<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>I will share my backup approach as well, but as with Thomas, I
doubt the way I do things is going to be exactly how anyone else
wants to do them. Rather, you may get some inspiration from my
description about how you want to handle things yourself.</p>
<p>I'm a big believer in backups happening automatically. I don't
want to have to periodically copy/paste folders, or manually back
up onto a thumb drive or external drive, or anything like that. I
just want the backups to happen transparently in the background
and tell me when they're not working.</p>
<p>Similarly, I'm a big believer in offsite backups. If your data is
only backed up to devices in your home, then you're not protected
against a disaster that destroys your home, and you're not
protected against a disaster which keeps you out of your home for
an extended period of time, and you're not protected against a
burglar breaking into your home and stealing all your devices.</p>
<p>So:</p>
<ul>
<li>My digiKam database is stored in MariaDB rather than SQLite.</li>
<li>My photos are stored on a Synology NAS accessed over CIFS from
my Linux boxes where I run digiKam.<br>
</li>
<li>I do nightly backups of the digikam MariaDB database using
mariabackup, full backups every 45 days and incremental backups
between the full backups.</li>
<li>My <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://github.com/jikamens/jik-backup-utilities">home-grown
network backup scripts</a> back up my entire photo archive and
my database backups into Backblaze B2 storage every night. (Note
that the stuff at that link is partially obsolete since I'm now
using mariabackup for the database backups rather than MySQL
backup method described there; I haven't gotten around to
updating the stuff in Github to reflect my current usage.)</li>
<li>Backblaze B2 saves old versions of deleted files, so if one of
my photos somehow gets corrupted by digiKam or some other tool I
can restore from an old version.</li>
<li>However, I don't want to pay to store those old versions of
photos forever, so I periodically run "jpeginfo -c" on the
current versions of all the photos that have old versions saved,
and if jpeginfo says the current version is OK, I purge the old
versions. (Face-tagging is the biggest culprit for modifying
files and causing old versions to be saved, since I have digiKam
configured to save all metadata into the photo files for maximum
interoperability with things like Synology Photos.)</li>
</ul>
<p>By the way, I've only just recently started using digiKam, and
may I just say how grateful I am to the people who have worked on
it for finally creating a photo management tool that runs on Linux
that is robust enough for me to finally stop using my old copy of
Picasa. I am especially grateful for the face recognition features
and for the fact that digiKam supports MariaDB as a backend. Thank
you!<br>
</p>
<p>jik</p>
<br>
</body>
</html>