What’s a reliable long-term workflow for storing and backing up a family photo library?
Asked 3/5/2021
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2 answers
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I have about 200GB of family photos going back to the 1990s, gathered from several services and apps including Apple Photos, Flickr, Google Photos, Lightroom, and Dropbox. I’ve recently consolidated everything into one folder and removed duplicates.
I currently subscribe to Adobe CC, Google One, and Dropbox, and I like the idea of keeping photos locally while also using cloud services for backup and easy access on phones and displays.
My idea is to import photos from my phone or camera to a computer, store them in Dropbox, organize and edit them in Lightroom, and also sync them to Google Photos for viewing and sharing. Is that a sound long-term system for family photos, or is there a better approach for storage, organization, and backup?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
5y ago
2 Answers
3
In terms of backup, I don’t think it sound. But it’s better than nothing.
Putting pictures in the cloud can add flexibility to a workflow. It’s a wonderful technology. And for a business use, it is probably good enough as a backup because business records have finite retention periods and business can buy operational interruptions insurance.
But your pictures are not fungible. Money can’t replace them. They don’t have a short retention period. And pictures in the cloud are not under your control.
Miss a payment, they are gone.
Catastrophic data center event, they are gone.
Change in the host’s business model, gone.
Your account compromised, gone.
Plain vanilla ordinary operator error by you, gone. And these are more likely with the cloud because you will be touching the storage all the time for ordinary operations not just backup.
A good backup strategy is the opposite: the backup is offline and read only and redundant. Tactically, backup is based on reducing failure modes and creating multiple paths to recovery.
The cloud can be a convenient skirmish line. But it’s no substitute for hard disks in safe deposit boxes. And another with a family member in another town. And so on.
Originally by user95237. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user95237
5y ago
0
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Using Dropbox plus Google Photos can be useful for access, sharing, and convenience, but it is not a fully reliable backup strategy by itself.
The main concern is that cloud storage is still outside your control. If a payment is missed, an account is compromised, a service changes policies, there’s user error, or a provider has a serious failure, your only copy could be at risk. For irreplaceable family photos, that’s not ideal.
A better approach is to treat cloud services as one layer, not the whole system:
- keep a primary local copy under your control
- keep at least one additional backup separate from that primary copy
- use cloud sync/services as an extra backup and for easy access/sharing
Your proposed workflow is fine for organizing and viewing, especially with Lightroom and Google Photos, but don’t rely on Dropbox/Google Photos alone as the archive. The key principle is redundancy and control: multiple copies, in different places, with at least one copy you manage directly.
So: good idea as part of a system, but not sufficient as the only backup for long-term family photo preservation.
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