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I save my writing here, on this website, in straight HTML. Several of my articles over the years on other people's platforms have disappeared into the ether, so it is a good feeling to have them backed up locally and on Github.
(2024-03-25) One of my goals is to have a durable digital library, which includes intergenerational photo backups. (It also includes owning offline music, ebooks, and other media.)
This year I am taking about 1,500 pictures a quarter and favorite about 100 (+/- 50) of those. My photos backup to Google Photos. Unfortunately, Google Photos makes it hard to do offline backups. It used to be easier, but they changed how Photos interacts with Drive. The “hack” my friend turned me on to is just downloading Favorites photos quarterly (which I do on the solstices and equinoxes).
My process is to review and curate the photos taken during the past quarter, adding and removing Favorites, and then downloading the quarter’s Favorites into a private Github repository. Google Photos is itself a kind of backup, but for platform resilience having both the photos offline and on Google and its competitor Microsoft gives me peace of mind. Github has unlimited storage capacity as long as each file is less than 25MB, which works for photos (but not for videos). It is also easy to keep offline repositories up to date across multiple devices.
Looking forward, if I start using a different service than Google Photos for receiving my torrent of daily photos, the process should still work. If Github decides to limit storage, I could also look at different Git options.