Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
My friend Bill just returned from a family vacation in Costa Rica and shot lots of photos and video on his iPhone, including some killer shots of breakfasts with local monkeys.
No surprise that once he got home, he checked his iPhone storage and found that it was 98% full. Just a few more snaps, and he’d be totally out of room.
His solution? “I’ll just put them all on iCloud, and then delete them off my iPhone,” he told me.
Launched in 2017, Google’s Backup and Sync app was its way of tying your desktop computer or laptop into Google Drive and Google Photos so that you could, as the name suggests, back stuff up and sync the data on your devices. That application is now being retired in favour of a new “Drive for Desktop” app. Backup and Sync will stop working completely this year, and the rollout of the new Drive for Desktop app has already begun.
It’s probably not much of a surprise. Google’s cloud stuff is always “evolving” despite what a pain it can often be for its users and it’s already changed Photos around quite a bit lately. The new Drive for Desktop application offers a couple of perks over the existing app, although some are only available if you’re part of a team.
Storing and backing up efficiently and securely more than ten years of photography is a complicate technical task.
At the center of my setup I use a Synology DS1515+ NAS, with 8 disks configured in Raid 6 for a total of 14.54TB of available storage.
I wrote about this set up a year ago, but I recently updated it to be more streamlined and secure.
With Amazon killing off their unlimited storage, and CrashPlan ditching consumers in favour of enterprise level clients, more were bound to follow. Google is now shaking things up, announcing that they’re ending Google Drive in March 2018. The difference, however, is that Google don’t seem to be screwing their customers over in the process.
For Google Drive users, Google Backup and Sync will be the replacement. For commercial G Suite customers, Drive File Stream is the new main system. But as of this moment, Google Drive for Mac & PC is officially deprecated. Support will end on December 11th, 2017, and it will shut down completely on March 12th, 2018.
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