this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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This has been the biggest and dumbest take I've seen come from the GenZ/GenA crowd. Polaroids were a big hit a few years ago and I can't help but wince at this stuff. Yeah it's cute or whatever to hold it in your hand, but in 1, 5, 10, 30 years...when that photo or DVD is bent/scratched/lost, you'll be kicking yourself in the ass for even bothering with it.
Just pirate your content, take photos with your $1000 phones and print the photos out, and learn to backup your own shit. Buy a 2 bay NAS and backup your shit to it. And then backup your NAS to a cloud like backblaze.
My dad has been doing this since the early 2000s. We have our family photos AND videos from 1990-2026 all backed up on a NAS, which syncs to backblaze. ~600GBs of data. And the cloud backup on backblaze is $7.25 a month for that data.
Literally anyone can go buy a a $200 2-bay NAS, then grab two 1TB hard drives for $40 each. $280 for a NAS that will last you YEARS. And then figure out whatever service you want to backup to for a cloud backup.
While I agree with the general idea, your example prices are no longer valid since storage costs are now through the roof. The best defense of kids using DVDs is that you can borrow them from the library for free.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00519B0UO
https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-DH2300-2-Bay-Capacity-Diskless/dp/B0FNWHSPXF
Please at least Google something before talking out of your ass
I think you missed his point. The NAS is cheap. The disks to put in it no longer are.
I didn't miss his point. I wrote what the price of the drives are, he said nope, and I linked drives for that price.
Those arent drives. Those are NAS housings. Specifically listed as "diskless" meaning they don't contain any hard drives or ssds
The last two links are drives.
I linked the NAS over and over from different storefronts as a petty response.
I know what diskless is. My entire original post has a paragraph explicitly saying to buy a NAS and drives and their prices, because shocker I searched for current prices of items before posting my original comment, so then I'm not caught talking out of my ass like some other commenters are doing here in response to my post.
Please don't use google or amazon
Idk what to say to you other than you're being intentionally flippant. These are very simply things to search for online. The fact that I linked items proving my price claims are accurate and you sit there and move the goal posts and change the subject is the most moronic thing I have ever seen.
Go touch some grass and then find something else to occupy your time with.
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16822995008?item=N82E16822995008&source=region
https://www.microcenter.com/product/703359/DH2300_NASync_2-Bay_Diskless_NAS?storeID=101
https://nas.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-nasync-dh2300-nas-storage?variant=45841636786370&country=US¤cy=USD
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1929136-REG/ugreen_95432_nasync_dh2300_bundle_with.html?ap=y&smp=Y
https://www.adorama.com/udh2300.html
https://www.newegg.com/p/1Z4-000B-00KK3?item=9SIA5ADK9A1326
https://www.newegg.com/seagate-desktop-hdd-st500dm002-500gb/p/N82E16822148767?item=9SIAAEE5MZ4108
Insted of saying "just google it" instead say "just search it" or "just look it up". There are many different search engines available, and do we really want google to be our word choice here? Akin to advertising imo. fuck promoting these companies.
i do appreciate the links, but that's not what I meant.
There is a bit of a romantic feeling in only having a physical copy of a photo though, and Polaroids are the easiest ones to do this with.
And that's completely valid, but I just want to warn others that physical items deteriorate.
I'm currently digitally archiving photos of my great-great grandparents. You know how disappointing it is to have these photos, but then see they are all water damaged or torn or crumbled to all hell because of improper storage? Some scans are ok, others are terrible and will require work on my end to restore them digitally.
I'm sure we have thousands of digital photos of ourselves, but how many of those are backed up properly? How many of us will be regretting not backing things up properly and we can't share these photos with our grandkids or great grandkids or to reminisce because our phones died or Instagram shutdown or we stopped paying for iCloud?
All I'm saying is take your Polaroids, but also take plenty of digital photos and back them up as well.
Digital things degrade too, and faster than youd think
And drives can fail. And data can get corrupted. You could get a virus.
You deteriorate. We all deteriorate. What's the point of that illusion of having a perfect eternal storage medium for data? It's the experience that matters.
What's the point of having the experience when our memory deteriorates?
See how stupid that argument sounds?
Guess what, you can do both!
I can't note anything sound 'stupid' there.
Experiences AND memories do vanish. That's a fact, it's completely natural and fine and it's not a general necessity to fight against that. I found that it is possible to accept transience.
Guess what, we can have new experiences any moment.
Spending much time and money to preserve all the present experiences without gaps and to combat the fleeting nature of all things and to capture every moment of my life for the future seems wasteful. I did this too in the past but the older I get the more I find that I'd rather spend my time in the present moment than in the archive.
Not having so much, being more. The more we collect and accumulate, the more that holds us back.
But hey, I don't want to discourage anyone and I can understand the approach.
Are you encrypting your data before it goes to Backblaze? And if so, are you also testing those encrypted backups?
Yes, and yes. I'm running TrueNAS and I test a restore once a quarter or so, worst case once every 6 months.
I haven't had to do a full restore...so that'll be the true test, but I do have a sister TrueNAS at an off-site location for off-site backups. I went simple with this off-site one and just use Tailscale and Syncthing.
Out of curiosity how do you test your restore? Do you just choose a file and try to recover it from backup? I have a synology NAS that I should backup but haven't really looked into the complexities of backing it up.
I cut/paste a single file or folder, depending on my mood, out of a directory that is backed up and then do a PULL/sync through the TrueNAS GUI from Backblaze
Not sure on Synology...I'm sure there is a method though
easy with that logic, killer.