How do you back up your photos?

[Syborg1211]

What's everyone doing for backing up your photos? Is anyone using a cloud-based service? Which one and how do you like it?

I usually buy 2 external hard drives per year and use them as a double back-up in case one fails. I also keep 1 of the copies from previous years in a different location in case of a fire/break-in/etc. I've been slacking on buying drives for this year, and I'm starting to get tired of collecting hard drives so cloud might work. I just like how much faster it is to load photos onto an external and grab them later. Uploading hundreds of gigs of photos to the cloud does not sound appealing though.

 

[corkyg]

I have many years worth of photos. They are backrg up up several ways. I put some on opticals, most all on duplicate HDDs. The first task is to decide what is worth backing up. Not all photos are.

 

[repoman0]

I'd be screwed if my apartment burned down, but I basically use a couple of internal mirrored 4TB drives set up in MS storage spaces. It's like a RAID1 with some extra checksumming features to avoid bit rot and latent corruption, like ZFS. I bought a bluray burner intending to back them up on optical discs too but so far haven't bothered with it.

At this point if I was to pick a real backup solution beyond just using duplicate drives I think it'd be some kind of offsite ("cloud") backup. Or maybe two blu-rays per backup with one stored at work.

 

[Brainonska511]

All my data is mirrored to another internal drive once a week. About once a month (or when I add a significant amount of new stuff), I'll attach an external drive.

 

[IronWing]

The first task is to decide what is worth backing up. Not all photos are.

What! Yeah, but it's hard.

I back up to an external RAID 1 drive once a week and keep that drive detached when in use. If the house burns, I'm SOL. I just can't see cloud services being a solution for the long haul. Companies and services come and go.

 

[Anubis]

i have a 15TB NAS and i use backblaze

 

[Rifter]

one copy on local PC spinners one copy on a 3.5" HDD sitting in my fireproof gun safe onsite, and copy on a 3.5" HDD sitting in safe at external site and one copy on dropbox.

 

[CuriousMike]

I have a 3TD usb drive that has "point to a folder and I'll auto backup" software.

I'd be screwed if there was a disaster in the house.

 

[corkyg]

Speaking of disasters in the house, when we had a full 4 BR house full of stuff, I meticulously photographed every item, every piece of art, silver, etc., etc., and put all those photos on a disk and placed in in our safety deposit box at the bank. That was in case of a disaster, fire, etc., for insurance purposes. But! We have downsized - sold the house and all the "stuff." That disk no longer applies so I now know to go get it and relegate it to the optical drawer for giggles and memories.

 

[Fardringle]

I have my photos on a drive in my PC that I sync to an external drive once in a while, and they are also backed up automatically to an online Crashplan account along with other stuff that I would prefer not to lose if my house ever disappears.

 

[biostud]

Onedrive+external hard drive, every ~2 month.

 

[Red Squirrel]

My photos are within the rest of all my personal files, so they just get backed up by my server regular backup routine. I have rsync jobs that sync with a backup raid array on my file server (different raid than where the data is, of course).

I also have a manual offsite job I run once in a while using HDDs and a HDD dock and have multiple rotations of each job. (a job being a set of files that need to be backed up as it does more than pictures) I have it setup so the drive has an alias to the proper backup script to run, so I just need to put a drive in the dock, run a command on the server and it will run the proper job for that particular drive. I have a small rotation including an actual off site one. The rest stay in a filing cabinet.

Not the best setup, I'd like to revisit it at some point, but it works and for the few times I had to go back to backup it saved my butt.

I often look into tapes but the drives are pricy and so are the tapes unless you go to the older ones like LTO3 but then you're dealing with used stuff including tapes.

 

[carelo]

Besides storing them on mirrored drives on my Windows Home Server, which are backed up to an external USB 3.0, I actually stopped erasing my full SD memory cards a few years ago. When I fill one up, I just buy a couple more. Considering I paid $225 for my first 15MB CompactFlash in 1998, today's memory is ridiculously cheap!
By the way, I do have a lot of pictures stored online (OneDrive/Dropbox/Amazon Photos), but that's a pain for me to use as a backup strategy. I'd rather have copies in as many places as possible. I'm considering one of those fire/water-proof external drives as a third layer of protection.

What's everyone doing for backing up your photos? Is anyone using a cloud-based service? Which one and how do you like it?

 

[WelshBloke]

Hdd drive on my PC synced to one on my wifes PC. That folder is synced to a folder on my freenas server. Plus all my photos are backed up to google photos as well.

 

[ronbo613]

Internal hard drives, external hard drives(stored off site) and NAS. System drive is imaged using Macrium Reflect and files are regularly backed up using SyncBack. Both of these backup programs are free.

 

[luv2liv]

https://www.backblaze.com/
unlimited $5/month.
but im cheap so i use google photos. unlimited photos/vids for free.

 

[Exterous]

Besides storing them on mirrored drives on my Windows Home Server, which are backed up to an external USB 3.0, I actually stopped erasing my full SD memory cards a few years ago. When I fill one up, I just buy a couple more. Considering I paid $225 for my first 15MB CompactFlash in 1998, today's memory is ridiculously cheap!
By the way, I do have a lot of pictures stored online (OneDrive/Dropbox/Amazon Photos), but that's a pain for me to use as a backup strategy. I'd rather have copies in as many places as possible. I'm considering one of those fire/water-proof external drives as a third layer of protection.

Thats pretty close to what we do. I use syncback pro to do a delta every week from Storage Spaces to our networked external HDD so that it might be a 'quick grab' in case of emergency. I don't do 'mirror' since I'm never a fan of having software auto-delete stuff for me which makes cleaning up more of a pain but I have more piece of mind. I've waned to get a safety deposit box to do an offsite but those are never available when I think to ask about it. On my list of things to do is backblaze or crashplan but in the mean time we have mostly full SD cards laying around.

 

[NutBucket]

Carbonite for the PCs and Google Photos for the phones.

 

[Yakk]

NAS server, online at carbonite, and a reduced crap copy on google photo unlimited.

 

[zCypher]

Multiple copies on separate devices in the home + multiple places online, pretty hard to go wrong there. Flickr has a lot of free space and let's you upload/download the full resolution files. I've retrieved a few pics from Flickr a couple of times when I wasn't being diligent with my local backups and it always served me well.

I think it's a mistake to *only* store them locally. But as long as you at least have copies on multiple devices, then that's pretty good for most scenarios.