Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D56Q0000BAmuYXSQZ/is-something-wrong-with-amazon-photos-i-lost-240364-photos

by vocatan • 3 years ago

319 340 3 years ago

amazonforum.com

vocatan2• 3 years ago

Pop goes the photo cache, all my family photos mysteriously vanish into the depths of Amazon Photos

prox2• 3 years ago

Is that your only backup? Because precious photos need more than one (like any backup regime really)

Still it sucks and it shouldn’t happen, hopefully it’s just a reporting error in the app.

temp2022account• 3 years ago

Sharing my family-photo-backup system:

- Synology NAS is accessible on LAN & phones sync photos when at home

- Nightly rsync from internal NAS storage to 1 external (non-raid) hard drive

The nightly rsync does not delete files, so the external hard drive is pretty close to an off-site backup even though it's still attached. The only better thing I've thought of doing is mounting it ro after backups + re-mounting before backups.

At the end of the day we get 3 copies of data: the photo on your phone, the photo on the shared NAS, and the photo on an external hard drive that spends 99% of its life spun down.

EdwardDiego5• 3 years ago

I'm hoping that it's just a stale cache or microservice that hit an issue building its view of the metadata or something. They use S3 to store your data (according to this blog[0]) so my fingers are crossed that the data is still there, they just need to get an engineer onto it.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-...

gdelfino01• 3 years ago

I love my Synology NAS. It handles photos great: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/photos

madethemcry• 3 years ago

Me too!

I don't trust to open my network to the internet though. So I've created a VPN to connect with my ubiquity network from mobile. Sadly, I can't share photos with other folks or allow my family to participate easily.

I'm a layman in terms of networking. I always wonder how people can sleep if they open their home network. In this case either by using QuickConnect or forward ports and access the machine through a custom domain secured by TLS. I mean that would be perfect but I just can't convince me to take that burden of maintaining that open door into my network.

I've read about creating sub networks with the power of ubiquiti (or any other router), but I will never trust anything I configure there either because I can't confirm it's secure.

So I'm stuck with Google Photos additionally to Synology Photos because of the convenience of sharing.

lordnacho2• 3 years ago

My solution is to not open it. Use the cloud for browsing, use the home machine to copy the files down. You rarely need to browse on the home machine, it's really just there if the cloud provider ditches you.

akho8• 3 years ago

I own a Synology NAS, and now believe that it would have been easier to just set up a computer for the tasks I use it for. There are just too many cases where the solution is to use a container (and the clumsy web interfaces for reverse proxying &c), and if I end up SSHing into it too much, I prefer to have a more controllable environment.

It does fit some workflows very well though, you just have to assess if your needs over the next few years fit their business intentions.

avsteele• 3 years ago

Synology has an app which will automatically back up your photos to the NAS/server (only when on WiFi). I haven't been able to find an alternative to this on Android, have you? (photosync looks good but seems to only work for iOS last I checked).

lostlogin10• 3 years ago

You may be able to run a VM on your Synology via their app.

I run a Mac VM on mine but via iscsi as the actual VM host hasn’t enough storage to hold my library.

gaudat• 3 years ago

+1'ing this too. Very user friendly with its web interface. And I think it is the only self-hosted solution that can backup live photos from iOS devices.

There is only one significant issue that I found: Backing up large videos fails If I put the Syno behind Cloudflare. Because the photo backup app uploads it as one large HTTP form data and CF does not like it. So now I need to make do with basic firewalling at my place.

dschuetz• 3 years ago

No kidding, huh

kmfrk• 3 years ago

How fast are Backblaze transfer speeds these days? I wasn't a huge fan of the client, but running something third party like Arq[1] felt like a bad workaround.

[1] https://www.arqbackup.com

Daedren• 3 years ago

The Backblaze client's for Backblaze Personal Backup, while Arq and other third-party clients and APIs are for Backblaze B2, no?

gilrain• 3 years ago

restic backing up to B2 works very well for me, and it’s really cheap. The restores I’ve tried so far have been acceptably fast, albeit in the gigabyte rather than terabyte range.

quaintdev• 3 years ago

Use Immich OP: https://github.com/immich-app/immich

akho8• 3 years ago

At least they warn you to “not use the app as the only way to store your photos and videos!”

tecleandor• 3 years ago

I don't know if it's due to one of those weird GDPR blocking rules (I'm in Europe) but amazonforum.com doesn't let me connect. It just drops my connection:

   http https://www.amazonforum.com
  
  http: LogLevel.ERROR: ConnectionError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='www.amazonforum.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: / (Caused by NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.HTTPSConnection object at 0x10b551e10>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 61] Connection refused')) while doing a GET request to URL: https://www.amazonforum.com/

But if I connect indirectly, like through archive.is, it works: https://archive.is/wip/5MK8A

danielbln• 3 years ago

Not GDPR related, as I can see it from central Europe.

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

Had a similar problem but it's because Pihole is resolving the domain to 0.0.0.0 here. Through one of my servers in France it seems to work just fine.

weare138• 3 years ago

I was having the same issue. Disabling Pihole fixed it.

KomoD2• 3 years ago

I don't know if it's due to one of those weird GDPR blocking rules (I'm in Europe) but amazonforum.com doesn't let me connect.

It's not, I'm in EU as well, can connect without any issues

InCityDreams2• 3 years ago

Those blocks are tiresome. Like the eu is going to go after the eg alabama times or other small sites. I just vpn to usa and send them an email. Google etc...easy meat for gdpr, but for small site - why are you tracking me anyway?

paddez• 3 years ago

As a slight aside - I was surprised to learn that Amazon Photos (if you have Prime) includes RAW camera formats as valid photos for the purposes of their unlimited storage offer.

I've taken to essentially backing up all my RAWs to Amazon Photos - even the ones I would typically discard.

plagiarist2• 3 years ago

I also. I don't know why they would offer that as part of their base Prime service when no competitors seem to. The upsell for printing doesn't seem appealing to the type of person who would be storing RAWs.

akho8• 3 years ago

Sorry for your loss.

(here I was hoping that the Docker thing filled the surprised Pikachu face quota for the week’s frontpage)

wyldfire• 3 years ago

I thought I had received an email from Amazon a few months ago telling me that my storage on Amazon Drive was going away. Pretty frustrating any time a service like this just goes poof.

EDIT: I misremembered the details, actually the email says:

Beginning December 31, 2023, files stored on Amazon Drive will no longer be available to customers. We will continue to support Amazon Photos and ensure customers can safely back up, share, and organize photos and videos with the Amazon Photos service.

simonh• 3 years ago

files stored on Amazon Drive will no longer be available to customers

That's an interesting choice of phrasing they're using.

ho_schi2• 3 years ago

Sounds unfortunate. Hopefully just an error or the service can replace it by a snapshot.

No local backup on a drive or memory-card? Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network.

The cloud is the server of someone else and not a backup.

