My experience is that when someone dies, all their paperwork gets left in a drawer for years until the next house move and then it's all thrown out.
The digital archive or cloud storage will likely in many cases not even be discovered. And if it is discovered, it will probably be such a load of images, good and bad, that no-one will have the time to really look it through and appreciate it.
But for sure, both options combined is probably best.
My experience has been the opposite, with relatives eagerly snatching up the old photographs.
My boss is young and one of those people for whom digital is the only way. Then one day she got a box of old photographs and was absolutely amazed that she could turn them over and read where they were taken, on what occasion, and who was in the photos.
She now prints out all of her photos and writes notes on the back of them and keeps them in a box, just like people have done for the last century.
Exactly, and setting up a NAS has never been easier.
I trust any cloud provider a lot more than my lazy self.
> and external storage is becoming cheaper every year
Sure, but electricity isn't. At the current price in the UK it seems like running a small NAS would be 10 GBP per month, more than most online storage solutions.
That is without counting the initial investment of buying the NAS, the cost of maintaining it (if I have to spend an hour a month on maintenance, that's $1000+ a year of time wasted), the footprint of the NAS, the noise, the heat, etc.
My home backup is going to be it's own problem after my death.
Nowadays it's only available inside the world of Black Mirror and similar fiction.
E.g. if this was about storing monetary data, this would never have happened.
That becomes apparent if you ever had any issue with a google product. There's no way to resolve issues outside of canned answers from "AI" systems and public forums.
Let’s hope none of the images were NFT “assets” then haha
https://twitter.com/samwcyo/status/1569897392560050178
Discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32835190
Of course they do. How can they possibly put any value on endless PB of holiday snaps? They only care that you are now reliant on them to store your memories.
Personally, I use Syncthing to sync between devices, including a NAS as a target, which regularly backs up to Backblaze.
QNAP or Asustor has standalone apps my parents can use as well. Without getting your parents involved, you could either pay for remote hosting for your off-site, or trade RAID space with a friend.
Another good test: upload your photo collection, then download it and binary diff the two sets of files.
Also, when was the last time you heard a banker say that everyone makes mistakes all the time.
But because it's Google I'm sure they can break whatever rules they want as long as it doesn't involve trying to avoid Apple's 30% fees.
But then I think about the convenience of my 2TB Google Drive and I can't do it.
And I think, too, of the Polaroid pictures my parents took and gave me in a box once I got married and are now fainted. Mayhaps algorithms deciding that it's time to let go of your own data is just the modern form of yellowing.
I highly recommend it. It feels like pure freedom, putting a price tag on my personal data. The migration is something done in two steps: set up your alternative service, but also keep the old one (gmail/gdrive/calendar/...) running. Then start to use the new email service, while keeping the old one.
There are enough affordable options and you do not have to migrate everything at once. I started with my emails - gmail is still running and forwards all incoming emails, so I wont miss anything. I already updated all my accounts/logins to the new email address.
The next step was copying all my files from Dropbox, GDrive, and so on to {service I am using}. The data in the other clouds are still there, but I am going to delete it all soon.
There are things that are not perfect - like accepting appointments, which I still want to show up in my Google calendar. To those mails I still have to respond in google mail. But I am getting there, one step after another. The win so far is much bigger than the loss/pain.
As for pictures, I do use Google Photos, but it's not my primary photo video store. It's more for the app that lets me lookup pictures.
For storing original versions of pictures/videos, I sync from my phone to a home computer using Syncthing, and store backups of my files on AWS S3 using Restic for encrypted backups.
If I lose Google Photos, no big deal. I still have local and cloud copies of my data.
I refuse to relinquish my files to some insouciant third-party. And what recourse would you have if they lost them?? Very probably them saying "Sorry. Not our problem."
Why not sync them to a cheap external drive on a regular basis?
It’s less about Google wanting to scan your data today and more about Google’s stingy strategy for photos plus Google’s lazy engineering (too many other interesting games to solve). Google Photos was born out of Google Plus, and is under heavy revenue efficiency pressure.
Well, let's see:
ssh user@rsync.net sha256 photos/IMG_1234.HEIC
Yep, checks out.
As someone who works in generative modeling, that's probably what is creating these issues in the first place. Kinda like how you can see certain GAN type of patterns on Netflix when there is upscaling or if you don't turn off the fancy features on your TVs. Of course, finding how these images are corrupted leads to better models so they will be solved. This isn't the first time Google has edited photos and made them worse and it won't be the last. But the trend is that the photos get better.
By the principle of explosion[0, eg].
You can just hash them locally or use AI to identify modifications.
This is already the case with different image compression algorithms improving on one another. Users couldn't and shouldn't tell the difference between JPG, or slightly smaller / resized JPG, or WebP, or whatever. I personally don't think image hosts should have to alert users when making undetectable changes to their images like this.
It's simply not the same thing. If I opened my file browser one day and saw that all of my FLACs had been converted to MP3, I would go on a murder spree.
With every passing week, every Google fuck up like this and with ente's great pace of development, I draw myself nearer and nearer to the precipice of full switchover. I will soon be having my last Google Takeout.
