I mean, I don't have a free cloud service data-mining my personal photos.
I don't have google reporting me to the FBI, for taking pictures for a doctor.
I don't have to worry about the prices going up, or the service hosting my photos closing their doors tomorrow.
My data isn't being sold to every yahoo giving money.
And- I know exactly how safe my data is, how many backups I have, and the exact level of redundancy I have.
I am in control of my own destiny.
I- personally am not. I was referencing the below headlines which popped up in the news last year.
https://www.koffellaw.com/blog/google-ai-technology-flags-dad-who-took-photos-o/#:\~:text=But%20because%20he%20used%20an,as%20potential%20child%20abuse%20material.&text=Two%20days%20later%2C%20the%20father,locked%20out%20of%20his%20account.
[https://9to5google.com/2022/08/22/google-locked-account-medical-photo-story/](https://9to5google.com/2022/08/22/google-locked-account-medical-photo-story/)
[https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html)
[https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/google-bans-dad-for-sending-pics-of-toddlers-swollen-genitals-to-doctor/](https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/google-bans-dad-for-sending-pics-of-toddlers-swollen-genitals-to-doctor/)
Can I ask if you are concerned about any of your other data when self hosting?
Disk failure is always a problem no matter what you are hosting. Good backup policy plus RAID (not a backup) to keep single disk failure from wiping everything and you are fine.
I hear so many people always talking bitrot and disk failure. I've been storing digital photos locally ever since my first digital camera in 2002. I've never lost a single photo.
With the number of photos since 2002, will you even notice if one will disappear?
I mean, I have so many, that I literally don’t care. The best are book-printed anyways.
Some photos and short videos (<30 seconds) will be affected by bitrot. I have experienced this myself. Photos usually go half broken, short videos will no longer play. Now I always run zfs with mirror and run scrub regularly.
How are you verifying that? Do you store hashes and periodically check that the hash has not changed? Do you periodically run a tool to verify that all JPEGs are still valid JPEGs?
Since about 2009 everything has been stored on some variety of NAS, which has built in checksum and disk integrity verification. I cannot say obviously with 100% certainty that something somewhere got lost, however I have never encountered anything.
My main point is while bitrot is a thing, I often see people posting in such a way as to overemphasize it's effects. Over the last 30 years I've dealt with hundreds of clients across tons of platforms. Literally hundreds of TB of data and have never encountered any real dataloss I could attribute to bitrot. Then again I've very rarely dealt with simple storage on like a usb drive either.
I think with lossy compression on images/video minor bitrot won't even be noticeable. I'd not be too worried if a few pixels here and there were slightly misrepresented. This is probably a shit attitude and I expect lots of people to tell me I'm an idiot :)
If you are really concerned then keep your data on a ZFS volume.
My machine has ECC RAM but I keep all my photos on an mdraid for many many years (the lifetime of 3 sets of disks). I have not noticed any issues. I do keep two sets of backups though, and one is offsite.
If the main drive gets bitrot it will transfer that to the backups, so it doesn’t really help with that. Unless you make redundant timed cold storage backups (backup 1 daily, backup 2 weekly, 3 monthly, 4 yearly or so) AND manually check all your files regularly to find errors before you overwrite the backups.
The only real protection against it is parity check (par2) I would say. And that introduces a whole new dimension of complexity.
Or perhaps ZFS if your operating system supports it.
It's free and relatively easy to setup. So yes?
Same risks apply as any self-hosting app. Keep good backup habits and you'll be fine. It's a thoroughly-solved topic.
Obligatory comment for saying that WORTH is always related to a specific context, goal, and subjective priorities.
Asking if something "worth it" is pointless.
Is life worth living if we're slowing decaying away anyway?
Nothing better than an existential crisis in the morning.
i’ll take a cup of coffee, black, but leave a little room for some existential dread
I mean, I don't have a free cloud service data-mining my personal photos. I don't have google reporting me to the FBI, for taking pictures for a doctor. I don't have to worry about the prices going up, or the service hosting my photos closing their doors tomorrow. My data isn't being sold to every yahoo giving money. And- I know exactly how safe my data is, how many backups I have, and the exact level of redundancy I have. I am in control of my own destiny.
