What do you do with home video files?

A2597

A2597

Well-known member
Backstory:
So a few years ago I lost about 6 months worth of phone photos. Phone bricked hard, and took the SD card with it. Totally unreadable.

Since that time, I've kinda obsessed about archiving photos. I use Amazon Prime Photos on our phones, which auto-uploads full resolution photos and videos to the cloud. I then use the Amazon Drive desktop app to keep those same photos synced to my home desktop. (Because ultimately I don't trust any cloud provider to permanently keep all my files, I want my own copy).
From there, I also have a Backblaze account that syncs my entire PC to another offsite storage just in case of flood/tornado wiping out my desktop.

The issue
The photos I see frequently, thanks to the "on this day" feature of Prime Photos, and a digital cloud storage photo frame that we can send photos to from our phones.

Videos however, are a different matter. While you can pay for additional video storage from Amazon, it's not really worth it IMHO because we'd fill it up so quickly. I just move the videos out of Amazon Drive to my local storage when we hit the cap. But accessing them becomes the challenge.

What is the best way to access these videos so they can be enjoyed. Plex? Ehhh...it could work, but not really user friendly and means being intentional about doing it. No casual "Oh remember that?" moments.

I'm pondering building a video frame using a Raspberry Pi that would pick random videos from the network location and play them, with a button to mute/unmute, but figure there has to be something out there already that does this....

So, how do YOU manage your family videos?
 
I am definitely not at all robust about how I deal with home videos. I simply have them backed up on two separate home PCs for redundancy in case of catastrophic loss, and I also back them up to DVD annually. Most years we can fit all our "special occasion" home videos on 1 or 2 DVDs.
 
I use DVD's to backup photos and videos. I don't need them to be directly accessible and I'm not paying for cloud storage space (since I do some photography, my photos in full resolution are huge).
 
I basically back up everything, including videos to my NAS which runs with two mirrored drives. That helps protect against drive failure, and then I also back up important things like videos to Crash Plan, so I have an off site backup. The only problem is Crash Plan is very slow, but it will eventually succeed in backing up my files (I basically just have it running whenever my main machine is on).
 
I have them saved to my home server and then I use dropbox and onedrive for off site back-ups. I pay for the 1tb service for both. I live in Tornado alley. I don't want all my stuff blown away. The $20 a month for both services is worth it IMO.
 
I save them to my home server which is basically just a PC running Win 10 with Stablebit Drive Pool on it. I use the two disk option to ensure local redundancy, and also have offsite setup using Carbonite.
 
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