Photo-Video Backup Strategies.....

[rx8pilot]

Hello all -
I am trying to find the easiest and most reliable way to backup all of the photos/videos captured on my device. This seems easy enough but I have been frustrated with how much effort it takes to make this happen reliably.

Setup:
Using Google Photos on Galaxy S6 and Galaxy TAB S
Auto uploader on various Windows machines as well.

Goal:
Have every photo/video backed up to a local NAS as well as Google photos cloud. I want it to be a very deliberate effort to completely delete a backed up copy - even if/when it is deleted on the originating device.

This setup seems to be reliable as far as getting all media to a single location without having to think about it. The problem I struggle with the most is on my S6, which is the dominant photo/video acquisition device, runs out of storage and old media needs to be removed.

The Google Photos Assistant offers to clear out everything older than 30 days to save local storage. While this is fine in concept - how to I verify that the media is POSITIVELY backed up in the cloud. Also, how do I pull an archive of just those particular deletions to a local drive for non-cloud backup? My Google Photos account gets input from a variety of places so it is not possible to just select a range of photos and archive that - if I did, it would duplicate a ton of media that originated on other devices.

All I want to do is free up a reasonable amount of storage on my phone. I did a test by manually deleting a video and it ALSO deleted it from Google Photos. Not good. I tried to delete from the gallery, but the delete option does not exist (guessing because the sync option is turned on). How can I free up space without deleting from Google Photos? The 'assistant' option is a giant blunt hammer that removes local copies of media older than 30 days. I am scared that it will also delete them in Google Photos.

Why is this such a PITA? I have been entrenched in technology since the early 80's have made it my career. While I am not an expert in Android, I feel that this should not be such a challenge? Does anyone know of a tutorial, video, or alternate way to manage photos that is easier?

 

[lunatic59]

Google Photos, Google Drive, Drop Box, OneDrive, iCloud (did I forget any?) are all sync services where when you do something to a file in one location it will filter throughout all sync'ed devices. Delete a file on your phone it will get deleted everywhere it's sync'ed. Edit a file on your PC and it will modify the file on your phone.

If I understand what you want to do, then why not use Dropbox. On a PC that syncs regularly, backup your Dropbox folder to your NAS without synchronization so you NAS acts as an archive. If you ever need to find an old file deleted from Dropbox, it would be there.

 

[chanchan05]

SugarSync would have been able to do this. They have options to sync photos only one way to specific folders. You could have set it to sync to PC only, but to not sync deletes. But it has since moved to a pay only service.

You could look at Folder sync. I remember it has some settings like that.

 

[rx8pilot]

On a previous generation of device/OS I had used a 3rd party app to push images/videos to BOX - which I already have a 1TB account. It was reasonably decent but would skip images and sometimes crash without me knowing. The database would have some sort of corruption problem and it would start pushing all photos/videos again. When I got my S6, I got rid of that app in the process of looking for a more reliable way. I no longer have Drop Box but since I have the BOX account, maybe I should look to see if they have added an automatic function.

My BOX account is already setup to do one-way pushes to my NAS and then the NAS itself is mirrored on another cloud backup service with version control and deleted file saves. All I need, I guess, is a reliable 'set and forget' way to have my media creating devices sync with BOX. For the moment - I am going to search around for BOX related solutions and see if I get lucky. I guess I can still use Google Photos as a convenience tool to view and share while something like BOX (pushed 1-way to my NAS-RAID) is handling the archive part.

On a side note - SugarSync was a major problem for me. I had it deployed on about 8 PC's at one time - and it had major problems with sync. On some it just got stuck and stopped any syncing, on others many files were deleted. It was such a mess. Drop Box was a BIG improvement, and then BOX was an improvement over Drop Box for a larger scale. It is possible that Drop Box has become better but I have not looked back for quite a while. So far I have been successful with about 20 users on BOX with a fairly complex web of sharing and permissions and administration. Anytime a file is added to BOX, it gets pushed to a NAS-RAID and then daily cloud push for offsite backup.

Thank you for the comments so far, I appreciate the time.

 

[lunatic59]

I've been using oneDrive (MS) more and more since I got 1TB with my office subscription. It seems reliable and pretty convenient. I do have those folders on my PC set to backup to my NAS as well. It is pretty much a set-and-forget setup.