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I've finally started digitizing some very old family photos--most going back only to the 1940s or 1930s, but one dating from roughly 1885--and doing a little digital restoration. It's slow going, and I won't get all that many done, but every one I complete is immediately backed up twice, so there are three digital copies of it as well as any prints I make.

 

Nice!

 

Is one of you backups off-site or cloud?

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The KEY is off-site vs. on-site.

 

I have two friends that have totally lost valuable archives of their lives' work, that were backed up on-site, one due to fire and one due to flood.

 

And now they are retired and live in Florida... :rolleyes:

 

For a long time, I was using Amazon S3 (and Filezilla as the transfer client) to hold certain folder, website, and work document backups. This was along with WD Passport images of boot drives. Lately due to changes by Amazon, I now back up to Toshiba X300 5Tb drives that drop into this:

 

SABRENT USB 3.0 to SATA I/II/III Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station

 

This is not NAS as such--but the rotating drives end up out in the garage shop--which is unlikely to burn along with the house...

 "I See Things..."

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  • 1 month later...
For me, saving your images on the "cloud" is very much like saving your money in bitcoins and the like.

 

Whatever the drawbacks of cloud storage, this is a poor analogy. When you use cloud storage, there is something there: a server farm that is storing your image. When you buy bitcoin, you are buying essentially nothing other than a digital certificate that you hope some greater fool will pay more for. It's a simple pyramid scheme--like the Dutch tulip bubble, but in that case, people actually did own flowers.

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Whatever the drawbacks of cloud storage, this is a poor analogy. When you use cloud storage, there is something there: a server farm that is storing your image. When you buy bitcoin, you are buying essentially nothing other than a digital certificate that you hope some greater fool will pay more for. It's a simple pyramid scheme--like the Dutch tulip bubble, but in that case, people actually did own flowers.

So saving your images on the "cloud" is very much like the Dutch tulip bubble.

 

(Which, by the way, was not a trade in actual things people actually owned, but, like bitcoins, a trade in promises. Futures. "Windhandel", i.e. trade in wind. Nothing tangible.)

Edited by q.g._de_bakker
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Indeed. Futures trading, but futures of real things.

 

For example, from the year after the trading in tulip futures took off:

 

"The records of the tulip trade offer examples of just how dramatically the money invested in a single bulb could multiply. A Viceroy grown by an Almaar wine merchant Named Gerrit Bosch...weighted 81 aces when it was planted in hte autumn of 1636. It had grown to 416 aces [azen] when it was lifted in July 1637..." (Mike Dash, Tulipmania, p. 119).

 

That bulb was a real thing. People were speculating in future prices of material goods. As you probably know, futures trading in other commodities was already established in Amsterda before the tulip craze. People speculating in bitcoin are buying nothing other than the hope that a greater fool will follow them. Think of it this way: if the price of tulips fell to zero, someone in the chain would still own a given bulb. if the price of Bitcoin falls to zero, the owners are left with nothing at all.

 

None of which has anything to do with cloud storage of photographs.

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Indeed. Futures trading, but futures of real things.

 

For example, from the year after the trading in tulip futures took off:

 

"The records of the tulip trade offer examples of just how dramatically the money invested in a single bulb could multiply. A Viceroy grown by an Almaar wine merchant Named Gerrit Bosch...weighted 81 aces when it was planted in hte autumn of 1636. It had grown to 416 aces [azen] when it was lifted in July 1637..." (Mike Dash, Tulipmania, p. 119).

 

That bulb was a real thing. People were speculating in future prices of material goods. As you probably know, futures trading in other commodities was already established in Amsterda before the tulip craze. People speculating in bitcoin are buying nothing other than the hope that a greater fool will follow them. Think of it this way: if the price of tulips fell to zero, someone in the chain would still own a given bulb. if the price of Bitcoin falls to zero, the owners are left with nothing at all.

 

None of which has anything to do with cloud storage of photographs.

The bulb was a real thing. The shoots it would produce, and those were the things traded, did not yet exist when they were traded. Futures. Windhandel.

 

What this has to do with Cloud storage is that you are entrusting your valuables to someone else, without any guarantee that that someone else and your valuables are still around the day after tomorrow. Good faith. Trust. "Hope", as you put in the the bitcoin context. And you pay that someone else for that too.

It is easy and cheap enough to not have to put your faith in someone else, and create your own internet accessible, safe storage.

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What this has to do with Cloud storage is that you are entrusting your valuables to someone else, without any guarantee that that someone else and your valuables are still around the day after tomorrow. Good faith. Trust. "Hope", as you put in the the bitcoin context. And you pay that someone else for that too.

It is easy and cheap enough to not have to put your faith in someone else, and create your own internet accessible, safe storage.

 

A non sequitur. The interchange was about whether cloud storage is analogous to bitcoin.

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Offsite (cloud server) storage is a nice thing. It does not take the place of rock-solid local media, as quiggy and others have noted.

 

What's the likelihood--barring the collapse of Western Civilization--that Google (Alphabet), Amazon, and Microsoft are going away within our lifetimes?

 

They will find ways to extract a shitload more money from us going into the future though... o_O

 

TANSTAAFL

 "I See Things..."

The FotoFora Community Experience [Link]

A new community for creative photographers.  Come join us!

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Offsite (cloud server) storage is a nice thing. It does not take the place of rock-solid local media

 

The more general principle, I think, is that nothing is foolproof, so you should have at least two backups of different sorts in different locations.

 

It's trivially easy to do, and quite cheap.

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On 7/1/2022 at 6:39 PM, paddler4 said:

 

The more general principle, I think, is that nothing is foolproof, so you should have at least two backups of different sorts in different locations.

 

It's trivially easy to do, and quite cheap.

This is the "bottom line" of this discussion, worth bumping one more time.
 

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On 10/23/2022 at 2:34 AM, q.g._de_bakker said:

They did not misplace it. They put the knowledge where they put it on...

Reminds me of a real story, though I don't remember which device.

Some handheld computing devices, maybe Palm.

There was a compression app, that would compress apps to save memory, and automatically uncompress them.

And then someone compressed the automatic compress/uncompress app ...

-- glen

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