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Tom
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Joined: 15 Dec 2001
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Tom
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PostSat Mar 23, 2024 10:56 pm 
How diligent are you backing up your data? I have to admit I've been pretty lax over the years, and fortunate not to have lost anything. I have a small portable external drive for backups, but not really part of a process. My last backup was 6+ years ago when I bought my current laptop and needed to transfer the files. doof.gif A long time ago I set up a home NAS with dual 1 TB drives for backups, but quickly gave up on using it for that purpose as transferring files was slow, and only found it convenient for storing movies to watch on our TV. I eventually splurged on a fancier Synology NAS with dual 4 TB drives a couple years ago, but never got around to setting it up. Finally found the motivation earlier this week, as part of a long overdue solution to back up the NWH photo server, and have to say I'm loving it! So fast, can easily back up stuff, sync the backups to the cloud, or vice-versa, schedule backups, not to mention all sorts of other geeky stuff like setting up a plex server, running python scripts, etc. nerd.gif You do need to be somewhat computer savvy to set it up and properly secure it, so I think for most folks, paying for google one storage (google drive, google photos) is a better option. For ~$100 / year you can get 2 TB of google one cloud storage. While I have a NAS and online servers to back up my data, I still plan to invest in a google one account as you can't beat the convenience of google photos, so nice to have photos automatically uploaded and available from any device. With a paid plan, you can back up all your photos in original quality, and probably never have to worry about running out of space unless you go crazy with photos and videos. You also can't beat the convenience of google drive to automatically back up your devices and computer(s). Even if you utilize other backup options it's good to have redundancy. You can also share your google one storage account with up to 5 other people to defray some of the cost if that's an issue, just seems a no brainer. Anyway, on the subject of backups, just finished backing up the ~1.5 million images on the NWH photo server. A few years ago when flickr was threatening to delete photos for free accounts I invested in an inexpensive shared hosting account with "unlimited storage" to cache all external images posted to NWH. It's no fun pulling up an old trip report only to find broken image links or small thumbnails because the external images are no longer available online. Eventually this server became a place for folks to upload photos directly, why not, since we're caching all images, but with this iteration it became (even more) important to back everything up, as there's no fallback for uploaded images if something were to happen to the photo server. Alas the photo server is on a shared host, with only FTP access. I started to backup everything to my laptop and the FTP software estimated 16 days to download everything, and then every time the connection to the server dropped I'd also have to manually restart it, total nightmare. I decided to cut my losses and sign up for an inexpensive VPS storage server with 2 TB of storage for $6 / month, and wrote a script to start scraping all the images to the new server. It took a couple days, but much faster than FTP! Anyway, once I had scraped the ~1.5 million mages to that server, I could easily download them to my NAS, since the VPS server allows connecting via SSH, so now I have online and local backups of the NWH photo server, wohoo! Better yet, the plan is to transition the current photo server to the new VPS server, which should make photo uploads much faster.

Kascadia, runup, zimmertr, kite, huron
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kite
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Joined: 28 Sep 2009
Posts: 1414 | TRs | Pics
Location: Olympia
kite
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PostSun Mar 24, 2024 8:08 am 
I run a Synology NAS with 4 drive 1tb drives, don't remember the raid configuration.

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zimmertr
TJ Zimmerman



Joined: 24 Jun 2018
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Location: Issaquah
zimmertr
TJ Zimmerman
PostSun Mar 24, 2024 9:02 am 
I have a Proxmox server with 6x6TB disks configured in a RAID10 pool which ends up being about 18TB of useable data. I use NextCloud Sync to automatically upload my photos there from my phone in addition to Google Photos.

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Schroder
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Joined: 26 Oct 2007
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Location: on the beach
Schroder
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PostSun Mar 24, 2024 9:36 am 
I started getting lax as my space filled up. I signed up for Google One for 2 TB of storage but that only handled my recent digital photos and the Documents folder on my PC so everything else started going onto portable drives. I had one drive with all my scanned photos that I was working on for years and it failed about a month ago and had no backup. All the old photos I've posted here were on it. Looking into the options so this doesn't happen again, I narrowed it down to buying more Google One storage or buying an NAS. I decided to get a Synology 4 disk NAS. For now, I have 2 - 12TB drives in mirrored configuration (RAID 1) and I will periodically rotate them with a third drive that I'll store at another location. I've had the failed drive in a shop for about a month and they're trying to recover it. I don't have a lot of hope.

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mike
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Joined: 09 Jul 2004
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mike
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PostSun Mar 24, 2024 9:49 am 
I use syncback free and back up to a harddrive and Esy Stor NAS

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Opus
Wannabe



Joined: 04 Mar 2006
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Location: The big rock candy mountain
Opus
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PostWed Mar 27, 2024 1:42 pm 
I've been using basically the same setup as Schroeder for about the last five years. I have a Western Digital MyCloud EX2 with a pair of 4 TB mirrored drives. My PC is set to backup every Friday to this system and it's worked really well. I also have a third USB hard drive that I backup everything to less often just in case and keep this disconnected in a drawer. Looking for another setup soon though since Western Digital discontinued support for this due to security reasons and ever since the connection with my home network hasn't been reliable. I don't care about the loss of remote access, I just use the system to keep a safe backup of all my photos.

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idoru
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Joined: 02 Feb 2023
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Location: Portland-ish
idoru
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PostThu Mar 28, 2024 8:22 am 
I absolutely love my NAS, though my mistake was buying a two-bay unit years ago when I only had a 1080p TV. Now I've (finally) upgraded to a 4K TV and am absolutely going to run out of space if I decide to replace all of my 1080 content with 4K content. Guess an upgrade is in my future.

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Stefan
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Stefan
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PostThu Mar 28, 2024 8:39 am 
I have a computer. All pictures on that computer. I have two 1TB hard drives for backups. I pay nothing externally to any company. I don't take a heck of a lot of pictures compared to other people. Why? I don't go back to look at pictures a whole lot. When I have spare time, I go to look at other people's pictures. So i figured...why take so many pictures and then deal with time with storing them when I am not going to reminisce so much. And why pay for an external third party a monthly fee? Not my thing to spend a whole lot of time looking at my past pictures. I do look at some....like once every 10 years. And if I don't have the pictures from a friends gathering or trip....it really is no big deal to me.

Art is an adventure.
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