[0]: https://ente.io/
It looks like Google has unpublished our app, will figure out a fix.
If you happen to revisit and find something lacking, please write to vishnu[at]ente.io, we'd love to make ente work better for you.
I switched to the service completely.
[0]: https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-and-configur...
It works extremely well, and you can re-run it any time to sync new files locally too.
I used it like that for a few months before I finally installed syncthing on my phone and stopped using Google Photos altogether.
Now what I do is take photos on my phone, have them sync to a NAS. And on the NAS I used a modified version of this https://forum.syncthing.net/t/android-photo-sync-with-exifto... to build up a YYYY/MM folder organisation and move files older than 30 days from the syncthing folder into my archive. My archive is then in my Plex so it's still accessible to me.
In essence: 1) Take photo (implicit sync to NAS), 2) wait 30 days, 3) archive photo into long term directory naming convention, whilst making available to Plex and deleting the version from my phone (by deleting the syncthing version it will delete the one on the phone after 30 days too).
Apparently I am not the only one[1][2]. Other people have a mix of errors[3]. It is not the reliable data extraction I was expecting for something as valuable as my family photos. Google is losing a lot of trust from me based on this.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25591630 [2]: https://sysc.org/what-is-google-takeout/ [3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/googlephotos/comments/khited/google...
Update: my limited knowledge on this is proof I’m wrong.
It totally depends.
They're absolutely nothing like block-based JPEG, that's for sure. When I inspect the images Google Photos serves me in my browser, it is serving up JPEG (from the response headers). But is this an artifact that shows up in AVIF or WebP? I wonder if mobile clients are getting a different encoding.
The only objective thing I notice is that the artifact lines tend to track a line of constant brightness, so you seem them appearing perpendicular to gradients of light and shade. And that each artifact line is black/dark on one side and white/light on the other -- and that the white edge seems to be in the direction of darkening, while the black is in the direction of lightening.
Someone here who works with modern image codecs must be able to hypothesize what part of encoding/decoding must be bugging out here?
(See, e.g., http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/15-463/2019_fall/lectures... for a nice overview of gradient-domain image processing.)
These artifacts aren’t where I’ve seen them before. Normally you’d see this sort of posterization and clamping around global highlights and shadows, especially if the incorrect colorspace profile was applied, but this seems like the affected border is around a localized area, possibly due to a buggy pseudo-HDR implementation (what you see when you move the “pop” adjustment slider, which increases localized contrast ranges). Google+ images had a mild pop adjustment applied automatically.
But seriously, I am also very curious. I wonder if they are playing with an in-house compression algorithm.
That being said my photos are the only digital files I really care about not losing. My photos and videos from my phone get backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive and Amazon’s photo storage that comes with Prime.
My videos get backed up to all of the above except Amazon’s storage.
But, I don’t have a personal computer anymore and soon won’t have a personal residence. My wife and I are going to be digital nomads traveling across the country for a few years.
My backup flow is: phone, iCloud, local ZFS array served by PhotoPrism (synced using PhotoSync), Backblaze.
I tried to open a Word document that I hadn't viewed for several years, but got an error that the file was damaged. It looks like this happens sometimes, after searching for the error online. Luckily I was able to recover an earlier version of the file (via version history), but it was alarming that it happened in the first place (also I'm not sure if important edits were made in the latest corrupted version).
It's unfortunate how many cloud services default to storing on the cloud only instead of also keeping a local copy, and don't even provide the option to opt out. Even if you choose the "keep offline" option for several services, for unknown reasons, this doesn't seem reliable (Maybe I'm 'using it wrong'? But in practice, I've found myself having to download files that I was sure I set to keep offline.)
The same isn't true for GCP - there they lost some writes to customers persistent disks - but only ~50 megabytes worldwide, which is still rather good when you consider they store millions of terabytes.
I hope to fix up my prototype and launch it next year.
If anyone knows of a quality source of bulk SD cards or flash drives in high capacity please let me know.
The idea would be to subscribe to have this data shipped once or more per year so hopefully some of the data would survive.
Any advice on error correction metadata and tools?
Don’t bother getting all frustrated in a big support thread. The engineers who caused these bugs DO NOT care about you. They are way way too busy solving dynamic programming problems. Chargebacks are the most effective tool here.
You are flirting with having your entire google account disabled. As this may end up un-personing you, I would suggest strongly taking another route.
Use anything else you want for day to day usage - Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, Google Drive, etc. whatever fits your budget and needs. But sleep safe knowing your data has a backup.
Same thing with YouTube - you never know when Google might decide to wipe out your channel, and if they do you’ll never know why they did it, and you’ll have no recourse after they have done it. There are plenty of stories on HN where this has happened. So the master copy of all your videos should be in AWS so you can start again if you need to. IMO.
It's been great so far although I do need to figure out why it powers on all the time (probably SMB shenanigans).
But the main thing I got it for is to set up freezing folders full of RAWs I've taken to back-up to Glacier.
I had a disaster when using DropBox way back around 2011. Ever since then I have been responsible for storing and backing up my own files. Nobody else gets to have them in their 'safe'-keeping.
