Dear Friends,
I just wanted to take a moment to sincerely thank you everyone for your incredibly thoughtful and detailed responses for the films in general, while I find myself in a difficult situation when it comes to safeguarding the PERSONAL FAMILY PHOTOS and VIDEOS.
- On one hand, if I choose to store them online/cloud encrypted / (edit: encrypt first then upload it), I face significant privacy concerns. While they might be secure now, there’s always the potential for a very near future breaches or compromises, especially with the evolving risks associated with AI training and data misuse.
The idea of the personal moments being used in ways I can’t control or predict is deeply unsettling.
- On the other hand, keeping these files offline doesn’t feel like a perfect solution either. There are still considerable risks of losing them due to physical damage, especially since I live in an area prone to earthquakes. The possibility of losing IRREPLACEABLE MEMORIES due to natural disasters or other unforeseen events is always a WORRY.
How can I effectively balance these privacy, security, and physical risks to ensure the long-term safety and integrity of the FAMILY’S PERSONAL MEMORIES?
Are there strategies or solutions that can protect them both digitally and physically, while minimizing these threats?
if you absolutely don’t want them online, then your ‘offsite’ part of 3-2-1 backup scheme is going to be something in a different city… far enough away that the same ‘disaster’ wouldn’t hit both there and your home. either a bank safe deposit box, or family member, or trusted friend.
I use immich with a public proxy as my forward facing solution.
The public proxy helps when I share photos behind a password.
I have a 3 2 1 backup policy with roughly 200tb of total storage. Then I backup in a remote location (6 timezones away) that I also own. The only time I’ll lose access to my photos is if the entire world blows up.
Everything is secured using VPN tunnels. Data isn’t encrypted at rest for me though, I’d rather assume the risk of someone getting my photos (physical and technical access) than having my encryption mess up. Both are equally low risk, but ones more disastrous.
If you don’t mind having to take an extra step to access them and probably not having the convenience of online sharing, you can encrypt your photos/videos before uploading them to online cloud storage.
Thank you for that, I’m afraid I have mentioned the “encrypted” word in my post :
(ie. if I choose to store them online/cloud encrypted, I face significant privacy concerns. While they might be secure now, there’s always the potential for a very near future breaches or compromises, especially with the evolving risks associated with AI training and data misuse),
but haven’t detailed/highlighted/clear enough
Yes “encrypt them first then upload them” is the situation I meant
p.s edited the post now
there’s always the potential for a very near future breaches or compromise
That is a goalpost that will never stop moving. There is always a potential threat and you can never reduce your risk to zero. Right now, encrypting the data yourself before uploading it is your best option outside of encrypting AND hosting the data yourself. You’re basically anticipating that the well-known secure encryption algorithms will eventually be broken, which is not impossible no doubt, but at the moment not likely. You also have to step back and figure out your threat model, in order to come up with an adequate solution.
if I choose to store them online/cloud encrypted / (edit: encrypt first then upload it) … there’s always the potential for a very near future breaches or compromises
Does this matter? Say you upload your encrypted photo backup to Mega Upload (or whatever) and some unauthorized person gets a copy of your encrypted data. So? It’s encrypted? They can’t read or see the data?
Are you worried about state actors breaking the encryption?