EdwardDiego5• 3 years ago

God you'd hope that Amazon is using S3 versioning (they apparently use S3 as the backend storage, because, well, yeah, you would. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-amazon-photos-uses-... )

Nextgrid4• 3 years ago

Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network. The cloud is the server of someone else and not a backup.

That's common knowledge among tech people but blaming the victim is not the solution here. These services are marketed as safe, reliable, and not needing backups (in fact sometimes they make it difficult to take backups, even more so for a non-technical user).

Maybe the regulation should be changed that any consumer-grade storage service either needs to provide adequate SLAs & compensation, or have to advertise in bold and prominent font (at least as prominent as their selling points) "WE MAY EAT YOUR DATA AT ANY TIME, PLAN ACCORDINGLY".

luckylion4• 3 years ago

Nobody is blaming the victim, they're saying that you should have a backup outside of your cloud provider.

I don't think people care enough about SLAs to pay a premium, until something happens to their data. But by then it's too late. The bold warning is cute, but have you seen cigarette packaging in Europe lately?

ho_schi2• 3 years ago

I‘m sorry if you interpret here a blame. I consider repeating common knowledge actually a necessity! To keep tech people informed and aware and also non-tech people.

PS: I should better do another backup…

ClumsyPilot7• 3 years ago

Local backups shall be stored in different locations (depends on importance) not reachable by network

This is basically you signing that we have failed as an industry.

No other industry expects it's users to operate with tbe diligence of a bank.

stepri• 3 years ago

This is just a reminder to take a backup of your cloud photos and store it locally (or other cloud provider). For example, with Google Takeout you can get a ZIP file with all your photos and videos from Google Photos.

ALLTaken• 3 years ago

For iCloud, would just copying images from iCloud to the backup media be enough?

bayindirh5• 3 years ago

Local photo library is a folder, disguised as a package. One of the folders store all the originals on the device. Copy that folder, and you're good to go. You can also get the full folder hierarchy, if you wish.

mleo• 3 years ago

You can use privacy.apple.com to request a copy of all photos and other digital data. It will send emails with download links when bundled.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

worldsavior2• 3 years ago

That makes no sense. If you have backups locally, why store them on the cloud?

homero• 3 years ago

House fire? Theft?

ssalenik• 3 years ago

two is one and one is none

riskable2• 3 years ago

In case your house burns down. It happens.

Toutouxc2• 3 years ago

One backup is no backup. Two backups is one backup.

xeromal• 3 years ago

The general rule is if you only have 1 backup, you have no backups. You need at least 2.

postingawayonhn• 3 years ago

So they can be easily accessed on multiple devices and shared with other people.

pandemicsoul• 3 years ago

The backup rule of 3?

ClumsyPilot7• 3 years ago

Exactly, if cloud cannot be trusted I might as well buy a synology nas and drop at a family member's home.

BLKNSLVR5• 3 years ago

Off site!

Geographical separation is important if you're serious.

Trasmatta• 3 years ago

I hate how Google Photos seems to no longer have the ability to auto sync to your computer. When it was integrated more with Google Drive you could do that, and then my daily automated backups would pull them. That way I had them in Google Photos, my computer's hard drive, and my off-site backups, all automatically. Now my only option is to periodically do a manual Takeout, as far as I can tell.

lom• 3 years ago

You can get automatic takeouts from Google, might have to find a way to automatically download them when they send it to your email

coldpie2• 3 years ago

So... what do y'all actually do with your hundreds of thousands of photos? I just bulk delete everything older than a month when my phone is low on storage. Do you ever actually go back and look at any of the hundreds of thousands of pictures? When do you do this?

skipnup• 3 years ago

All the time actually. I have monthly folders, automatically backed up by my phone to the NAS. Each month my wife and I sift through the photos and delete all duplicates and boring stuff and then we have around 150 photos per month that we sometime just have on as a slideshow.

Yearly, we create printed photo albums that we look at regularly and show to our kids.

But all this only works after lots and lots of hours of manual work filtering the photos.

Still, over the last 15 years or so for two people we have way more than 100k photos stored on the NAS.

BLKNSLVR5• 3 years ago

When you have kids, and when they turn into teenagers, you'll want to remember them as they were before.

;)

My daughter loves looking back at home videos of the family. So embarrassing, so beautiful, so many little things about their personalities that would otherwise be forgotten.

Just a few hours ago I was checking backups and stumbled into a nest of folders that had some more home videos in it, and of my son just being his quirky little kid self. Gives my life meaning, shows me I did stuff ok.

hbn2• 3 years ago

I have photos backed up on Google Photos for the last 10 years. I go back to find old photos all the time. There's different reasons, sometimes I'm just feeling nostalgic for a time in my life and want to see photos for them. Sometimes I want to find a specific photo of someone to send to them.

Here's a practical example of it coming in handy: back in university I moved to another city for an internship and took some framed photos I had on my walls. When I moved back into my parents' house when the internship was over, the nails were still in the walls and I wanted to hang them the same way I had before but couldn't remember which photo went where. So I went into my Google Photos, typed "photo frames," and was able to find pictures in my library with the framed photos in the background, and piece together which photo went where to get everything back to where it had been before.

ghaff11• 3 years ago

I do cull/edit my photos but I have scanned photos going back to the 1960s that I look at from time to time.

vel0city• 3 years ago

I look at them a good bit. Having a good tool like Google Photos or similar makes it easy to jump back to the photos from that one trip a decade ago, that holiday together with the family no longer with us, the dreams I had for myself in highschool. I find it interesting to see the changes in my life objectively by looking at myself, the places, the people, and things around me at various points in my life. I find it helps me continue to keep perspective of my life in the same way some might keep a journal. It can help me jump back into the shoes of who I was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and reflect on who I am today and where I'm going.

If I don't have any real reference points, its hard to measure things. Its hard to improve things you cannot measure. And sometimes it just feels good to help remember the good times with people no longer with us.

prmoustache2• 3 years ago

I backup everything.

The thing is also to delete photos you don't want to keep long term. Most of my photos are only synced when I am on my local wifi, so until then having a good hygiene of deleting badly taken photos right after taking them.

Having said that I have recently started (late december) to do a weekly printing session of my key moments of each weeks. Well there have been weeks in january and february I didn't print anything. I sometimes only have one or two photo per day/event but since I put the date on the notebook next to the photo and keep all other photos it helps me find back the whole event if I want to see them all. I am using smaller photo format than 10x15cm, mostly zink 2"x3" adhesive photos and kodak instant print 3"x3" from instant cameras that have a printer function.

I should blog about that.

rolisz• 3 years ago

Fun party trick: look up old photos of people when you meet them after a long time and show it to them. Everyone is shocked/embarrassed. Extra points if you can pull up childhood photos of them.

Tempest1981• 3 years ago

I've been enjoying the iOS photos widget. Every day it surfaces new photos from the past, based on different themes. A nice 2 minute diversion each morning.

