Out of all the 1s and 0s that I want backed up in the cloud for an indefinite period of time, nothing is as irreplaceable as a photo/video that will make me smile 2/5/10/20+ years from now. I'd argue that the threat of "X is shutting down" or worse, "X has shut down" but it landed in my spam 3 months ago is worse than any benefits that a non-FAANG co can offer me. At least with keeping backups on icloud/Gphotos, I know that both co's would kill those services abrubtly as their last dying wish.
I ended up simply printing my photos. This also had a positive effect on the quality - you tend to select the better ones when you are limited.
It's not just about third-party storage - I have a picture of my great-grandmother and her parents from 1898 when she was 3 in my photo album. It survived several wars, regimes, and revolutions. No current digital tech in general can provide this kind of longevity, you have to actively watch the media yourself and transfer it when it's about to expire. (which I also do for the rest, of course)
> I have a picture of my great-grandmother and her parents from 1898 when she was 3 in my photo album. It survived several wars, regimes, and revolutions. No current digital tech in general can provide this kind of longevity
That's because digital storage didn't exist then... Now it's easier and cheaper to store media than ever before
Maybe I'm missing something in your argument, but to me it sounds naive?
> That's because digital storage didn't exist then... Now it's easier and cheaper to store media than ever before
It may seem that way, but it's not as simple. A digitized history project in the UK made this assumption, and later worked really hard to get back at the data, [0] is a long description, the Wikipedia entry on the BBC Domesday book doesn't go into all the details. You might believe we've learned a lesson since then, but I don't.
DRM formats are creeping into everything. Right now it seems JPEGs will be usable forever, and that may be; But cultural artificats - games and videos - are already becoming hard to preserve; People only care about convenience, and I suspect a popular 3D-or-lightfield-or-something-format in the future will be similarly hard to preserve 20 years later.
Print media has two main advantages: It requires no equipment/software/license/electricity to use; and treated properly, it has been shown to last hundreds of years.
I have a couple of 20-year-old hard drives that are still mostly readable (12 bad sectors so far), and that's considered a miracle. Usenet history is disappearing, even though it doesn't take a lot of space - because it isn't in anyone's economic interest to keep it - and the same will happen to free cloud storage sooner or later.
Nothing stops you from having redundancy in printed media. In fact, I have that photo reproduced in another album of my relatives.
>That's because digital storage didn't exist then...
What can you realistically do to keep the digital photo through 120 years or more? Imagine you stored it on the most durable media you have, M-Disc perhaps, or whatever they advertise today. Let's assume it even survived 120 years with its data intact. Are you sure your descendants will have the means to read that M-Disc in the year 2140? How about the file system on it? JPEG or DNG format? With a printed photo, you don't have to be sure.
Online storage is much more complex and thus inherently volatile. You depend on other people and on the assumption that business and legal frameworks will remain the same throughout the archival period.
Digital tech heavily depends on an unbroken chain of content transfer, which is a pretty big assumption for archival-grade storage, considering that companies, encodings and formats come and go, and there are also things like censorship and AI "enhancement" to worry about. (and who knows what else it will be many years into future) Digital media is not static by nature. Admittedly, any media depends on content refreshing, but the traditional media has much longer life between transfers - for an extreme example we still can read Sumerian clay tablets.
>Now it's easier and cheaper to store media than ever before
Storage cost was never a problem. The problem is the separation of the archival-worthy content from the info noise. Now, when the noise is multiplied, selecting is much harder than before. For my case, I only have a few photos worthy of putting into a 120-year photo album for my descendants, because I'm just an ordinary person.
I am in the process of scanning paper photos and photos on glass plates, dating from 120 years ago or so. Some of them survived two world wars, and mind you surviving WWII in Poland is no small feat for a piece of paper.
So while I do agree with the general sentiment of having multiple copies and backups, our digital world is woefully short-lived when compared to physical media.
On a related note, I am working on gallery/archive software, where the main assumption is longevity: whatever the UI du jour is, actual data must be kept in the simplest and most long-term file formats possible. Which means well-established and documented "traditional" image formats, text files with metadata, etc.
Of course you are only processing the photos that survived. Preserved artifacts are not an argument that storage technology was better back then. It is just selection bias.
