Considering to set up a photo-backup: self hosted: need your advice...

[saint_otrott]

dear friends, good day,



first of al: i am pretty new to this foru. my name is saint_otrott,

well after years and years of working with other options like google offers i have come to the point where I'm considering a photo backup.. - and well i want it "self hosted".

note: i want to get rid of te Google-Apps - and therefore. And now i am trying to find out which is the most reliable - heard alot of Immich - and and it has a mobile app ... and its open-source.
but some of my friends told me - that there might be some issues with Immich - so i think its best to come here and to talk to you...the experts of the photorio-forum.

question: which is the most reliable and feature rich or shortly the best service according to your idea and experience.
additional: well i would love to get a open-source-system since i like the idea of sustainable development.

look forward to hear from you
regards
saint otrott

 

[Don_ih]

Assuming your photos are accessed by a computer, why not just a removable hard drive?

 

[MattKing]

Welcome to Photrio.
I've moved your thread to more of a "general purpose" digital sub-forum, as that seems like it might be a better fit.
We wish you well in your search.

 

[ntenny]

Are you trying to achieve something photo-specific, like a browsable image archive, or just a backup of a bunch of files (that happen to be photos)?

Assuming the latter, I think you can just store them on a drive, have a local backup drive using any of the many backup solutions floating around in the world, and ideally also have an offsite backup through one of the various services (I use Backblaze) in case of a catastrophic local failure.

-NT

 

[F4U]

The problem with using web services is that you never know when one of them goes out of business or shuts down the site. I'd personally just use thumb drives. CD and DVD drives have a lifspan to where they get ornery and won't work, hard drives eventually go bad. And so do thumb drives, for that matter. but they are cheap, and between having redundant hard drives AND thumb drives, the chance o completely losing everything is remote. Why pay to have some cloud site keep them?

 

[koraks]

Why pay to have some cloud site keep them?

I think the rationale for many people is that it's offsite backup that'll survive something like a house fire, flood or burglary.

Online backup van also be automated. This is relevant since the Achilles's heel of any backup system that requires human intervention is the (lack of) discipline of the human involved.

Of course, a local variant of online backup can be chosen such as a NAS system. In that scenario, don't forget the energy cost and deprecation on the hardware when this option is compared to a cloud provider.

The argument that a cloud provider can disappear is often heard, but in reality, it rarely happens; mergers are much more common, but those generally don't involve discontinuation of the service. In case of discontinuation, commonly this is announced in advance, leaving ample time to scout for an alternative.

What the best approach is, depends entirely on the requirements and personal preferences. There are several approaches that can work in any given situation.

 

[fgorga]

My approach... three identical external hard disks.

#1 - my working drive
#2 - back up A
#3 - back up B

My working drive and one of the back up drives are always attached to my computer. The other back up drive is kept at a friends house.

The working drive gets copied to which ever back up drive is attached to the computer at regular intervals.

At irregular intervals (about once a month when I remember) the location of the back up drives is switched. This is, of course, the weak spot in my strategy as it is a manual process.

These drives contain only photographs. Other data (which resides on the computers internal drive) is backed up similarly but separately.

I am an amateur so my tolerance for losing photos is probably a bit higher than if I was making a living from my photos so this works for me.

When the drives get to about 80% of capacity I start watching for deals on larger drives. When I find a good deal, I purchase three identical new drives and move forward. This system has been working for me for roughly two decades.

 

[4season]

Very interesting, this is the first time I've heard of Immich. If you have an older PC you are no longer using, and are comfortable working with Linux, the price is certainly right, so why not give it a try?

My current solution is to store all photos on a NAS, with a pair of hard drives configured as RAID 1 (mirrorred). My various devices access the NAS as needed: Windows, Mac, and *Nix clients, and software including Adobe LIghtroom, Capture One Pro and Darktable work just fine with this scheme. Although palm-sized, all-SSD NASes are the latest trend, the old-fashioned 3.5" hard drive is still very much a viable option, particularly where vast amounts of storage space are needed, and speed isn't the #1 priority.

 

[koraks]

If you have an older PC you are no longer using

There's a drawback to this option that didn't use to be much of an issue, but is increasingly becoming one - energy use. A regular desktop PC may easily idle at 50-100W, continuously. That's easily over 400kWh annually. The economic (not to mention, environmental) cost is not exactly negligible.

 

[Steven Lee]

Unless you're comfortable with basic DevOps skills, and have ample free time to tinker, I would advise to stay away from open source. If you want to get as close to Google Photos as possible, but in a private setting, get a Synology NAS. You will get:

• Privacy of having all of your photos in your own house.
• Automatic encrypted backup to the cloud.
• Modern web UI with decent search and face recognition.
• Decent mobile app which you can point to your home IP/domain.

Once set up, it is completely touch-free. Software updates and backups will be happening automatically. Mine is in the basement closet. Had I not moved recently, I would have said: "I haven't seen it or touched it in years".

 

[koraks]

a Synology NAS

That's what I've been running for...oh, probably a decade. Highly recommended. It really is virtually maintenance-free. The modern ones are energy-efficient, too, especially if you load them with SSD's. Performance is also good on these little boxes. What they do not hedge against, of course, is accidents like fires or ransomware that spreads from a computer that has write access to the network shares.

One more nice thing about the Synology machines is that they allow for all manner of media casting/streaming to devices on the local network (also movies & music). And they can be opened up for internet access as well so you can reach your stuff while on the move. There's evidently a security implication to that option, but it can be very convenient.

 

[Steven Lee]

@koraks Aww, happy to find something we agree on! Warms my heart.

 

[4season]

Something to be aware of before buying a new Synology NAS in 2025:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...unctionality-and-support-for-third-party-hdds

 

[koraks]

Something to be aware of before buying a new Synology NAS in 2025:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...unctionality-and-support-for-third-party-hdds

The question is how critical the features are you'd lose by not using a Synology-approved drive - which in fact will still work. https://nascompares.com/2022/06/13/synology-3rd-party-hard-drives-what-you-can-and-cannot-do/
It seems that virtually all relevant functions will work just fine. The most relevant feature you may miss out on is automatic firmware updates for the hard drives themselves. How often have you run hdd firmware upgrdes?