[digiKam-users] Best practise for DigiKam backup?

[Thomas D]

Hello,

Great question. And a great topic to discuss.

I am going to share my strategy for this. This is not going to be for
everyone. But maybe it can inspire someone else.

What I do is that I add all my photos incl. any sidecars or other
meta-files to subversion[0].
I have a local subversion server.
Any changes are immediately tracked.
I cannot easily lose images by user error as long as they are added to
subversion. Even when I explicitly delete photos, I can get them back if I
really have to.
The subversion server is then backed up using a 3-2-1 backup strategy[1]
My photo collection is big. (total size is measured in TBs)

This strategy provides some rather good safety guarantees. However, it does
come with some disadvantages, including;:

1: It takes at least 2x size on the machine who has the checkout/working
copy of the fotos. As well as an additional copy on the subversion server.
(I am not even counting the real backups here). However, I think the size
disadvantage is really a small price to pay for the safety. I likely pay
around 3x the price for storage this way, however, SATA disks are cheap and
my photo collection is valuable to me.

2: The use of Subversion is a bit out-dated. However, I have been using
this scheme for ~15 years now. And it works very well. If I were to design
it again I would like look into a more modern VCS for this. Maybe Git.
Maybe something else that is better suited for binary files.

3: I have to use command-line tools to work with subversion. This is fine
for me, but it every one's cup of tea. I have a few neat shell aliases to
help me with this. I could probably find a decent GUI interface to
Subversion at this stage, but using the CLI does not bother me too much.

4: Lacking integration to most programs. Neither Digikam nor most other
photo tools support Subversion.


[0]: Subversion: https://subversion.apache.org/
[1]: 3-2-1 backup strategy:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/



Den søn. 21. nov. 2021 kl. 20.11 skrev Henrik Hemrin <hehemrin at hemrin.com>:

> A question about backup.
>
> My background is that I have used Photoshop Elements for years. I backup
> primarily in two ways:
> - Copy and paste of folders with photos (incl sidecars)
> - Backup tool included in Photoshop Elements, which includes all to
> restore Photoshop Elements.
>
> I am relatively new to DigiKam. I have not found any similar backup tool
> included. I use DigiKam as Linux Appimage and (soon) on macOS as well. As I
> understand, I must myself "copy and paste" (or any script or whatever
> method I add myself) and do a backup of:
> a) configuration file digikamrc
> b) data bases
> c) folders with photos (incl sidecars)
>
> Is this correctly understood? Any further advice?
>
> Best regards
> Henrik Hemrin
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