The odds of physical photos destroyed in a fire is far lower than a photo hosting service going out of business. There's no money in it because monitoring it for legal compliance is expensive and time consuming. Apple and Google and Facebook can do it because the monitoring has a business upside in terms of training ML models.
Cool. What track record do they have, through financial crisis, world wars and natural disasters, that makes you believe this 100 year claim? And if they fail to deliver, what recourse do you have?
Personally, if Lloyd's of London offered an insured storage service, I might believe them, but I can't think of any other organization I would trust with a 100 year promise.
Depends on the level of trust you require. Family wealth or family photos - big difference. At least they state this as their objective, Dropbox does not. They also list on their website the kind of measures they have taken to try and achieve that objective.
I'm sure Lloyd would happily insure your photos 100 years. I'm not sure you have the kind of money that Lloyd would ask for that service.
I wish I could agree, but its more likely that Google et al will either phase out the service or replace it with an inferior one. For example, a while ago Google stopped the ability to download full quality originals from the Google Photos service. Since then I have to plug in my phone every once in a while to download the originals to my computer and back them up manually.
I also remember when I left Facebook and asked for an archive of my photos, I got 800x600 images when I had uploaded much higher resolution ones. Service degradation is actually more common in FAANG because they have a massive moat and rely on the fact that 90% of their customers don't know their 1's from their 0's.
Timeliner is a personal data aggregation utility.
It collects all your digital things from pretty much
anywhere and stores them on your own computer, indexes
them, and projects them onto a single, unified timeline.
Supported data sources
* Google Location History
* Google Photos
Now, when I was just browsing the zips, it was folder after folder of junk I didn't even recognize, I guess metadata files of some sort. Rather than do all that, at least in Gnome, when I unzip it has an option of 'preserve directory structure' that I unchecked, which basically gets rid of all the folders. From there I was easily able to mass remove all the json and other non-photo files, leaving only the photos behind. Good luck.
Yeah the files were like html files that had image links inside them if I remember correctly. But even those links didn’t work right.
This is because of a change they made.
I was absolutely distraught tbh. The feeling of being at the mercy of google is a horrible feeling. Especially when there is zero support or assistance.
I just did a take-out today based on your comment here.
I received links to over 100 tgz files (4GB each), and checked a couple. Each had JPG files and JSON files with extra metadata ("geoDataExif", "geoData" (inferred from my location history?), "title", "description", etc).
I can't tell if the actual images are the originals I uploaded, but I can confirm the images were archived as actual images, and in a serviceable format/structure.
For any iOS users that want a self hosted photo backup I can very much recommend https://www.photosync-app.com/. I set it up once years ago, never open it and still it silently backups any photo and video (original and edited) I take to WebDAV and a B2 bucket in the background, sorted in subfolders for every month.
another +1 for photosync. bought it a few years ago now and it just works in the background reliably ever since. (backing up mine and my wife’s iphone photos to a synology NAS)
It’s only good for backups though. There’s no way to browse/share memories so we reluctantly still also use Amazon photos...
1. Yeah i understand. Something more free/libre would have been a better choice. On the other hand I also like that it's quite "complete" so i don't have a lot of chances of screwing it up
2. Yeah, I only use DS Photo for backup / browsing on my phone. And Drive to replace Dropbox.
3. Not entirely sure about DS moments, as i use Photostation. In there it's basically each folder is an album (or sub/album).
PhotoSync talks to WebDAV natively. When I want to access those backups from my Mac I use Forklift (https://binarynights.com/) but even Finder and Windows Explorer can browse WebDAV storage natively.
Yes and no. Backups that you control (physically, technically, and legally) are the only complete mitigation against someone else losing your digital memories. That applies to a FAANG as well as a startup, although startups are far more likely to just flame out as you say.
I didn't mean to imply that FAANG cloud storage completely mitigates the risk of memories being lost or debate about how to minimize the likelihood through means such as owning the hard drive or inscribing the data on titanium disks stored in vacuum-sealed cannisters.
This is just about choosing a cloud storage provider that I can feel reasonably confident will still have my photos backed up on any given day for the foreseeable future.
