The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/xBraria on 2025-01-13 11:54:56.
Hi,
I've seen a similar post a few years ago, but it's since been locked.
I will post in the comments, copies of relevant comments and scraps of information I found (there and) all over the internet. But I am still fearing losing this data and would love to hear your experience.
I am interested in keeping as much metadata as possible for my photos.
I am a mom, so the dates of each picture are important. The locations where we traveled are also important. We use the face recognition feature and I've manually renamed hundreds if not thousands of photos and allocated them to the correct person, so this data is valuable to me. I have edited countless of photos (and it seems that backing them up traditionally only keeps the uncropped, unedited version) so I'd love to keep the edited versions of photos (I'm okay with storing each edited picture twice with both versions in theory). As a biologist, I use the information and "add caption" to pictures to add scientific names to different, mostly plant species. I also appreciate the albums (including automatically generated ones such as "screenshots") that I have the pictures in, and would like them to stay intact.
I'm at the point where I'd need to pay for 2 TB monthly which seems too much. We have a nice large empty disk I allocated to photos that is mostly empty, because neither of us is so far storing our own phone photos there. Husband uses his computer and I fear deleting them from the cloud because I don't want to lose all that's there.
I have a friend who suggested several 3rd party apps but I'm afraid to pull the trigger (for one, of giving them access to my gallery and for two, putting a shitton of effort in with no results).
I'd love any and all advice but especially personal experience - mine is only bad. I'm potentially open to a weird solution of purchasing older phones/laptops just for the storage space (hoping this will be improved in the following years), but idk if it's really worth it compared to just paying 130 euros yearly for 2 TBs of photos.
Thank you so much.