Catastrophies like this probably will happen to most people.<p>For a long time I've used Flickr as an archive for my better photos, but I may be moving that to something else because the new Flickr interface is intolerably slow to use.<p>I was working on a presentation last week and I wanted to use my own pictures, but the time in the time I'd spend waiting for Flickr to load to put one image in my presentation I could find and insert five images from Bing or Google Image Search.
My archive of photos has always been files in directories. Nothing "mysterious" can go wrong with those... Copy as many times as you like to whatever medium you like, and not dependent on any particular software.
Had a similar experience with iphoto. Now I dump straight to a folder, scp to my raided synology NAS, and make another copy on a usb drive that I store at work.
I'm unclear on a point: If you have a Time Machine backup, and it used to work at some point, why can't you restore that from Time Machine?<p>I saw you say that that database was empty, but if you just go back a few days (to a point when you know it worked), then it <i>will</i> work. Time Machine backs the entire drive up.
Now Flickr offer a free terabyte of storage, offsite backup for photos is free. I wrote this script to upload my iPhoto pics: <a href="https://github.com/jawj/iphoto-flickr" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jawj/iphoto-flickr</a>
With all the solutions thrown about here from multiple SD drives, cloud storage and even a "simple web server and web interface" (while I agree that would be a fun project) to sync between them, I'm forced to wonder why old-school ways of backup aren't considered.<p>How difficult and awkward would it be to have an external DVD/Blu-ray writer, a spindle of disks and a permanent marker? It's not like you're doing the backups in one go, after all. A disk every couple of weeks to a month for the average Joe isn't too much. This isn't a professional photographer after all.
Having an extra drive offsite is a great idea. The terms of service for Everpix are shady..<p>"By displaying or posting any Content on or through the Everpix Services, you hereby grant to 33cube a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content in or through the Everpix Services to you and to those other users with whom you choose to share such Content."
I have probably a couple hundred gigabytes of photos on my iMac at home, which I manage with Lightroom. A couple months ago, my iMac died unexpectedly. I didn't panic, though, as I had an external drive constantly doing Time Machine backups, plus Backblaze syncing everything.<p>It turned out the logic board was dead, so I just bought a new iMac, restored everything, and went about my business. No fuss, no muss, and absolutely no fretting.
Boogles my mind people find this photo collecting/hoarding behaviour normal.<p>You only have one life, live it, don't waste it behind a camera trying to fake it.<p>Even if OP's kid died the next week, as if there wouldn't have been hundred of other photos around.<p>I think wasting a birthday on a triviality would be what really mattered then.<p>Life is about experiences not collecting things.
I have a mix of Backblaze online backup, Time Machine local backup, Flickr for a selection of non-private photos, and Dropbox for documents/financial stuff.<p>Before I started doing backups, I was really lucky that every time I got burned it was by having a decently new (<2 months) old drive blow up, and I had most of my data on the old drive.
You're an asshole if you think that "just losing some photos" isn't a big deal. Minimizing or person's trouble by giving a hypothetical example is not only mean spirited, it's also stupid. For instance, the OP could have lost his family in a fire but at the same time someone else in the world could have that while also being tortured. Dumbasses<p>Beyond that, our photographs help to serve as a link to out memories, and to many people they are just as important as the memoirists themselves. Even more important later in life when our memories are failing and when we have lost those that are important to us.<p>So while you're bitching about first world problems, consider yourself lucky that your biggest problem today is that someone else suffered a near misfortune and that you are lucky enough to bitch about it from the comfort of your air conditioned home.<p>You ignorant, useless fucks.
Here's how I handle photo backups:<p><a href="http://www.brianlane.com/automatic-backup-of-files-to-s3-and-glacier.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.brianlane.com/automatic-backup-of-files-to-s3-and...</a>
Is there a script/application to sync a hierarchical folder of 100,000 photos to Flickr, now it has so much storage? One set per subfolder. I found a few Windows apps, but they mostly baulked at that many files.
I use two exact equal external USB HDs to backup all my photos (twice) since the 2.0 megapixel era. The main issue now is how to organize photos from multiple devices I do it semimanually.