I dont know, I wouldn't recommend using Facebook or Instagram as backup, and even services like Microsofts One drive have been known to dissapear files. A 'dumb' WebDAV service makes it easy to move data in and out, enabling hedging. Or a company like Backblaze, which has no other monetisation scheme and thus no interest other than keeping your bits safe.
I think you can make much better choices than FAANG or a random company, and I advise anyone to go with that better choice.
Indeed. This is my fear. Let's see where Stingle is in 5 years time, but I'm not going to rely on and be inconvenienced by a shutdown of another startup in this space. Photos/Videos are priceless.
I remember storing photos on fotki.com some years ago based on a recommendation. From a colleague. Functionally it was a good platform. After some years I wanted to download and they wanted to charge me $500 for access to my files. I ended up relying on local backup but the experience gave me chills that my photos were being held hostage.
Did you report them? Seems quite illegal, at least definitly against eu customer rights iirc to not list that charge anywhere and deny you your personal data.
No I did not. This was some years back before gdpr . They did not deny data, simply asked premium for my originals. I deleted account and moved on, since I had local copies, which took some time to locate among all the hard drives, but I did locate eventually.
I agree with your sentiment, but this actually highlights just how necessary it is to not solely trust the large players with our personal memories; by relying on a single, walled garden to play host for our memories, we're increasing our dependence on the larger players. Data privacy concerns aside, what happens if they decide to change the terms of service in a way thats unappealing, or the product itself? Or even lock us out of their service?
Far better IMO to not rely on a single provider, especially in the case of backups.
It comes with an adapter for Google Photos, so you can use it to download / backup photos and videos in your library.
Note: there are some limitations to this approach – namely that rclone won't be able to download your original image files, even if you uploaded with 'original' quality. These limitations are documented on the rclone website: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/
I store these on a local OpenSuse box I use as a NAS. It has a local drive, with a 2nd drive that is mounted and synced to weekly. Then the important stuff is rsynced offsite to a cloud server, rsync for pictures and other various "family" stuff. Borg for home drives with more private information.
That internal drive I backup to, runs btrfs. After backup is complete. I take a snapshot and keep a monthly one going back at least a year.
I use Syncthing to copy from my phone to my ZFS NAS. The phone also backs up to Google Photos (Pixel phone). From there I import them into a Lightroom catalog (looking at DigiKam though) and move the photos to a ZFS dataset that has auto snapshots enabled (accidental deletions, malware protection, etc) and is on a RAIDZ2 pool (survives two drive failures).
From there RClone encrypts and copies them to AWS Glacier Deep Archive (11 9s, etc). I'll also start coping them to Google Workspace (was GSuite).
This removes a lot of product change risks such as Google APIs not returning the original files, etc. AWS Glacier is secure and cheap unless I have to restore. If I'm doing a full restore it's likely that's the cheapest option so then I don't care.
Glacier Deep Archive works out to about $1/TB/month and because it's paid per GB it removes the risks of a company changing plans or some "unlimited but not really" problem.
One piece of advice, think about your local disaster risks. I'm in an earthquake risk area. I ruled out most off-site backup options that involved moving drives around due to those all being in my same disaster area and costs of bank boxes etc.
After spending too much time on it now, the Google Photos API Limitations (only compressed files via the API, EXIF Data not complete) are what really rubs me the wrong way. I've turned on Takeout Backup Creation every 2 months now and expect to just flatout pump these files into Glacier, while retaining a local copy of the latest version on a NAS here, but this is really a sad state of affairs.
Is iCloud better for this?
As Google Photos is my main usecase for being stuck in the Google Ecosystem, is this situation better with the iCloud?
Both timeliner and rclone (which are both great projects) are at the mercy of the Google photos api, which removes GPS metadata and elides the majority of other tags. Even something as critical as the captured-at time can get modified from the original.
(Source: my personal experience with Google Pixel "original quality" backups, and providing customer support to several hundred PhotoStructure beta testers).
This is exactly the reason I recently chose to move all my photos to Adobe Creative Cloud and also keep them backed up to multiple separate locations. Almost all other data I can recreate (even if it took years) but the memories I have through photos and videos are irreplaceable.
I have one computer which always has all originals locally available. That computer is backed up with borg to three separate borg repos (1 local, 2 remote).
I use iCloud photos for sharing with friends and family.