But you're right, otherwise I would never have time to dig back into old photos.

ashwagary• 3 years ago

A buddy self-hosts his collection using a free tool called PhotoPrism. It has some auto classification abilities.

https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

lordnacho2• 3 years ago

This is the main reason I have a NUC sitting at home. It copies my family photos from the cloud and that's all it does.

harry82• 3 years ago

1.5 Terabytes? (Assuming 6Mb/photo which is what I'm getting from an old nikon in raw format, dunno what everyone else is using - enlighten me please if necessary).

Less than USD$50 for a 2TB disk. So buy 3, post one to a family member when its full. Double the price it for SSD?

How much Amazon Photos storage do you get for $150? Ok for this guy, none, and I get connection refused from the link above so I got no details. But assuming it worked as advertised how much would you get?

plagiarist2• 3 years ago

Nikon RAWs are more like 50 Mb on their current cameras. Amazon offers unlimited photo storage with Prime.

I agree they should also have their own physical backup if the photos are important, even at ~10x the storage requirements you estimate, but I'd also say any complaints about Amazon losing their photos are valid.

harry82• 3 years ago

oh, ok so prime sub is about $50/yr but you get other things and it seems popular.

And 15 Tb is the go. Can you encrypt them or do they require to be able to view your photos so not just bytes on disk?

any complaints about Amazon losing their photos are valid.

Like crossing the road, being right doesn't help. :(

dboreham3• 3 years ago

Data point: I have 7T of "photo data". I think some proportion of that is video, but probably no more than 10%. I am quite old and it does include scans of all the film images I've taken since birth, and all of one side of my family's film media scanned, and backups of all the cell phone images from family members' devices. From memory however most of the data comes from digital-era DSLR images which can be 30-40M each.

None of this data is stored in a FAANG company's DC.

elzbardico• 3 years ago

After a scare of being temporarily unable to recover my account on Flickr (later resolved), I got into the habit of printing my significant photos in a shop and storing them in a box in a cool and dry place. Of course, I also have local backups.

vocatan2• 3 years ago

Just to add context - I do have backups, but they're spread across a myriad of different hard drives. I had used Amazon Photos to consolidate, and benefit from the facial recognition to be able to quickly locate pictures of family members quickly.

I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up.

Thanks for the comments!

capableweb3• 3 years ago

I think that I'll give DigiKam another go, against the NAS loaded up.

I'm also looking for something FOSS that can do basic face recognition + maybe even more, but last time I checked DigiKam's detection didn't work so well, or maybe I got spoiled by the detection in Google Photos. If you do give it a go, would be nice if you reported back on your experience :)

komali22• 3 years ago

FOSS photo software with face recognition (note that some of this is off-premise face recognition, sometimes requiring an API key you get on your own)

https://damselfly.info

https://github.com/LibrePhotos/librephotos

https://photoview.github.io/

I may have missed some: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#pho...

mavhc• 3 years ago

How does the face recognition compare to https://www.photoprism.app/

wh33zle2• 3 years ago

Not sure if it has been mentioned already but photoprism added face recognition a few releases ago and it is working well for me: https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism

The quality of this software is overall extremely good. It is a solo-developer as well so you might want to consider sponsoring them if you end up using it.

I am not affiliated, just a happy user :)

raffraffraff3• 3 years ago

There's a difference between face detection and face recognition. Last I checked (less than a year ago) it could find faces, but was abysmal at recognizing them. I spend a few days on it, tweaking this and that, taking to the devs. It was crap.

bayindirh5• 3 years ago

Digikam is the bees knees in digital asset management. I manage my personal photo archive with that, and it punches way above its weight.

tastemykungfu• 3 years ago

Except for it's horrible face recognition right?.. ugh.

foobarbecue2• 3 years ago

"knees bees" ... maybe I'm missing a joke, but I always said "bees knees" in this context as a play on "business"

magicalhippo• 3 years ago

I tried it as a replacement for Picasa, but found it underwhelming.

It was slow processing the images, so took very long after adding new pictures to them turning up in searches.

One of the main attractions, searching geotagged images by location, wasn't smooth at all and quite clunky to use.

Tried it a few times last fall but gave up.

e40• 3 years ago

I can’t find an arm image for macOS. That’s a bummer.

8fingerlouie6• 3 years ago

Not that it helps you now, but i also keep all our family photos in the cloud (iCloud in my case), but at the same time i have a small ARM machine at home that keeps a mirror of the iCloud data.

That ARM machine also has the responsibility of making backups, local to a USB drive, as well as to another cloud. Not mirrors, but proper versioned backups (as in Restic, Borg, Arq, Duplicacy, Kopia, etc).

I also maintain a couple of USB drives with yearly updated mirrors of the entire photo library. The drives are stored at geographically different locations, and surface scanned, updated and rotated yearly.

And finally, as a "last ditch recovery", i maintain an archive of M-disc Blu-Ray discs that contain a complete copy of our family photo library. Every year i make an identical set of discs containing the past years photos, and these sets are stored alongside the USB drives.

I don't bother archiving documents as everything that is important is stored on government servers anyway, or exists in hardcopy. Also, if every step in my normal 3-2-1 backup scheme has failed and i need to recover from the archive, i probably have bigger issues than retrieving my budget for this years finances.

password4321• 3 years ago

I don't bother archiving documents

Isn't that 2 or 3 orders of magnitude less space though?

I do understand where you're coming from for sure.

exitb• 3 years ago

As a fellow small ARM machine owner, what's your strategy for getting the photos from iCloud? Is there a tool one shouldn't feel weird to give their iCloud credentials to?

zamalek• 3 years ago

This is my backup method:

* A nextcloud+recognize (for face recog) instance running on Hetzner. $20/month (I co-host other services on the VM). This is attached to a Hetzner storage box.

* Syncthing pushes all of nextcloud to a zfs.rent (great service BTW) machine, I purchased my disks up front, so it's $cheap/month. ZFS snapshots are taken.

* Local RPi NAS. Syncthing up to the other two.

About $40/month in total. How valuable are 240k photos to you?

Uploading photos is a matter of sending them to Nextcloud. Syncthing does the rest.

mikewarot2• 3 years ago

Digikam is less crashy than it used to be. Its slowly going through my 650,000+ photos and finding faces. I started this past Sunday. I expect to be done in a week or two.

raffraffraff3• 3 years ago

Finding faces or identifying faces? Because I tried the latter and it was horrendously bad.

indymike• 3 years ago

Can second using DigiKam. It's a great app.

didgetmaster• 3 years ago

I'm glad you haven't really 'lost' the photos since you have copies elsewhere. It is surprising how many people these days rely on some cloud service to store and preserve their only copy of some important and unreproducible data.

You are right about file systems doing a lousy job of helping you organize and locate photos, especially when they are spread across many different HDD and SDD drives attached to various computers. They are equally bad at organizing other forms of content (documents, videos, logs, music, software, etc.)

