to do it once or twice a year.

Anyone got any good fireproof safe recommendations that will save a back up external HD from melting? Also keep water/humidity out, block electrical signals from frying it, any other threat factors I am missing?

Backblaze used to have a pricing model where they limit how much you can upload per month but not directly how much you can store in total.

Could be worth it if you have more than 1 TB. Or even more than 200 GB at Google.

I have tons of 2.5" HDDs from laptops, is there a way to make them work in some decentish RAID1 setup? I looked around and Synology has a dedicated box but... it has 6 bays and way out of my budget

My wedding and engagement photos are backed up in a basic S3 bucket. I plan to do the same with any important family photos.

It costs next to nothing. The redundancy levels of S3 are way better than anything I can make.

Take photos (on phone) ... automatically sync (using Resilio Sync) to a NAS I have at home.

Periodically file/classify photos on NAS. Periodically make physical backup NAS to a remote site.

This approach is low cost and convenient.

Also interested in this, but hijacking to ask what folks scanning solution is. My dad has tons of slides, and prints. He’s hesitant to send them off, but we have analysis paralysis on scanners etc.

Howdy! I'm an early digital photography adopter (1998), so I started feeling this pain a while back.

After the fourth photo service I had migrated to went out of business (and Picasa was then cancelled), I realized I needed something that wouldn't go away on me, and started working on PhotoStructure, a self-hosted photo and video "digital asset manager" that does automatic organization and deduplication to sweep everything into a single, neat, timestamped pile, and, critically, _keeps my original files intact_.

The point isn't to use PhotoStructure, specifically, but to use an application that you could walk away from and not be heartbroken, because that app used a standard filesystem hierarchy, and used standards to store any metadata changes.

My beta users asked me "how do I keep my stuff safe?" so many times, I ended up doing a bunch of research and wrote up this article, which discusses file integrity, why "3-2-1 backups" isn't really what you want, and how to go from there:

https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files

Know that Google Photos is a great _secondary_ backup, but even in "original mode", what you upload aren't always the same bytes as what you download--their API strips off GPS metadata, I've seen changed captured-at times and exposure information changed after the round-trip through GP. (iPhone uploads, in "original" mode may survive the round-trip, but the point is that it's not something they guarantee).

I'd recommend using one of several mobile apps that will backup your original bytes directly to your computer at home. There are three I've tested and listed here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...

I'd also recommend using a filesystem on your home server that can detect media errors. I discussed that, and what cloud storage backups I recommend in the above article, as well.

-=-=-=-=

OK, so, now that you've got your stuff safe, let me tell you a story.

My Mom and Dad passed away almost a decade ago, and left several boxes filled with albums, shoeboxes and loose photos.

Almost none of the photos had dates on them. The albums had no writing in them, and most of the photos were of locations or people that I didn't recognize.

It took a while, browsing through these images, to realize that these images had relevance to only my parents: and maybe only the parent taking the photo.

Without additional context, these boxes of memories were almost entirely irrelevant to the next generation.

It was a punishing realization for me. I know these boxes were important and relevant to my parents, but all but a handful of photos had relevance to me.

Digital photography at least has a modicum of metadata automatically.

But you should still consider you "heirloom" of hundreds of thousands of photos and videos to be _irrelevant by default_ to the next generation.

So, how can you add relevance to your corpus of imagery?

I think that can be helped to some extent with

1. software (PhotoStructure shows random "samples" of years to deal with browsing through gigantic libraries, and displays "streams" of related photos using common metadata attributes to browse across hierarchical trees)

2. rating and pruning (so people can browse only the "best"), but

3. I think the real answer to avoiding irrelevance is for you to tell the story behind the image to give it context and relevance. It doesn't have to be a novel, but even a couple words can inoculate the album from irrelevance.

Good luck!

We print the most important photos and put them in photo albums. Properly printed photos on good photo paper and stored in a photo album should last a long time, hopefully measured in centuries.

I use both Google Photos and Amazon photos. Both, because I'm afraid of being one of those cases where Google's automation decides to suspend my entire account without recourse.

