HACKER Q&A
📣 denis4inet

Photo Storage for Travelers


Hi there,

I am not a professional photographer or videographer, but I am a Software Engineer that works remotely and trying to travel as much as possible. I have a drone, a 360 action camera, a mirrorless camera, a phone - I took a lot of photos and video. There is no commercial background therefore I don't want to spend $$$ on TB of storage. And internet bandwidth usually not so good to upload everything immediately. Therefore I am using the following setup.

Traveler Storage:

1. Single Board Computer (Raspberry PI) with armbian on the board. 2. External 5TB HDD from Costco. 3. Automount and autobackup script. 4. gocryptfs (but key is not stored securely currently on my side). 5. Resilio Sync to backup all my data to the remote storage

I connect it to the Etherenet and put into USB power supplier when I traveling. I am thinking to create some app for Android that can connect over Bluetooth and send WiFi password to connect to wifi network instead of dealing with Ethernet.

Remote Storage setup: 1. Single Board Computer (RPi4) with Armbian 2. External 5TB HDD. 3. Resilio Sync to backup media files from the "Traveler Storage". 4. Tailscale to be able to connect remotely.

Questions: 1. Is there a better alternative to my setup? Especially for hotels when internet are really bad? 2. If no, do creators need this thing to be in production? Does it make sense to start a kickstarter company?


  👤 tiernano Accepted Answer ✓
This is what Gnarbox was meant to be. It worked for a while, with options to upload to Dropbox (Lightroom was meant to arrive at some stage... but it didn't). I still have my Gen 1 and Gen 2 ones here, but unfortunately, the company seems dead... Raspberry Pi, a couple of external drives, Resilio Sync or Sync Thing and remote storage (at home or in the cloud) are your best bet... Direct to Lightroom is also an option but costs a good amount... Drop Box is also an option, but again, costs...

👤 ravivooda
I have been thinking about similar problem. I have a few TBs of hard drives lying around my house. And I have 180GB of photos in my iCloud. Instead of paying iCloud, can I compress my photos and save them in my hard drive.

👤 legrande