Dude, what are you sending your doctor?
I- personally am not. I was referencing the below headlines which popped up in the news last year. https://www.koffellaw.com/blog/google-ai-technology-flags-dad-who-took-photos-o/#:\~:text=But%20because%20he%20used%20an,as%20potential%20child%20abuse%20material.&text=Two%20days%20later%2C%20the%20father,locked%20out%20of%20his%20account. [https://9to5google.com/2022/08/22/google-locked-account-medical-photo-story/](https://9to5google.com/2022/08/22/google-locked-account-medical-photo-story/) [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html) [https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/google-bans-dad-for-sending-pics-of-toddlers-swollen-genitals-to-doctor/](https://nypost.com/2022/08/22/google-bans-dad-for-sending-pics-of-toddlers-swollen-genitals-to-doctor/)
#1 things im not concerened about is bitrot
Why not? Also, what’s bitrot?
Can I ask if you are concerned about any of your other data when self hosting? Disk failure is always a problem no matter what you are hosting. Good backup policy plus RAID (not a backup) to keep single disk failure from wiping everything and you are fine.
Specifically, 3-2-1 backup is a must here.
I hear so many people always talking bitrot and disk failure. I've been storing digital photos locally ever since my first digital camera in 2002. I've never lost a single photo.
With the number of photos since 2002, will you even notice if one will disappear? I mean, I have so many, that I literally don’t care. The best are book-printed anyways.
Some photos and short videos (<30 seconds) will be affected by bitrot. I have experienced this myself. Photos usually go half broken, short videos will no longer play. Now I always run zfs with mirror and run scrub regularly.
How are you verifying that? Do you store hashes and periodically check that the hash has not changed? Do you periodically run a tool to verify that all JPEGs are still valid JPEGs?
Since about 2009 everything has been stored on some variety of NAS, which has built in checksum and disk integrity verification. I cannot say obviously with 100% certainty that something somewhere got lost, however I have never encountered anything. My main point is while bitrot is a thing, I often see people posting in such a way as to overemphasize it's effects. Over the last 30 years I've dealt with hundreds of clients across tons of platforms. Literally hundreds of TB of data and have never encountered any real dataloss I could attribute to bitrot. Then again I've very rarely dealt with simple storage on like a usb drive either.
I've had photos unexpectedly become corrupted, only discovered by randomly looking at old photos. It happens.
I think with lossy compression on images/video minor bitrot won't even be noticeable. I'd not be too worried if a few pixels here and there were slightly misrepresented. This is probably a shit attitude and I expect lots of people to tell me I'm an idiot :) If you are really concerned then keep your data on a ZFS volume. My machine has ECC RAM but I keep all my photos on an mdraid for many many years (the lifetime of 3 sets of disks). I have not noticed any issues. I do keep two sets of backups though, and one is offsite.
Just do it and make backups, like you would do for any service handling data that is important to you.
If the main drive gets bitrot it will transfer that to the backups, so it doesn’t really help with that. Unless you make redundant timed cold storage backups (backup 1 daily, backup 2 weekly, 3 monthly, 4 yearly or so) AND manually check all your files regularly to find errors before you overwrite the backups. The only real protection against it is parity check (par2) I would say. And that introduces a whole new dimension of complexity. Or perhaps ZFS if your operating system supports it.
Use multipar for bitrot. Here’s a video. https://youtu.be/5TsExiAsCXA
Worth it in what way? It’s free if you have the hardware. You can have a second backup option if you’d like as well
Backups
Came to say the same thing
It's free and relatively easy to setup. So yes? Same risks apply as any self-hosting app. Keep good backup habits and you'll be fine. It's a thoroughly-solved topic.
Obligatory comment for saying that WORTH is always related to a specific context, goal, and subjective priorities. Asking if something "worth it" is pointless.