Here’s a non-paywalled link to an article published in the Washington Post a few days ago. It’s great to see this kind of thing getting some mainstream attention. Young children have not made an informed decision about whether they want their photos posted online.
Managing digital photos is quite hard to do reliably.
Where do you store them? Optical disc, it might get mushrooms; HDD, mechanism might fail; SSD or flash, this one’s better but it might get corrupted, and so on.
Cloud services provide a convenient solution to all this, than apart from the service going down (which is less likely) have no other issues. You can also access them wherever you are.
Privacy is an important concern. It would be nice to have them encrypted on cloud. Encrypted from a local and trusted (open source) client, that is also convenient. If each time I want to show a photo to my granny I have to download and gpg a file manually, I pass.
But most people don’t care about their privacy at all anyways, so why bother.
Um… what?
I think they mean
Syncthing!
Android Phone/Linux/Windows/Mac/iOS clients. Simply sync your photos to all of your devices, if you only have the one device, use a trusted friend and cross sync…
Don’t bother with cloud.
Also Signal groups for sharing with those that matter.
If you don’t care about privacy, you’re probably blasé about backup, but if you have backups it’s as simple as 3-2-1…
Just do backups, isn’t that easier than using a cloud service?
Sounds easy.
To make local backups I have to do them on schedule, transfer all photos (or rsync them) from all devices to backup media. To have some redundancy I have to make a copy (unless you got a RAID NAS at home that is). In this situation you’ll have a backup as recent as your sync frequency. To access the backups you have to browse the files on the drive, if it’s a NAS, it can be quite convenient, but not if it’s any other kind of storage.
Compare this to for example Google Photos backup. You take a photo, you have Internet connection, it’s synchronized. You don’t worry about redundancy, and can access the photo wherever you are with a very nice app.
These days I use Btrfs snapshots to do incremental backups to an external drive each week, it’s manual but it takes less than 5 minutes a week, the most I risk losing is a week of data and I trust it a lot more than relying on some external service that might go down at any time or randomly decide to delete my account. For most people just worried about photos I would assume that’s enough, I feel like anything else is just over-engineered.
That’s a very nice solution I will look into it. Thanks.
This is basically the method I use:
https://fedoramagazine.org/btrfs-snapshots-backup-incremental/
If it’s not fully automatic I won’t stick with it
I find keeping a calendar is useful for remembering routine tasks.
Encryption can brute forced
Of course it can. Go brute-force a quantum resistant algorithm with a reasonably sized encryption key and call me when you’re done.
You just got to be overly paranoid as it will serve you better long term