If anyone tried to view my mods in the past few days and wondered where the pictures went, I had a solid state drive suddenly fail, putting my whole system offline. Since I self-host my pictures, this meant that the links were broken.  Fortunately, I have most of my files on a separate drive, including all my picture files. They are also backed up using SpiderOak One, which is an online encrypted storage so my private information remains private as SpiderOak is a zero-knowledge (meaning they don't hold the keys, I do so they can't decrypt my files) storage system.

I have now purchased and installed a new solid-state drive and have reinstalled Fedora 29 Linux. I have more reconfiguring and reloading of utilities to do, but my basic web server is working and the pictures are again showing up in my mods. I'll have to look to see if I have posted pictures elsewhere that are not showing up so I can put copies of them in the proper place so the image links will work again.

Same curiosity. If you subscribe to Prime, not only do you get the mostly-free shipping, but you also get a subscription to Prime Video, AND (and this is the relevant part) unlimited free photo storage. The best part is that Amazon will handle all the data backup overhead. There are other benefits as well, like Prime discounts at Whole Paycheck (maybe that's not so great?).

Anywho, back to your regularly scheduled topic drift.

I had not considered Amazon Photos. Since I am a Prime member, I could store photos there. The big reason I have not used third-party photo storage sites is that I objected to the terms of use. For example, Imagur's Terms of Service include:

"With regard to any file or content you upload to the public portions of our site, you grant Imgur a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable worldwide license (with sublicense and assignment rights) to use, to display online and in any present or future media, to create derivative works of, to allow downloads of, and/or distribute any such file or content. To the extent that you delete any such file or content from the public portions of our site, the license you grant to Imgur pursuant to the preceding sentence will automatically terminate, but will not be revoked with respect to any file or content Imgur has already copied and sublicensed or designated for sublicense. Also, of course, anything you post to a public portion of our site may be used by the public pursuant to the following paragraph even after you delete it."

I do not want to grant any company such rights to my images. I have not been able to find Amazon's terms of service. Before I use them for photos, I would like to make sure the rights to my photos remain mine. That is the main reason I decided to self-host my photos.

Edit: It looks like Amazon does not specify that I would be granting them a license to use my photos if I store them there. I guess I will have to give it a test and see how hard it is to post a link to a photo stored there so it shows up on the forum.

Edit: I tried uploading a photo to Amazon and then sharing the photo to here. I pasted the photo link Amazon gave me but it did not work. The link is: https://www.amazon.com/photos/share/7SdgcqBiQBZhsVv9SfItrNcPlGkiRF2f9W2v0Wo2x5d

This is much the same problem I had trying to use Google's photo storage and links. I never could get it to work. That is the other reason I decided to self-host. When I host the file, I can size it and name it and it shows up properly in the post.

To get to Amazon photos, Select "Accounts & Lists" from the main Amazon page. About 2/3 of the way down, you will find "Your Amazon Photos". When you select that link, it will request you to login (if you haven't already).

I can find no terms of use WRT photos. May have to poke around a bit for that, but as far as I have been able to determine, the photos are yours.

See edits above.

Glad you are back together again. We have a triple redundancy storage system for our photos. First-level storage is my home desktop system (the "pants"). Second-level storage is our in-house NAS (the "belt"). Third-level storage is a portable hard drive (the "suspenders").

The first level is just where we put everything. No thought about it other than dropping photos or whatever on it.

The second level happens automatically, and again, no thought is put into it, except that I check it periodically to make sure things are still working.

The third level I "push the button" about once a week to incrementally copy stuff from the NAS to the portable backup drive.

Finally, I have a monthly breakfast group that I meet with. One of the fellows in that group and I exchange our portable hard drives.

May sound paranoid (and maybe it is), but I've lost things in the past, and this system ensures that I have a backup, and a backup to the backup.

We keep a 3-month running backup. This is my level of paranoia. If one of our computers gets a virus, we can roll-back to a known clear condition.

Our NAS is RAID 5, although I think the vendor calls it 5X. It allows us the ability to increase storage by swapping out the old drives with larger ones. When we originally purchased it, each of the discs were 250GB, and over the years, one, then another crapped out (SMART actually gave us a warning when each of them was starting to go). Instead of replacing them with same-size drives, I swapped them for 1TB discs. After a couple of them had failed, I went ahead and swapped the other two.

Our 3-month running backup is now totaling about 1TB. Way bigger than I would want to back up over the net.

Before no, when I had the raid 5 system that was my only backup for that data, which was non-critical, storage was still too expensive for me to do full backups then. I've always made multiple backups for critical data though. So what I lost then wasn't the end of the world, just an experience I personally don't ever want to repeat.  YMMV.