File systems were invented decades ago when the biggest hard drives could only hold a few thousand files at most, and drives were also so expensive that most people only had one of them. Traditional file systems are antiquated and need to be replaced with something better.

Helmut10001• 3 years ago

Self-host and use Photoview [1], it has face recognition. I use this since 2 years with 5TB of photos (on ZFS) and it works flawlessly. It is worth it - everything under your control and you decide when to migrate. My phone's photos are also uploaded automatically to a Nextcloud folder, which is read-mounted to Photoview and scanned automatically.

[1] https://github.com/photoview/photoview

34679• 3 years ago

I'm curious if you've asked your family members whether they're ok with having photos of themselves being used to train Amazon's facial recognition model? I know it's a common practice and Amazon isn't alone, yet I feel people should be more aware of what's happening.

varispeed• 3 years ago

I would be careful with hard drives. As I learned couple of days ago when I got my 10 year old hard drive from storage, I was unable to read most of the data as the drive would start to intermittently disconnect from the computer. Most likely the drive is okay, but the board has developed an issue - maybe capacitors gone bad or something. Now, I am yet to check if it is the one that has hardware encryption (I supposed to get rid of all of them and copy data to alternative drives) - there are drives that encrypt the data by default and if you don't set up the key, the encryption still takes place with some default key. If the board dies for some reason, then you won't ever be able to decrypt the data - even if technically was unencrypted, even by swapping the board from a working hard drive. This happened to me once and I lost 3TB of important data couple of years ago.

That being said - I think the best additional backup is to store important things on BluRay - producers estimate they should last 80-100 years and so far never had a bad disk, even those burned years ago.

brokenmachine3• 3 years ago

I recommend ddrescue for data recovery, worked really well when I needed it.

It will resume when you hook the drive back up, and work around dead sectors.

eddieroger• 3 years ago

Lots of reminders to make backups and alternatives offered, but I think it's fair to expect something from Amazon here since Photos, being a Prime benefit, is a paid service, which should come with a reasonable expectation of stability. It's a shame Amazon doesn't have an easier way to find formal support.

ppetty• 3 years ago

Does anyone know if iCloud (photos) storage is AWS S3? Curious if using both iCloud & Amazon Photos is a decent redundant backup plan in addition to a local copy. Or if I have iCloud & Prime, why not? (I also use Backblaze.)

timvisee• 3 years ago

I believe iCloud uses Google's cloud as storage backend.

vdfs• 3 years ago

What if a strong solar EMP wipe all storages on earth? you need redundancy on at least two other planets (I would suggest the moon but it's close to earth)

wenyuanyu• 3 years ago

I think Apple uses GCP as well. A photo is probably replicated twice across AWS and GCP by Apple, and AWS and GCP will then replicate it at least 5 times on their own side onto different racks or even AZ.

flykespice• 3 years ago

That is why always you should synchronize your cloud with a local backup storage, always remain skeptical on cloud-backed storage as you are relying on someone else keeping it up (it can go anytime).

Cloud storage is just as volatile as your physical storage breaking or getting lost.

komali22• 3 years ago

That super sucks. Stories like this (but about Google Photos) led to me setting up the following backup strategy.

1. First, all photos are on a fat external harddrive connected to a homelab server. When I come home with photos, I dump them onto this (TODO to find a way to automatically copy them into the proper spot off the camera upon the camera being plugged in, or a different spot if the gopro is plugged in)

2. Once a day, these are rsynced to a separate set of harddrives, which serve self hosted photo software I use (similar functionality to google photos. Looking for a replacement that lets me create arbitrary albums of photos, and then create web pages pointing to those arbitrary albums, that's FOSS. Currently evaluating photoview and librephotos)

3. Once a day, all photos are backed up to a backblaze b2 bucket using duplicati. with several previous versions also kept.

4. Once a year, a fucknormous external drive is purchased, all photos dumped onto it, and mailed to my parent's house, where they put it into a firebox.

5. Oh, and all my photos are also uploaded to google photos, because why not

I'm very much a scrub when it comes to sysadmin tasks and was able to set up all of the above with about... I don't know, no more than 100 hours of effort I'm sure, probably less. I recommend at least looking into consumer backup services like the one by backblaze!

softwaredoug• 3 years ago

A 'better than nothing' but very easy thing I do is use two cloud providers for photo storage. Since my photos are all phone based, backing up to any cloud provider is pretty straightforward.

twawaaay2• 3 years ago

And people laugh when they hear about my USB HDD docking station and a fleet of 3.5" HDDs backup setup....

EdwardDiego5• 3 years ago

3.5" HDDs?

Aww, I got all excited because I read that as 3.5" FDDs, and got nostalgic for the noise... and installing Windows from like twelve of the bastards.

petodo2• 3 years ago

Yeah, nothing like CRC error nostalgia.

petodo2• 3 years ago

I dont laugh, just hope you store it at different locations.

twawaaay2• 3 years ago

One is always co-located at parents in law. Whenever I drive there with my family I take the newest backup and rotate it.

Just in case I was robbed or had a house fire.

Toutouxc2• 3 years ago

And then you read up on bit rot and HDDs dying when not used for a long time, and there goes the fuzzy feeling. :(

greendave• 3 years ago

Just wait until you read about what happens to those cold-storage SSDs!

kypro• 3 years ago

Why is this getting so heavily upvoted? Are we sure OPs title is even correct?

This may be user error? It's possible the photos are still there, or if they are gone, perhaps Amazon can restore.

OP, did you try to call / contact Amazon before you posted this?

EdwardDiego5• 3 years ago

...they literally posted a link to their question in an Amazon forum...

...which is listed as the first port of call for support.[0]

For more help, try our Amazon Drive & Amazon Photos forum

But hey, maybe I missed the prominently displayed phone number somehow, so if you can help me find it, it'd be much appreciated.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

thrdbndndn2• 3 years ago

It literally only has been 1 hour since OP posted that thread.

I agree with all the points about having backups and/or using better service/self host etc., but IMO it's too early to conclude anything about this incident.

owlninja• 3 years ago

And a follow-up will likely not make the front page.

EdwardDiego5• 3 years ago

I'd be freaking the fuck out too, tbh. These days you tend to get better support from the megacorps if you tweet or post on HN, it can bypass the obligatory outsourced support layer.

thrdbndndn2• 3 years ago

Oh I totally agree.

I do wish I have such luck when posting on HN though, often ended up with zero upvotes and no replies.

PaulHoule4• 3 years ago

It might be true about some other big tech companies but AMZN is exceptionally obstinate.

rchaud2• 3 years ago

Maybe, but somehow I don't see them rushing in to spare the blushes of the Amazon Photos product team. Now if this were an S3 cloud bucket.....

akho8• 3 years ago

So they might still get their photos back. 240,364 photos is a lot, and none are replaceable. It’s still a lot of stress.

prmoustache2• 3 years ago

who would rely on only one vendor and repo for his data?

wlesieutre• 3 years ago

In this case they do have backups, just not convenient ones

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35181205

unxdfa6• 3 years ago

Knowing Amazon retail / services support, their data is gone and they'll be lucky if they raise anyone at all.

