Archive photos to DVD (James Orr)

[Jens Benecke]

I beg to differ.

It's not *that hard* to keep a good backup strategy.
You just need to get started at all, and, yes maybe have *initial* help 
from an IT expert.

I spent about 800€ on our NAS (Synology Diskstation + 2 12TB harddisks), 
and I spend about 15€ monthly on 5TB of remote SSH storage (no Microsoft 
or Google) which is the offsite backup and encrypted. Don't use external 
harddisks, they are usually badly ventilated (= die young) and just need 
to be dropped once and that's it.

I use *Borgbackup <borgbackup.readthedocs.io>* to do the actual heavy 
lifting on several PCs, one Macbook and one Raspberry Pi, but if you 
want to have a nice desktop backup GUI you can have a look at *Kopia 
<https://kopia.io/>*, which is very similar and possibly easier to use.

Both are fast, secure (backups are encrypted), can deduplicate (not just 
"incremental" backups but "forever incremental"), and open source (= 
available everywhere and forever).
Backup snapshots and archives can be mounted and browsed with any file 
manager - even the remote backups - so you can restore anything at any 
point of time to anywhere.
Borg even has a "append-only" mode where it will prevent deletion of old 
snapshots, to guard against malware attacks that try to delete your backups.

Keep your data local, and create two parallel backup jobs (3-2-1 rule): 
one onto your NAS (hourly if you like), and one onto your cloud storage 
(maybe daily).
Don't backup your NAS backup: if the NAS backup breaks silently for some 
reason, you'll just duplicate the failure to the cloud and have won 
nothing.  See this Borg FAQ entry 
<https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq.html#can-i-copy-or-synchronize-my-repo-to-another-location>.

Borg saves a daily snapshot of my system, roughly 700GB of data and 
400'000 files in total (not just photos), to the NAS in about 5 minutes. 
I have a 2013-era i5 Haswell CPU.

You don't need to spend $10,000 for a good backup solution.
But you *do* need to get started at some point.

Regards,
Jens


Am 25.02.24 um 13:48 schrieb James White:
> There are solutions at scale that do the job really reliably while 
> using minimal bandwidth for backup, but you need to spend at least 
> $10,000 and keep track of a 24-hr I.T. expert who'll charge you a bit 
> every month. No cloud required.
>
>   * Restore one or all files from any point in time easily
>   * Survive regional disaster (flood, fire, burglary, etc)
>   * Only back up file difference to local NAS - up to hourly
>   * Only back difference from local NAS to remote NAS nightly
>   * Recover from virus, crypto locker etc. with minimal loss
>   * Scalable to many terabytes (or more) fairly easily
>   * Digital protection from 'bit-rot'  (the greatest threat of all)
>   * Any equipment can fail and still photos are easily restored
>   * Total ownership and privacy of your intellectual property
>   * No Microsoft, Google, Zenfolio etc. required
>
> I use one for my 30-year archive of about 8 terabytes. It's a bit 
> overwhelming for an individual - you need the I.T. expert, but the 
> solution does exist and eliminates the fear of failing equipment, 
> virus, crypto locker, regional disaster, etc.
>
> For a large studio (or a well-off individual), this is a good deal, 
> but for most, there just isn't a safe and secure solution other than 
> archival prints.
>
> I fear that there will be very few photos that survive this 
> generation; no cd, dvd or hard drive will survive.  Our grandchildren 
> won't have much to remember us by.
>
> james white
>>
>
-- 
Regards, Jens
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digikam-users/attachments/20240226/6dcb9bb9/attachment-0001.htm>