[shelkie]

Hi YC friends—

We’re Eric and Eric (or @shelkie and @karj) and we built Pixaver. It’s an app you’ll hopefully install—but never need to use.

Last summer, Google uncoupled Photos from Drive. When they did, I got a little antsy. I didn’t like the idea of all my photos being in one basket. (Admittedly, they already were, but this change broke any illusion of redundancy.)

So, I went looking for a backup solution, but they all involved too much admin. This led me to build something for my own use—and (of course) we figured there might be a product in there.

Pixaver (pic + saver, get it?) is so easy to use, anyone can put it to work.

You create an account, link it to your Google account, and you’re done. It does an initial backup of up all items, then automatically maintains an external backup of your Google Photos library as new items are added.

It doesn’t replace Google Photos in any way. It’s just added peace-of-mind. Let’s say you accidentally delete a bunch of images on Google Photos. Or, you lost access to your Google account. In either of those situations, Pixaver would offer a way to recover your images.

We soft-launched a few months ago. Then we applied to the Google Photos Partner Program (in part for more API calls). That has now been approved and we’re ready to accommodate more users.

If you have feedback, questions, or criticism, we’d love to hear it. :-)

[mceachen]

Where does this second backup live: cloud, or local? You might want to clarify that on your website.

If it's local, I wouldn't make it tiered by library size.

I think you're being perhaps optimistic with your $15/mo tier. I'd love to be wrong, but that money would pay for a new 10 TB HD every year. Maybe other people won't think that way? Are you using s3? Your costs might be lower using glacier or backblaze.

You should also take a look at https://github.com/mholt/timeliner. Open source, easy to install, runs locally for free. Worked perfectly on my very large library.

However, both your service and timeliner have to deal with Google Photos and the file mangling they do. Most tags are deleted, and several are modified (!!?) when you fetch them via takeouts or timeliner. I don't think there's anything you can do about it, because you're downstream of where the damage happens.

Good luck! You should try PhotoStructure, BTW. Link in my profile.

[shelkie]

We're using Wasabi for storage (wasabi.com) They offer S3 compatible hot storage at at fraction of the cost of AWS or any other cloud storage service.

Timeliner looks cool, but tools such as this are only suitable for the tech-savy crowd. I think there certainly is a market for these sorts of things, and PhotoStructure should be a good fit for those who want to keep thier data local.

Pixaver is targeted toward the vast majority of Google Photos users who don't have a technical background or the desire to maintain local physical backups. Backups running with just a few clicks and they don't to think about buying hard drives or fiddling with code.

As you mention, the data provided by the Google Photos API is sometimes not ideal. Geolocation data and some other metadata are omitted. Currently, only the "optimized" version of videos are provided. That said, our service is not meant as a replacement for Google Photos. We just want to be a way to get your images back if the unthinkable were to happen.

[esquire_900]

Hi Eric, looks like a nice, simple and clean product. =)

I am however slightly averse to building up monthly fees for products that are convenient in general, and this definitely falls into that category. I can't imagine people paying for a backup of a backup, or something you can easily dump into cold storage every now and then. Good luck nonetheless, hope that other people don't share that opinion!

[shelkie]

Thanks - we’ve tried to make this as clean and simple as possible :-)

This came from my own necessity. I would occasionally use Takeout as my backup, but downloading more than 50 individual 2GB files was becoming pretty tiresome. Plus, that backup was obsolete the moment I added new photos to my library.

Maybe my workflow is different than others? Google Photos is the only place that all my photos live now. I have multiple devices connected, each sending files to the same library. I did’t have a full backup anywhere, other than the occasional Takeout download.

Agreed, one more monthly subscription not be right for some, but for others the extra piece of mind is worthwhile.