If you pay $15k a month for AWS enterprise support, you will find someone who may or may not be able to help you within 6 months after misinterpreting the problem and having to raise your account manager and wave your hands around.

krzyk3• 3 years ago

I'm surprised, Amazon is well known of having the best in class customer support for their store (I mean: "Customer: My kindle broke, because I sat on it. Amazon: no worries, let me send you a replacement, no need to send back the old kindle" level of good support) - oh and human support, not google botocracy.

karmicthreat• 3 years ago

This has not been my experience. I pay 100$/mo for support and when I have had issues (had a RDS upgrade go really bad once) they have contacted me quickly to get details. Usually only 2-4 hours for an engineer to be on the issue.

hbn2• 3 years ago

The point of these services is they're supposed to be an easy-to-use, worry-free photo backup. Amazon/Google/Apple should surely have the resources available to keep my photos stored somewhere with some redundancy. I don't want to worry about how they do it, but that's the idea. In exchange they're probably training image recognition algorithms or what have you on my photos, and I certainly wouldn't keep anything too personal on those services (i.e. nudes). I may even be paying them for more than the free storage limit. The least they can do is be a reliable backup. Yahoo Mail doesn't disappear emails randomly, YouTube doesn't just disappear videos randomly (barring stupid robot moderation). You'd expect the same for your photos on these services.

zigzag312• 3 years ago

I agree. One selling point of cloud services is that technical details, like backup, are managed for you.

brokenmachine3• 3 years ago

YouTube doesn't just disappear videos randomly

My experience couldn't be further from that.

When I look through my "Watch Later" list, probably 10% of videos are missing. I think you have to choose "show deleted".

I've been planning to set up a script that uses yt-dlp to auto-download the new videos on my Watch Later list every night, but haven't got around to it yet.

caeril• 3 years ago

It's also highly suspect.

240k photos is 66 photos per day, every day, over a full decade.

If you're spending time taking 66 photos a day, I think you have bigger (personal) issues to contend with than your image storage solution.

Even on vacation, relaxing, with my kids and wife, visiting all manner of picturesque spots, 66 photos would be an enormous feat of narcissism.

The author is either lying about the photo library size to garner sympathy, or has a gargantuan psychological issue to address.

cnick• 3 years ago

In macro photography, taking an extreme closeup of something like an insect necessarily has a very, very thin depth of field due to its high magnification. To get the entire insect in focus, you use a technique called focus stacking where the focus changes by tiny fractions of a millimeter on each exposure. You can literally take 100 to 200 of pictures for one subject. If I do 10 of these in a day, I've reached one percent of OPs forever photo volume. https://www.photography-raw.com/creating-stunning-macro-phot...

Time lapse photography is taking a photo every X seconds/minutes/days. If you want the video to look smooth, you need 24-30 shots per second, so a 30 second video has 720 exposures. So again, failed three time lapse attempts and I'm at 1% of OPs forever exposure count.

There's an awful lot of judgment in your comment, and the issue certainly seems like a lack of understanding on your part, rather than OP's "psychological issue" or "lying." I'll refrain from my own judgements, and suggest you watch David Foster Wallace's "This is Water," and when you're done, please watch it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY

onphonenow2• 3 years ago

Wow - this is really not great. Amazon support is usually pretty ok though this is a weird case - any luck getting in touch w anyone?

riskable2• 3 years ago

This is why I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously on all my devices. If one of them screws up I've always got the other one.

What I need to do though is get them all copied to my home backup server (the HTPC) on the regular...

patrakov• 3 years ago

This is why I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously on all my devices. If one of them screws up I've always got the other one.

That's insufficient. If one of then screws up, deletions will likely propagate to the other.

Godel_unicode• 3 years ago

That’s not how it works.

fullstop2• 3 years ago

Deleted photos in google photos are not deleted. They go into a "trash" folder with a retention period of, if I remember correctly, 14 days.

So, yes, they could propagate but you have time to correct the mishap.

hassancf• 3 years ago

Exactly.

And if it’s a local backup, that local backup needs to be taken offline, to avoid the same issue if things get deleted in the cloud

bilekas2• 3 years ago

That's insufficient. If one of then screws up, deletions will likely propagate to the other.

That's not the setup described at least. It's both of the services withing in parallel. > I use both Amazon Photos and Google Photos simultaneously

Your scenario would depend on Google being a backup for Amazon or vice versa.

fallingmeat• 3 years ago

This is why you should always synchronize you cloud with your other cloud, and the NAS in your closet, and floss after every meal, and take daily vitamins.

dboreham3• 3 years ago

Quick note that "synchronize" may not be quite right -- if Amazon deletes all your photos you don't want to sync those deletes anywhere else.

Mizoguchi• 3 years ago

The old 3-2-1 backup rule is still relevant today.

andy_ppp• 3 years ago

This happened to me with Lightroom, I’m still being charged £10 per month and they can’t find the account. I cannot get through to support either.

vxNsr• 3 years ago

Chargeback? Or are you hoping to resolve it and get the photos back some how?

josefresco• 3 years ago

Anyone have a good iCloud backup option? I finally "gave in" and stopped manually pulling photos off my iOS devices and subscribed to iCloud. However I'm worried I'll get screwed or mistakenly delete something.

sgjohnson2• 3 years ago

iCloud doesn’t really back up photos. It’s more of a sync. If you’ll manually delete a photo from your phone, it’ll be deleted from iCloud too.

ghaff11• 3 years ago

The conflation of sync and backup can actually be really dangerous. You don't want a primary backup to have the opportunity to delete files because they (apparently) have been deleted on the primary.

rashkov• 3 years ago

I’ve been happily using PhotoSync, which has been very reliabe

johnnyballgame• 3 years ago

Install iCloud app locally and sync them. Then backup your local folder to another device or cloud. Backblaze B2 is a great cloud option for raw storage.

presto8• 3 years ago

Exactly what I do. I use an old Mac Mini with an attached 5 TB USB drive. This provides a mirror of the iCloud data. For versioning, add a separate drive and use Time Machine. This provides versioning. For offsite backup, B2 or other backup provider.

asdff5• 3 years ago

Does icloud drive contain the photos? My issue with icloud was that as far as I was aware, I could only sync photos via the Photos mac app, or web page downloading a zip archive a few gb at a time. Both options ended up failing for me unfortunately. The Photos app would quit instantly when I set it to sync the library because I guess it was too large perhaps. The web page downloads would time out a few hundred mb in. I tried using third party command line tools for icloud downloads, and they too would time out.

asdff5• 3 years ago

Currently searching but don't get in this boat with me. I'm dealing with a library of 50k+ photos I can't get off icloud currently. All options on the table have failed after multiple attempts (Photos app sync, web page download, third party command line downloaders).

clevedotoner2• 3 years ago

One of my worries that keeps me sleeplessly awake at nights sometimes is the possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not. A sufficiently strong solar flare can essentially put us back a few centuries electronically, and a few millenia socially, instantly.

