I’m building a desktop-first photo backup system because cloud backups kept failing me

I’m a photographer and engineer, and after losing trust in cloud backup tools over the years, I ended up building my own system.

The problem wasn’t “storage” — it was reliability at scale.

Once you get into multi-TB photo libraries, a lot of things quietly fall apart:

- background uploaders stall or silently skip files

- restores are slow, incomplete, or painful

- billing and quotas get weird

- you don’t actually know what’s backed up vs what isn’t

Most tools are great demos until you really stress them.

So instead of another web app, I’ve been building a desktop-first system:

- local file watching

- resumable background uploads

- integrity checks

- predictable restores

- boring, visible behavior (logs, queues, limits you can actually see)

It’s taken far longer than expected — especially getting restore flows and subscriptions right — and there were multiple points where I seriously questioned whether it was worth continuing.

Right now it’s close to release, and I’m finally at the stage where I trust it with my own archive.

I’m curious:

If you’ve built or used backup, sync, or infrastructure-style products — what were the hardest problems you didn’t expect going in?

And if you’re a founder who kept rebuilding something “boring” because existing tools weren’t good enough — how did you know when it was ready to put in front of people?