First delete all the low quality shots, scale down low quality vids with ffmpeg, that reduces storage reqs. Then I copy to bluray 100gb discs. Once a year rotate to a relatives house.

We make physical photo albums and keep a few copies of our favorites, and send some to family.

Digitally I keep a few different backups but they are raw and would take a while to sort through.

OneDrive + 2 offline copies in two separate disks. Organization is in folders. Intend to keep one disk at a different location. But right now everything is at one place.

I have a local disk for fast backups. A NAS for backups with change tracking once a month. And once a year a disk goes off with a family member to a remote location.

It doesn't completely fit your use-case but smugmug is pretty cheap for photos and lots of storage. You also get smartphone sync for free.

Old HP Microserver running Ubuntu with a Mirrored ZFS pool and periodic backups to S3 via Duplicacy. Pretty much bomb proof.

This may sound sarcastic, but I'm serious:

- I hardly ever take pictures or shoot videos. Not owning a smartphone helps.

- I don't care at all about old family pictures, so if family members want to do something "for posterity", I hope they don't give me a giant pile of media and expect me to keep it.

Also, I feel like everyone's always creating content, not deleting it. Won't the result be an unmanageable pile of cat videos where you can't see the forest for the trees?

I use Amazon cloud and photos are free with Prime. If I get close to 1TB in cloud storage with videos, I back up to local FIFO.

It may be a good product idea to build a box PC with redundant hard drives and ZFS set up in paranoia mode to scrub every so often in order to refresh the data it guards, and configure it with safe defaults such that it works as a vault(not having provisions to run Docker etc.). Want to access photos, hook it up with an ethernet cable and access it like this... Once done, leave it in the closet with power supply. I wonder how many would buy such a box..

I use google drive + Sync to an s3 bucket in cold storage.

The most important ones (e.g wedding pictures) are also stored on a local disk.

I try to keep it as simple as possible. I back files up to a hard drive. No exotic filesystems either, usually just fat

I use Google Photos too, as simple as that.

For now using google one with family sharing. Thinking of buying a synology NAS to store everything locally.

Syncthing to sync from my phone to my nas. And then a nightly crone to back it up with Borg to borgbase.com

Mac with a 2TB internal drive backed up to an external on Time Machine, whole thing synced to iCloud.

we copy all our pics locally to a NAS, and clone to a drive which we drop off at my parents twice a year; when we do the dropoff, we give them the latest backup drive and we take back their (less recent) drive.

so, requires a home nas, and two backup drives, and an offsite person,

All photos make their way to a home server -> duplicati -> S3 and backblaze offsite backups

iCloud + Google Photos. I've just resigned myself to spending to keep these memories safe.

Synology NAS, 2 6TB HDD with RAID1. Plenty of space, can customize to work with any use case.

NAS (including RAID config) with external USB drives, at least one drive kept offsite.

As a long-term user of Synology NAS, I already have one central solution to store all photos and videos, a Diskstation 918+ with 10TB storage. The NAS has a "photos" folder, all important family members have accounts and can store all photos in that folder. It's organized by year and one folder for each event.

When I first set up that photo solution I feared that no one would like to use it, but everyone liked the idea to have one central storage for all photos where everyone can also see and download the photos of others.

To make sure this is not the only place where everything is stored, I have another, older NAS sitting at my mom's house that is used as a remote backup solution. If ever comes the situation that both my and my mom's NAS are destroyed, photos probably don't matter anymore, so that's totally fine for me.

Of course, two NAS with much storage is quite expensive, but I guess it's cheaper in the long term, than paying for a multi-TB cloud storage every year.

TLDR: two NAS at different locations, one has a shared folder where all family photos are stored, one is backup only.

Amazon Photos for stuff from real cameras. iCloud for stuff on my phone.

Managed Nextcloud at Hetzner for 6 EUR/month with 500G.

Redundancy - Google Photos for integrations/ease of use, Amazon Photos since it's free with prime w/ unlimited storage, HD backup, occasional bluray backup, photo books of the best photos. All of it

Backblaze on a media server with several hdd @ $6/mo

One generation later, your heirlooms are meaningless.