Wonder if there are stress tests on cloud storage that account for this possibility by means of adequate insulation or whatever it is that can counteract a solar flare.

davidmurdoch2• 3 years ago

Isn't a lot of our critical stuff backed up to tape drives still?

ghaff11• 3 years ago

"A lot"? Sure, I guess. But as someone who stores multiple copies of everything both onsite and in the "cloud," I certainly don't have local tape backup and I doubt that Backblaze does either.

rafabulsing• 3 years ago

Could putting backups in Faraday cages protect against solar flares?

warble• 3 years ago

yes, or burying them. Make sure the box is waterproof.

8fingerlouie6• 3 years ago

I keep my data in the cloud, with a local 1:1 mirror of which i keep a 3-2-1 backup (local + cloud).

Besides that i keep USB drives and M-disc archives of photos, identical sets stored in geographically separate locations. Optical media should be resilient to most natural phenomenon like flooding and solar flares. They're not resilient to fires, which is why i keep duplicate sets.

agotterer• 3 years ago

I keep everything in the cloud as well. Documents are either in GDrive / Dropbox and photos are in iCloud. For sensitive documents I created an encrypted disk image that I store in Dropbox and mount when I need access to it, which is pretty infrequent. I periodically backup content to a NAS and I backup the NAS to B2.

ClumsyPilot7• 3 years ago

possibility of solar flares wiping out storage/data -- at my bank, on my hard drive and what not.

Oh, one solar flare can solve global inequality in an instant! There money in all bank account would dissapear and the recently rich would have to pull themselves up by the bootstraps!

HeavyFeather• 3 years ago

Nah, it will just eliminate the middle class. I’m sure the millionaires will figure something out from their villas and yachts.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 3 years ago

Not the ones who wrote 12 magic words on a piece of paper ...

acidburnNSA• 3 years ago

Big solar flares are one thing to worry about, and big EMPs are another.

https://spp.fas.org/starwars/congress/1999_h/99-10-07wood.ht...

Note: reader mode on Firefox Mobile makes this more legible for me.

postdb• 3 years ago

Can't really see the forum without a login. Anyone can just copy/past it here?

Iwan-Zotow• 3 years ago

Bon Appétit!

iLoveOncall• 3 years ago

carefully curated

55 photos a day, every day, for 12 years, does not sound "carefully curated" to me.

krzyk3• 3 years ago

I'm surprised that there is something like Amazon Photos, this is literally first time I hear about it.

xyst• 3 years ago

This is what happens when you give the intern prod access

PaulHoule4• 3 years ago

Must have gone the same place two-day shipping went.

debacle• 3 years ago

My wife just purchased a 10tb ssd as a "backup" for Amazon Photos.

I think it's likely worth it considering the value of basically the history of our lives.

dboreham3• 3 years ago

You need to buy one too, and put it in a different building than hers.

mindslight• 3 years ago

wat? SSDs aren't quite to 10TB yet, at least consumer ones. Do you mean multiple SSDs in an enclosure? Because I sure hope you didn't end up with a fake. Fakes have hacked firmware that makes it report the wrong capacity, and you only find out when you go to retrieve your data.

Additionally, I've heard SSDs aren't great long term backup mediums, compared to mechanical hard drives. I personally use both.

bilekas2• 3 years ago

It's not clear from the question what the problem could have been, but I would be REALLY surprised if the app would be responsible for removing the photos in storage.

The app is just a front-end, deleting data (with Amazon photos and even S3) is not easy to do by accident without user input.

Is it just resynching the application (metrics updating) ? Super curious the issue.

VLM• 3 years ago

From a scalability standpoint how does one accumulate, and then utilize, a quarter million photos?

I'm a bit older than most, but that would be a photo every other hour since the minute I was born...

Kind of a digital hoarder moment. Which is relevant because my entire archive fits on a flash drive and I have a couple flash drives and its no big deal at that small of a scale. But a quarter mil pics will take some serious storage.

Now I could imagine if you owned five security cameras and stored a snapshot every minute for a month, that's about a fifth of a million photos, but that's all autogenerated and if you lose your complete set you'll have a new set in a month anyway.

delfinom• 3 years ago

They could be a photographer. Often they'll take numerous photos in a very short time span to capture a bunch of movement and angles just so they can pick the best of the bunch later

Why do they keep everything? Idk, /r/datahoarder is a subreddit that exists though so the mindset is out there

aftbit8• 3 years ago

IMO... why not? 250k photos at 10MB each is only ~2.5 TB. That easily fits on modern hard drives. You can even buy SSDs that would fit that for under $500. If you are a professional photographer, then you absolutely should keep everything you ever shoot, just in case one photo is ever worth it. Even if you're an amateur though, that's not really that much storage in the grand scheme of things.

warner25• 3 years ago

A quarter million is still a big number, but I'll admit to my family having 60,000 photos in storage. They're mostly since we started having kids in 2014, which works out to 20 per day. Of course, some days we take zero photos, and other days we take a bunch on burst because it's hard to get a photo of four kids with none of them picking their noses, let alone looking at the camera. When we go out somewhere, I don't even think we take a lot of photos compared to most people; we're mostly in the moment and trying to wrangle the kids, and I'm shooting with a $200 Android phone. So I can imagine a family with older kids, that's more into photography and social media, easily accumulating 4x our number.

Now, we select less than 10% for a private Flickr album that we actually enjoy looking at and sharing with the grandparents, etc. But so far it's been easier and safer to store the remainder instead of deleting them. I've gotten into trouble before with my wife when I deleted a photo that I thought was crummy, but she loved for some reason.

Edited to add: We also photograph all of the kids' artwork as a compromise instead of trying to save all that paper or hang it up somewhere in our house, which would be their preference. Those go into their own albums, which has actually turned out to be pretty neat.

InCityDreams2• 3 years ago

because it's hard to get a photo of four kids with none of them picking their noses, let alone looking at the camera.

But those nose-picking moments can be so easily utilised...usually when the kids get to 17-20yo and their partner 'Of course wants to see pics of when their loved one was a child'.

mceachen• 3 years ago

I’ve been taking (digital) photos since 1999. I’ve got 350k unique images, but more than a million unique SHAs.

I’ll maybe take a couple a day when out for a walk. 10-50 for an event. 20-30 for a big family gathering. My kids were always a good excuse to pull out the camera. It all adds up.

If you shoot with a big camera, people frequently opt for “JPEG+RAW” which is two image files every time you tap the shutter release. That adds up.

Also, if you use(d) google photos, or any other service that downscaled your originals, and then _also_ directly take a backup of your DCIM directory off of your phone, there’s another source of duplicate images.

