Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

AMEN!

Haydon

I LOST MY PHOTOS. Don't make the same mistakes.

The true mark of a YouTube Influencer. I've had him blocked on YT for several years now.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

👍👍 Exactly!

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

A Nigerian prince appears on the shore
Waiting to take you away
Click on the link with your head in a cloud
And all your files are gone ...

pego101

Thank you for this post. Backing up my pictures never occurred to me.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

ABJanes Loc: Jersey Boy now Virginia

How about these suggestions from Neil van Niekerk? https://neilvn.com/tangents/affordable-online-back-system/

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

"Affordable" backup system.....
How much is all your data (including pictures) worth to you?
vs. the price of "non-recoverable information".

Pgphoto Loc: Brooklyn, NY

I wonder if you watched his video, the cloud was not an option because he has 400 terabytes of files

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Did not.

Holy crap!! 400TB!
I have less than 400GB.

JoeBiker Loc: homebase: Houston, TX

It is not a case of cloud vs local backups. Regardless of which you use, you have to have redundancy... and checksums.

You can't trust a single cloud provide to provide the redundancy for you; they can go out of business, or have catastrophic failures or both (even google has lost people's mail). I used to use http://www.fototime.com to display my photos (not as a backup), but others used them as backup; then a year ago, they had a "catastrophic outage" and "ceased operations". So, you have to have (at least two) local copies, two different independent cloud providers (not both using storage from AWS), or best yet: a combination of local and cloud backups.

Also, as someone else already mention, you have to have a way to detect corruption before you copy the corrupt files onto your backups/archives. During the Covid isolation, I was transferring a huge number of files over the internet and have been surprised by how many of them had gotten corrupted somewhere along the way. I have a technical background, and I don't think the problems were caused by the HDDs themselves. I suspect that FTP is not extremely reliable, but that doesn't completely explain all the corruption that I have observed.

How to detect corruption? Several ways: Store data inside zip files, (so that you can test the zip files). Or calculate and store MD5 checksums for your files (so that you can occasionally test the MD5s). And, then you have to occasionally do file comparisons or MD5 checks so that you can detect the corruption before it gets copied to all of your archives. Yes, I seem to spend a lot of time making archives and checking the archives.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good method for detecting corruption on photo files, etc, that I am actively working on, because the slightest change to the file makes the checksum not match.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

But the precious data he lost wasn’t 400TB of 4K video, it was likely less than 1TB of family images. Here’s a more realistic number for the average person. i have 27,000 family image JPEGs (don’t need to be high res - just snapshots) -100 GB. Another 200 GB of raw files and videos and 100 GB of music (tens of thousands of MP3s) and documents - 400 GB total. It costs $4.00/month to store that in Amazon S3 and also archived on a dozen MDisks in a safe deposit box. If my house burned down, flooded, hit by lightning, etc. i have every family photo, all my important documents and all my music (granted, MP3, but I now use high res streaming for critical listening) that I can access anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. Amazon keeps 5 copies of that data at widely separate geographic locations with one close to me for low latency, and if Amazon fails and the internet is destroyed, I still have the MDisks that will outlast my grandchildren. Total cost: $48/year and $50 worth of MDisks.

Forget this “bit rot” crap. (1) Buy enterprise class drives. (2) If you need more capacity or speed use the RAID capability built into your native file system (NTFS, AFS, ZFS, etc) implemented on a JBOD (just a bunch of drives) enclosure - forget the proprietary consumer grade NAS and HW RAID controllers unless you can afford enterprise class HW (3) keep a local backup copy that includes versioning (snapshots) for quick restores and test your restore. Backup automatically on a set schedule (4) keep a disaster recovery copy (DR) of your data in a MAJOR cloud provider and understand the delete policy. Pay for it with an automatic deduction. (5) keep an archive copy of important documents on MDisks at a secure location away from your home such as a bank vault (6) practice safe computing. Keep your OS and Aps up to date including your virus/malware definitions. Regularly check for bots and malware. Don’t open any email attachments unless you confirm with the sender they are legit. Check the “from” address in all emails before opening. Never go to a link included in an email… And if you do those things, you won’t end up like TN.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Yup, no matter what one does, "stuff" can happen.

(I used to worry about Florida Flicker and Flash. I still turn stuff off during a thunderstorm, even with a UPS.)

chikid68 Loc: Tennesse USA

Similar to the way I do except that one of my backup drives is kept at my daughter's house in the event my house is destroyed either by a fire or more likely a tornado.