If I care, I print.

I use SpiderOak to back up all my important files.

Regular distributions of printed photos by mail.

OneDrive and sync software on Android

Same on Windows

Manual copy sync to OneDrive on Linux

Boom done

Photos on Mac iCloud and borg to rsync.net

print the ones you care about the most

I use both Google photos and iCloud

Thanks for this thread.

Google Photos.

As someone who has created a service (www.gatherthefamily.com) to do this, I can tell you there are no great solutions.

As a number of people have pointed out there are several problems with cloud based solutions:

1. Will the solution continue to be available

2. Will the company properly take care of your data, and protect your privacy vs. the companies own self interests.

3. There is an ongoing recurring cost.

With home based solutions you also have a large number of issues:

1. A lot of work that requires technical knowledge (making backups, regular testing, etc...)

2. You have to keep copies in multiple locations and maintain your own disaster recovery.

3. Obsolescence of your hardware, backup solution is a real problem.

4. This takes real time that you would probably prefer to spend doing something else, which means it will probably get neglected at some point, and therefore still highly susceptible disaster issues from hardware failure or much worse.

A number of people have suggested that the old way is better (Have paper copies of the photographs). This is also a bad solution

1. When converting modern digital photos to print you will loose data that is available in the digital photo.

2. Printed photos will degrade over time (Whether in a book or printed individually)

3. These are highly susceptible to destruction via disaster

4. There is no way to search your data

As far as the ongoing cost of storing in a cloud based solution, by the time you figure the cost for any of the other options when done right, The cloud based solution is probably cheaper depending on how you value your time in each of the other options.

As a number of people have pointed out in the comments as well, the photographs are only valuable if you have useful Metadata of the photos. With modern photos that is much better than before as you get a timestamp and often a GPS location with the photo. Ideally you want at least the date, location, event(if applicable), people in photo, description/story. That will take a photo from being useless to others besides the person who took it, to becoming highly valuable. The more information the better. Collecting that metadata is much harder to accomplish with old analog photos that have been digitized as they often have none of that metadata handy.

Storing, searching and using the metadata is solvable with good software. I tried solving many of those issues with my software. the issue that is not easily solvable is the where/how to store the data. My software allows storing on our service or you can import from Google Photos or Dropbox, but as noted those all have issues. If anyone has ideas on how to solve those issues and actually come up with a solution that is good, I would love to hear it.

iCloud

iCloud Drive

NAS that backs up to Backblaze

I recently spent a lot of time considering how to do my own storage and backups for a collection of mkv files I have. Your solution depends on how frequently you need to access the data, how frequently you need to modify the data and how frequently you need to add data to the archive.

For family photos, you might view them once every couple years, just to browse randomly. Every once in a while you might access the data with the intention of finding a specific photo. The data is of course never modified and only expanded once every five years or so.

So, low bandwidth, infrequent access and expansion and no modification. The winner by a mile is Blu-ray.

A hdd will de-magnetize over a very short period of time even if it’s stored in ideal condition. Less than a decade. You need to plug it in and let it refresh those tracks. If you keep it plugged in all the time then something else will die. Any way you slice it, there will be maintenance.

The data on a Blu-ray just sits there. It will outlast you.

Some Blu-ray Discs can have problems. This is because of improper materials and poor manufacturing. If the layers of plastic that sandwich the medium become delaminated or damaged in some way, this will lead to the oxidation of the data medium and loss of data. A properly manufactured disc like a Sony archival disc will never do that. And they make discs with data mediums that don’t oxidize so those ones can hypothetically last for thousands of years. Despite what people might say, a proper Blu-ray Disc is a great way to store data.

So here’s the deal. Get rid of duplicate pictures and pictures you don’t really care for. Compress as tightly as you can. Burn a copy of those files to a set of discs. Then another set of discs from another brand. And then another and continue however many times makes sense for your budget/ value of the data. Send each set to a different family member starting with the most remote. When it time to update the database, send out the latest discs.