I wrote more about this here: https://photostructure.com/faq/what-do-you-mean-by-deduplica...

nicoburns2• 3 years ago

Amazon have been sending me repeated email telling that it’s photos service is shutting down for over a year now. Have you not been getting those?

jwineinger• 3 years ago

From what I can find, Amazon Drive is shutting down at the end of 2023 but Photos is not. So you've got until end of year to download non-photo/non-video files from your Drive before they're gone.

https://www.amazon.com/b/?node=23943055011

nicoburns2• 3 years ago

You seem to be right. I wasn't actively using either product so I didn't pay too much attention to the details.

tyingq4• 3 years ago

This space is frustrating with any of the cloud vendors as they originally offered a lot of storage for free, then had to resort to various strategies to claw that back after it got expensive.

Google is especially frustrating for me. By default, an Android tries to sync all videos and photos up to Google photos. You can turn that off, but not in any sort of granular way. For example, you can't say "sync photos, but don't sync videos". You USED to be able to do this, but it's all or nothing now. Which I suppose drives revenue for the paid storage plans?

artificial• 3 years ago

I suspect photos are used for classification and training purposes.

justin_oaks• 3 years ago

While I still use Google Photos, there are times that I don't want pictures I take with my phone to be synced to the cloud. Since Google Photos does not allow such functionality, I installed a second camera app. That app allows me to choose where the picture are saved, so I save them to a folder that doesn't get backed up by Google Photos.

It's annoying to have to do this, but at least I can finally choose what gets synced and what doesn't.

vorpalhex2• 3 years ago

I specifically use "Secure Cam" from GrapheneOS (mine came from Google Play) for this, as it is close to the stock pixel camera and doesn't suffer the lag some other camera apps have.

-- edit

I originally called the app "private cam" and said it was from fdroid, apologies! Forgot I had aliased it.

paledot• 3 years ago

You can do this with locked folders.

https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10694388?hl=en

ericmay• 3 years ago

This space is frustrating with any of the cloud vendors as they originally offered a lot of storage for free, then had to resort to various strategies to claw that back after it got expensive.

Getting users to add photos and then charging (while also using them as image sets for training) was the strategy from the beginning. They didn't resort to anything. Keeping your photos stored somewhere is very sticky, particularly for non-software developers. And even so how do you even transfer them to another service without a huge bill?

tyingq4• 3 years ago

They didn't resort to anything.

I did spell out what one of the changes was. I used to be able to sync photos, which for me isn't a lot of space...but also NOT SYNC videos, which do use a lot of space. That option was removed, and syncing can only be turned off/on globally now.

Separately, there was also this change, which is notable: https://support.google.com/photos/answer/10100180?hl=en

So, yes, I believe they once offered more storage and flexibility, then took that away.

sirius87• 3 years ago

Stuff like this terrifies me. I'm personally reaching a point where I'm considering investing in an offline NAS with a RAID array and replacing disks every few years to be safe (or based on SMART tests).

Imagine uploading all your photos to a cloud provider, then having 5% of your files disappear. How would you even know your photos are missing if its a small %? At least when your local filesystem is corrupted, you know what you're losing.

lostlogin10• 3 years ago

Synology. Rsync images to it, upload to Backblaze at midnight and alerts set up to come through on failure.

Not cheap, but it’s a beautiful thing.

aendruk• 3 years ago

I went that route but wasn’t able to sleep soundly until eventually setting up a replicating NAS at a family member’s house.

B1FF_PSUVM• 3 years ago

How would you even know your photos are missing

What if you never found out in your lifetime?

(seriously, I have dire doubts about the usefulness of our hoards ...)

remote_phone• 3 years ago

I have 4 backups (and growing) of all my important digital things especially my photos. I have two separate overlapping backups and every few year I buy a new hard drive and put the old backup drive in storage. I will continue to do this until I die.

__bjoernd• 3 years ago

Commentator's voice: it had not.

wly_cdgr• 3 years ago

Periodic reminder to keep multiple offline backups of anything you actually care about.

Although, you should also think about whether you really need to keep more than a few dozen or at most a few hundred photos of your total life.

serbanTeodor• 3 years ago

Is there a way now to pull all the data. This is scary and I’m right now buying USB for storage, but I don’t know how to bulk retrieve all my photos. I imagine they probably close any ways to export the data to not migrate to other service. All I can think is to do a Selenium program to go through all the entries but I think it will be a bitch to have it resume from a certain point and not miss something

godshatter• 3 years ago

This is a general question; is no one else worried about Amazon or whichever company trolling your photos with face recognition, building up a graph of who you are connected to, all in the name of "giving you a better shopping experience"? Or who knows what else they might do with the meta data or AI object recognition shenanigans.

I guess I don't extend much trust to the companies that provide these services, especially if they are free. But then I don't take many photos nor share them around much. That might change the equation a bit if I was more into that. What photos I do take that I want to keep I download to my desktop.

Maybe I'm just too damned cynical.

unixhero• 3 years ago

I am very worried about this. Yes. Facebook already did this since 2007, or earlier.

CharlesW• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm just too damned cynical.

FWIW, I don't think so. There's such a thing as healthy paranoia.

Privacy considerations definitely factored into my decision to move my library to iCloud Photos from Google Photos a couple years ago.

I still maintain more than one backup of that library — one local, and one to a cloud backup provider.

rchaud2• 3 years ago

Amazon Photos for face recognition

Amazon Alexa for voice recognition and eavesdropping

Amazon subsidiary Ring.com to spy on your neighbor's driveway

AWS pulling it all together to send this panopticon to your local police department.

brokenmachine3• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm just too damned cynical.

Imagine if the nazis had access to the data that people store online now...

There wouldn't be any Schindler's list, he'd already have been in jail because the algorithm said so.

You can't opt out when everyone else has already opted you in.

bobleeswagger• 3 years ago

My important stuff goes like this:

PiBox w/ Mirrored SSDs -> Server w/ RAIDZ2 (at another wing of the house) -> Windows NAS -> Backblaze Unlimited

Multiple SSDs and HDDs would have to go down at the same time, and there are hourly snapshots up to a month in case a roll back is needed.

If you're relying on a third party in any case except total catastrophe, you're just waiting for that moment to come! This is why Backblaze is at the end, I depend on them when I have failed to provide availability myself.

sagebird• 3 years ago

When I hear individuals on talk about their backup routines they have developed, home nas servers, scripts that keep things synched, etc, I can’t help but to think about failed crypto ux attempts.

I don’t like relying on monolithic monopolized corporate services as much as the next hacker— but I think there should be an easy to understand service for the 98% of basic users.

If someone could make a service that detects and requests permission to connects to all of your cloud services and provides full backup service that includes whatever the best practices are it would seem like a win for those who don’t want to roll their own.

A marketable “sticker” Ala “intel inside” ie - “open backup compatible” would be good to have with a simple but serviceable api.

