This was a painful job that I had been putting off for a long time. I am a geek and enjoy working with computers but it is time to admit that I have a problem.
Over the last few years I have managed to accumulate (from back left):
- A custom built PC that I used to game on
- A Lenovo TS140 home server
- A 2017 imac that I got a great deal on this when Sarah's office moved
- A Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 that I picked up around five years ago. This was great whilst working away and commuting to London.
- A 2012 macbook pro which I purchased with my wages from working at camp one year. I upgraded this with a SSD a few years ago and it has been a great laptop over the years
- Three internal hard drives from various old computers and laptops
- An external hard drive which I have backed up some data on
- Five old Android phones in various states
- An old iphone
This didn't include my actual phone and my work laptop (a 2019 macbook pro). As I said, I have a problem.
I would class my 'data' as something stored on any of those devices or hard drives that I would be sad to lose. Before I started, I had data shared across computers, laptops, hard drives, a server, Google Drive, One Drive and Google Photos. Let's use some lockdown time to simplify!
Backing up photos
I started with photos as they were the most intimidating and the ones I would miss the most if they were lost. I decided on Google Photos for two reasons:
- I am currently using a Google Pixel 2 which automatically syncs with Google Photos. As such, I already had my photos from 2018 remotely backed up and any new photos I took with my phone would be automatically uploaded to Google Photos.
- Google offers free unlimited storage of photos. Photos taken with a pixel are backed up at full quality and photos from other devices are saved at high quality. I am not a professional photographer so the high quality images are good enough for my needs. You can view full details of the Google Photos limits here.
The next part was getting all the devices from various devices onto Google Photos. Full disclosure, this was painful.
A few years ago, I gave some simple advice with the best intentions:
Just take lots of photos with your phone and then one of them will probably turn out ok
These are obviously the words of someone who knows very little about photography and even less about keeping photos organised. This strategy meant I had lots of photos but I had lots of similar photos. I managed to delete many duplicates of these but it was time consuming and painful. I think deleting photos is tougher because there is an emotional element.
So far, Google Photos has been free and an excellent service, I would recommend.
Safely clearing data on the devices
I am pretty confident noone would care about trying to get data off my old hard drives and phones but it's better to be safe than sorry. There are lots of guides online to do this online and there are some different steps when working with Windows or OSX.
My understanding is that it is easier to recover data from a hard drive when:
- The data has not been encrypted
- When a file is deleted, the space that was used to save that file on the drive is not over-written with some new data
As such, the plan is to encrypt the hard drive, fill it with data, format and repeat. The more times this process is completed then the more unlikely it is that the data can be fully recovered from the drive.
I also put a drill through the hard drives. I've no idea if this was necessary but I saw Gilfoyle do this on Silicon Valley a few years ago and I had always wanted to do it. I found it much harder to drill through a drive than he did in the video.
Simplified Setup
I decided to sell my Macbook Pro, tablet and donate all the phones to charity. There are lots of links online about donating phones but I am planning to drop these off at Oxfam post lockdown and I am also planning to list my old PC (and monitor) on gumtree.
I managed to sell my old macbook and tablet on ebay raising some unexpected cash. Selling stuff when Ebay have their max selling fees promotions is an excellent way to get some beer money.
Solving one problem creates another problem
Now that I have my photos backed up safely on Google Photos, I now have another problem. I don't think Google will kill Photos but they've discontinued products before and I may want to move my photos to a new service at some point in the future.
Unfortunately, Google Sync does not include any photos stored on Google Photos 🤦♂️ so there is no out of the box way to automatically sync and backup. Thankfully some kind soul has open sourced a program to sync your Google photos. I am planning to set this up as a cron job with my server in the near future.
Final thoughts
Having all my photos in one place was a massive task but I'm feeling much better now. I understand where my data is and how it's backed up. It was also really good to relive memories from my time at Camp, trips to Australia and Canada and to see old photos of the family.