Not always 100% sure about cloud safety. This helped me think it through: https://infoveave.com/last-mile-data-collection
Do you trust completely, your data is safe on cloud ?
- Thread starter Futureized
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- cloud computing
Main 1tb Hard Disk as my media storage
Another clone hdd as a backup, my future goal is to just increase the HDD storage, keep everything local and host a NAS at home
superczar
Keymaster
I have been trying to answer this question for myself for the last 20 years, esp wrt Photos.
From storing all my photos on a dedicated NAS as redundant backup starting all the way back in 2006/7
to all sorts of strategies including a plethora of linux scripts on homelab servers and a combination of low cost cloud providers.
I don’t think there is a single one-size-fits-all answer to this but can share a couple of learnings over this extended time period
- Anyone who thinks keeping redundant local only backups/local cloud is the answer is fooling themselves. Hard drives and SSDs can and do fail without advance warning.
Redundant live HDDs on same premise can fail with a single power surge, While cold store drives may have died / developed faults along the way.
- Cloud only, while generally s lot safer than local has its own issues. google changed its photo sync policy in 2019 or so which made retrieving your full photo data set incredibly painful and prone to errors.
Although MS and apple have not yet done anything of this kind before, you never know when it msy happen
Additionally, people can and have lost full account access , esp with google with a low chance of recovery.
The current model i follow - and recommend to everyone is
- Keep a local PC copy that syncs with the cloud , ideally apple or MS. I would have included google but google does not let you do a two-way sync for photos since 2019 plus is known to be more trigger happy for account level blocks.
A few hundred Rs a month (price of a single pizza?) is totally worth it for this safety net.
- If your really value your photos, In addition to the above, have a periodic sync frequency between your PC library and another local storage medium (can either be a NAS or even a cold storage SSD)
I have not yet had any loss on 25+ years of digital memories so I would like to believe that the above works with minimal risk of catastrophic failure
From storing all my photos on a dedicated NAS as redundant backup starting all the way back in 2006/7
to all sorts of strategies including a plethora of linux scripts on homelab servers and a combination of low cost cloud providers.
I don’t think there is a single one-size-fits-all answer to this but can share a couple of learnings over this extended time period
- Anyone who thinks keeping redundant local only backups/local cloud is the answer is fooling themselves. Hard drives and SSDs can and do fail without advance warning.
Redundant live HDDs on same premise can fail with a single power surge, While cold store drives may have died / developed faults along the way.
- Cloud only, while generally s lot safer than local has its own issues. google changed its photo sync policy in 2019 or so which made retrieving your full photo data set incredibly painful and prone to errors.
Although MS and apple have not yet done anything of this kind before, you never know when it msy happen
Additionally, people can and have lost full account access , esp with google with a low chance of recovery.
The current model i follow - and recommend to everyone is
- Keep a local PC copy that syncs with the cloud , ideally apple or MS. I would have included google but google does not let you do a two-way sync for photos since 2019 plus is known to be more trigger happy for account level blocks.
A few hundred Rs a month (price of a single pizza?) is totally worth it for this safety net.
- If your really value your photos, In addition to the above, have a periodic sync frequency between your PC library and another local storage medium (can either be a NAS or even a cold storage SSD)
I have not yet had any loss on 25+ years of digital memories so I would like to believe that the above works with minimal risk of catastrophic failure
I don't trust cloud in terms of privacy but I have had hard disk crashes before so I feel that the best way is to have a physical backup drive in case things go south. Cloud is turning out to be very expensive and that's the reason hard disk prices haven't dropped in the last few years.
Everyone sharing their setup, can you also share the size and the type of data in your backups ike photos, documents etc. It helps in understanding the options available for specific size & types of data.
Bulk of our data these days is just family pics i.e kids primarily. They are backed up to onedrive. I do have a nextcloud instance but the app has occasional errors syncing. So, not relying on it completely.
Planning to get a couple of hdds to pair with one of my NUCs to add an offsite backup at my native. They have a local isp connection with unmetered bandwidth but reliable power is an issue. It is fine for non-realtime backups but worried about frequent power cuts affecting hdd health.
Bulk of our data these days is just family pics i.e kids primarily. They are backed up to onedrive. I do have a nextcloud instance but the app has occasional errors syncing. So, not relying on it completely.
Planning to get a couple of hdds to pair with one of my NUCs to add an offsite backup at my native. They have a local isp connection with unmetered bandwidth but reliable power is an issue. It is fine for non-realtime backups but worried about frequent power cuts affecting hdd health.
If it is offline and non-realtime, you don't even need a NUC. Just fill the hard disks with data and keep them at your native place. If you go there 2 or more times a year, just replace hard disks with fresh hard disks every time.
No electricity, UPS, NUC required. Hard disk will be more likely to die when constantly switched off, but not any worse than power fluctuations. And you could completely encrypt the hard disks in this case. Whereas if the NUC has to start automatically every time without input of password, hard disk will need to be either non-encrypted, or the password has to be available to the NUC in plain text which is as good as leaving the hard disks non-encrypted.
This protects you from flood, fire, theft etc. damage at your regular residence.
jamhood007
Contributor