I believe there are pros and cons for both. Imgur is great because you truly don’t have to think about disk space or bandwidth. Imgur is not great because they can delete your posts at any time without warning and leave holes on the interenet, especially if we’re talking 5, 10 , 20 years from now.
Should I invest in a beefy server to store all of my photo needs without storage anixety? Or should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me? I think I’m already answering my own question by writing this post out, but I’d love to hear from the self hosting community.
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There’s another option- cloud hosting in a cloud you control. You can also put a CDN infront of a not-so-beefy home server to avoid getting overwhelmed.
I’d think that a few terrabytes in a server would mean that you wouldn’t have to worry about image files for a while
Please use a proper image host. When your uploads get federated, if they are uploaded directly to lemmy, the images get federated as well. While you may have a large server, a lot of people don’t.
It even says on the lemmy docs to use a third party image service that’s built to host images:
Note that this functionality is not meant to share large images or videos, because that would require too many server resources. Instead, upload them on another platform like PeerTube or Pixelfed, and share the link on Lemmy.
Someone made a post the other day (since deleted) asking why their instance was slow after they uploaded NINETY high res images in one post. Please don’t be that person.
I’ve been looking for a way to cache images elsewhere instead of on my server as they are federated here, as my instance is tiny. I’m hoping I can find a way that’s not a bucket someplace as I don’t trust myself to not mess one of those up and end up with a massive bill.
You mentioned a timescale for data retention of decades which means doing it yourself is the only option.
Nothing that exists now existed either 20 years before now or is likely to exist in 20 years: I’m sure you can still download all those photos off your Friendster account or from photobucket (in case of confusion: lol no).
Of course with a multi-decade requirement, then you’re going to have to manage hardware, backups, and validating data integrity. The last one being the big one because everything will bitrot if you give it enough time, so it’s not like it’s just drop it on a drive and forget about it.
should I just rely on a larger company to handle it for me?
No, unless you have a paid contract with them that specifies heavy liability if they decide to screw you