I think today there is little financial incentive for storage providers to make the data easy to access via machine.

Ideally an api would not only allow incoming data to be quickly compared and synched… but would allow graceful and intelligent transfers or splits or duplication levels among stores, in the case that you want to change services or have your own backup.

ProAm• 3 years ago

The problem is no one wants to learn how to do it. Everyone wants the easy button. This is why we have the cloud, iCloud storage, google photos, amazon photos, back blaze, etc....

None of this is that hard to do, not one just wants to put a minimal amount of effort into learning how to do backups, or automate them or deal with DR scenarios. If this information is important to you it would behoove you to learn how to protect it. Otherwise its not that important to you. Obviously IMHO.

asdff5• 3 years ago

It doesn't help that the OS vendors have been letting their own local backup tooling rot over the years, probably in favor of selling more cloud subscriptions. When is the last time Time Machine got some attention, when it was released 15 years ago?

ar9av• 3 years ago

Having used Amazon photos for a long time, I have had a bunch of issues. It is certainly (in my mind) not a replacement for Google photos, but is a possible second repository / backup.

Advantages: unlimited full resolution backup

Disadvantages: Poor facial recognition Unable to manually add tags Poor folder /album management Android app has stopped uploading photos and support hasn'tbeen able to fix it Upload from PC only using their app (which isn't great) Upload from PC has "lost" the database and subsequently uploaded at least 2 versions of the just under 1TB / 50k images / videos from my family

The result is that actually finding or doing anything with the photos in the storage is not very easy, but at least everything is backed up there!

ihaveabeardnow• 3 years ago

it's not common, but not very rare either, that we go to view an old set of pictures on Google Drive and find some of them are corrupt and cannot be displayed. I've never reported anything to Google, because I don't really have any evidence to provide. All I know is, we didn't upload all these 'corrupt' photos 5/10/15 years ago.

and I do not have backups of them all (which is on me)

getoffmyyawn3• 3 years ago

I used to seriously stress out worrying about the huge amount of family photos I have saved in cloud storage and what it would mean to lose them. I've got a local backup as well of course. Even that has to be upgraded every so often to make sure the hardware will continue to run reliably.

A few years ago my (very non-technical) mother asked me to make and send her a photo album of recent pictures. My wife and I had so much fun doing it that we kept doing it. Choosing the best pictures, arranging them and making nice layouts and titles itself is a fun walk down memory lane.

Now we have a shelf with about a dozen volumes of memories and we found we are far more likely to look at these than we ever were with photos in cloud storage.

I like to think that if I lost all the digital copies, I would still be happy with what I have in these bound albums. I highly recommend this to everyone.

AdamN• 3 years ago

+100. The best and really only useful copy of your digital photo library is a curated set of prints, ideally as part of a book or a calendar.

yaseer• 3 years ago

+101.

My wife and I now have an annual tradition of making physical albums of memories from the past year.

Making the album in January is not just fun - it makes you mindful of fond memories at a time when you're likely to think "Geez, another year has passed so quickly".

My only regret is realising I should have started the habit much earlier.

ghaff11• 3 years ago

I've made photo books but I really try to decrease the flow of paper and other physical things into my house. I'm behind at the moment but I heavily curate/edit and upload to Flickr which also lets me access photos when I'm not at home.

ericcholis• 3 years ago

I have PhotoSync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home.html) set up to automatically send all my iCloud photos to my home NAS which automatically backs up to Backblaze. I can also specify other destinations for PhotoSync and the NAS backup.

ElCapitanMarkla• 3 years ago

Been PhotoSync for about 10 years now, it works great

deltarholamda• 3 years ago

This is definitely the way. This is also the best way to cement memories with your kids as well, and they love the process.

Professional photographers take a thousand photos, but they only use one. Quality, not quantity.

kylehotchkiss3• 3 years ago

Rough strategy:

1) use iCloud Photos

2) find a Mac with a very large system drive (1tb or above)

3) open the photos app on mac and ensure settings is configured to “download originals” not “save space”

4) make sure the computer is online on a regular basis. You should see ~/Pictures/Photos.app becoming massive over time.

5) setup Time Machine for that computer

6) success! You have a second copy of your photos library on Time Machine now.

7) Use Arq.app to backup your Time Machine drive to AWS glacier. Nice! Now you have 3 copies of your library.

An alternative path is making sure you have both a giant iPhone storage and giant Mac storage. Make sure photos on phone is set to “download originals”. Manually backup your iPhone to Mac monthly. These backups include photos library. I recommend encrypting your backup and keeping a key in safe and 1Password. Continue with Time Machine and Arq.

Alifatisk• 3 years ago

Is this the correct url?

arqbackup.com

coolspot• 3 years ago

You don’t need large system drive, just any drive connected (like USB) or even on the network.

Hold Alt (Option) when starting the Photo app to invoke a dialog where you can select custom photo library location.

You can have multiple photo libraries in different locations and switch between them during Photo app start.

https://support.apple.com/guide/photos/create-additional-lib...

Gigachad• 3 years ago

For google I have it set up to generate the Takeout backups every 2 months. Easy to do

getoffmyyawn3• 3 years ago

That's a nice comprehensive approach. I'm actually pretty happy with my setup from a data loss prevention perspective. It is just that, as I approach 2 decades of saving digital photos, I question the utility of it.

My parents have photo albums going back a few generations. The family tradition is that they are passed to the cousin with the most children, to maintain for future generations. If I were handed 500K+ images in a drive or a cloud account from each family member, I doubt I would ever look at most of them. With a bound and curated album, I know they are full enjoyed by every family member with an interest in the past.

FireBy2024• 3 years ago

We do the same. What's a good alternative for videos?

getoffmyyawn3• 3 years ago

I've been looking into authoring blu rays. Seems to be several promising apps but I haven't tried any yet.

zephrx1111• 3 years ago

I use Amazon Photo as yet another backup plan. I have my photos sync on OneDrive and NAS as well.

asdff5• 3 years ago

I'm currently in a similar pickle with an icloud account. It's not lost, yet, but I can't pull the photos locally at all. The download links supplied on the icloud website time out a few hundred mb into the download. Third party command line tools also time out a few hundred mb in or so. This is a large library, so when I try and open up the Photos app on my mac and sync it there, the app quits immediately. I feel like its a ticking time bomb of a situation here with these data on this icloud account, and I also feel like I'm powerless and out of options to do anything about it, although I will stop using icloud and similar services as primary storage going forward.

btfo• 3 years ago

This is what you get for using proprietary software on hardware you do not own. You deserve it. You did it to yourself.

lebed2045• 3 years ago

I urge everyone to use external disk backup, possibly with prism opensource alternative to cloud photo storage. After Facebook deleted my acc for no reason and google locked my account due to payment system problems- you start to rethink who really own your memories in the cloud and how securely they stored.

Is something wrong with Amazon Photos? I lost 240k photos

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