I’ve recently started looking into creating a physical at home storage back up solution for the thousands of photos my wife stores and shares on Google photo.
The concern, something may happen one day and all our photos become inaccessible from Google. We got lucky after one techanical error so far and Google restored the photo access. most of the photos are still stored on a number of different family member phones, but that would also be crazy to recover. And with our 2nd child arriving, I’m sure we’ll quickly run out of phone storage.
I’ve seen several different options and what I like the most is a setup that uses multiple hard drives with redundant back ups in case of a single failure. Bonus points would be if it could auto sync the photos from Google photos.
What options would you suggest? NAS setup with SSD’s, high capacity flash drives or some other solution. Any software that would auto back up from Google photos. I’m not to concerned about making the physical storage remote accesible. I would like to also store phone storage back up.
We use a Synology nas, and Tom believes that your use case would be supported. Happy to connect you two if that ends up being a potential path for you guys
I’d second Synology products, I’ve never once had so much as a hiccup from mine. If you are buying disks for them, make sure they are NAS-friendly, most brands have a designation for this,
ex: Western Digital Red. That said, I’m not sure there is a direct path for Google Photos sync in their software.
I’ve read too many articles on how to DIY google’s photo storage and there seems to be 101 ways at least, but most agree that having a NAS is one of the best ways to approach it.
If you find a solution specifically which is able to sync from Google please reply back here since that seems like the most tedious roadblock (I suspect this is a deliberate decision on the part of Alphabet)
thanks for the link! I’ve been putting off the purchase of a NAS because it’s not as fun as other toys in its price range, but it would solve a lot of my problems.
You can get a Synology NAS, and have it perform daily backups to (1) another Synology NAS - buddy system!, (2) AWS Glacier (archival cloud storage). You can also hang a USB hard drive from it (example 2 TB SSD) back that up, and then store that in your safe for local, longer term archival.
The NAS I have uses spinning platter hard drives, but I’d love to replace them with SSDs for longer term reliability & speed.
For photo/video archiving, I try to keep it pretty lo-fi: (Year) folder, and when possible (Month) folders within, and occasionally I’ll do (YYYY-MM-DD_Event-name).
That way, on a long enough time frame, you can move those folders to different storage mediums, as the technology changes.
