I never want to lose photos I’ve taken over the years. What’s the best solution to make sure they’re saved?
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.
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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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.
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 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.
Everything gets backed up to a Nextcloud instance running on my main Proxmox hypervisor. Every 24 hours, each VM gets backed up to my NAS. In addition, my Nextcloud VM runs a script every night to upload its entire database to Backblaze.
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 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.
Phone, PC, external SSD, iCloud All synced once a week or month or whatever
I know that I’m gonna get hate for this but… My phone is spoofed to appear as a pixel 5, so I have unlimited Google drive storage… I would setup next cloud, if I had the hardware to…
One hard drive on site. One hard drive off site. Rotate regularly.
2TB Google Drive, ~$100/yr.
VEEAM makes a local backup every night, but all my Windows libraries are mapped to a Google drive. Anything saved there automatically syncs to the cloud.
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.
I use Nextcloud to sync them from my phone/laptop/pc to my server then sync to my NAS, then monthly backup to a hard drive, which i rotate out off-site. In progress switching this to another NAS I store off site.
