Engineering - 8 min read
Building a photo archive that survives you
By Jamie Le - 12 May 2026 - 3 views
Photo: Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Hard drives die, services close, and JPEGs get lost in the laundry. A practical 3-2-1 layout that takes a Sunday to set up and a decade to forget.
The cruel thing about photos is that the ones you most want to keep are the ones you took on a phone that you no longer own. Backup is boring, but losing the only picture of your nan in her garden is not.
The rule I like is the old 3-2-1: three copies, two different storage types, one off-site. For photos that translates to a working library on your laptop, a mirrored archive on a spinning disk in a drawer, and a copy in cheap object storage somewhere.
I run rclone once a week. It hashes everything and only copies what's changed. The first sync took a weekend. The next one took twelve minutes.
The trap people fall into is thinking sync is backup. Sync is sync. If you delete a folder by mistake, sync will faithfully delete it everywhere. So the off-site copy lives in versioned storage - I pay about a dollar a month for the comfort of being able to restore last month's photos library if I do something silly.
The other thing worth doing is writing a "read me" text file at the top of the archive. Future you, or future someone-else, will thank you for explaining how the folders are named and which app made them. Photos are easy; metadata is the bit that rots.
The rule I like is the old 3-2-1: three copies, two different storage types, one off-site. For photos that translates to a working library on your laptop, a mirrored archive on a spinning disk in a drawer, and a copy in cheap object storage somewhere.
I run rclone once a week. It hashes everything and only copies what's changed. The first sync took a weekend. The next one took twelve minutes.
The trap people fall into is thinking sync is backup. Sync is sync. If you delete a folder by mistake, sync will faithfully delete it everywhere. So the off-site copy lives in versioned storage - I pay about a dollar a month for the comfort of being able to restore last month's photos library if I do something silly.
The other thing worth doing is writing a "read me" text file at the top of the archive. Future you, or future someone-else, will thank you for explaining how the folders are named and which app made them. Photos are easy; metadata is the bit that rots.
