I am currently thinking about my own setup for photo and video backup, and was curious what other people are using as their own backup systems.
Do you use online photo hosting like Google photos? Do you use self hosted backup system / network accessed storage? How many backups do you have in total? Do you split by medium and location?
Apologies if there is such a question on lemmy already.
Nextcloud for uploading all data, then Immich reading from a shared dir
(I’ve added immich to the nextcloud group, and make it read from my space in my nextcloud data dir)
Why upload with Nextcloud instead of with Immich directly?
Because Immich only handles media, and I have more than that (Signal backups, Termux, configs, Downloads, etc.). So I can either carefully splice that, hope both uploads work and nothing is lost, or upload everything via one method and point immich to the most important directories.
In an ideal world, I could just treat my phone like any other host, including permanent remote access via sftp, full borg backups and a better/cleaner fs structure.
These look very neat, thank you.
Out of curiosity, do you selfhost at home, or via private VPS?
If at home, wouldn’t eg a fire wipe out the photos? Or do you have several backups?
Almost everything is currently at home (at my fathers home, fiber internet, a basement with enough space etc.). I use borg to backup to a Hetzner Storagebox.
I only use a VPS for IPv6 addresses with rDNS and a static IPv4 with rDNS, as backup. And the storagebox, ofc.
Though, hopefully, I’ll soon get another nice deal to have a second server at my fathers place, so I can take the current fallback server back to my home, so I can actually host all my stuff there in case I need to.
I don’t use GAFAM storage.
I barely take any photo anymore, but I use Filen.io fully encrypted cloud storage (they’re made in Germany) to keep a copy of all my files, including the occasional picture. It’s a simple copy of the files and folders on my drives. I also have local backups on external storage (two differents) that are simply encrypted and rotated on a bi-monthly basis.
For non-confidential work-in-progress I use a different cloud, Swiss this time: Infomaniak KDrive. It’s working real nice but there is no E2EE (if they wanted they could see the content of the files, unlike with Filen).
Edit: I should have mentioned both services also offer an app that can backup the photos on your phone, if you need one.
Filen.io looks promising, thank you
You’re welcome.
If you want to get extra 10Go storage for free use this affiliate link to create your account (there is no string attached, just a bonus 10Go storage free that you will keep for ever/as long as the company exist, even if you decide to switch to a paid plan)
I don’t use GAFAM storage.
Without dereferencing that acronym, I’m not sure whether I’m using GAFAM storage either.
I don’t get the ‘dereferencing’ part of your question (English is not my native language) but if you are wondering whether or not you’re using them: if you use Google, Apple or Microsoft cloud you’re using a GAFAM (the F stand for Facebook which doens’t offer cloud storage). You may also be using one unknowingly by using a third party cloud provider that still uses one of them or even Amazon AWS storage, which would be the second A in GAFAM ;)
The two I use are supposedly not using gafam services and use either their own servers (for Infomaniak) or the German Hetzner (for Filen).
I RAID1 like a caveman
I raid 10 on truenas like a bitch caveman. Backups and redundancy for the win.
Raidz2 on truenas.
I have Immich running on my home server. That file system get regularly backed up to an external HDD. The photos are also rcloned to BackBlaze B2, including retention for deleted files for a bit.
rsync to an rsync.net account, serves me well
I did Film & TV in uni. One of the things they told me as a newbie was “keep three physical copies, two in your home and one in a different location”
So I keep three physical copies, all in my home, cause none of my friends wanted to keep my external hard-drive clearly labeled “high-res dick pics”
EDIT: Nah, but seriously, before you consider online storage, do physical. SSD if you can, they last longer.
Huh I was under the impression that SSDs don’t last as long as hard discs.
before you consider online storage, do physical. SSD
A stashed SSD isn’t physical: it’s an on-prem digital copy. Printed sheets would be ‘physical’.
if you can, they last longer.
Comma splice, by the way.
If you can hold it, it’s physical. Just like my relationship with your mom, nerd.
Haha jk lol
Photos + Videos: Immich
The backup repository: Veeam
How many: Don’t really know. 14 versions made daily?An few old internal hdds that are being used as external hdds
I use a self-written tool to extract my images and videos from Apple Photos and back them up incrementally as files and directories using Borg Backup.
Using this approach I retain full ownership over my data without having to look for alternatives to Apple Photos, which I really enjoy using.
As a result, I have a “live” copy on my iPhone/Mac/iCloud, a backup on my NAS and a remote Borg Backup repository in a data center.
a self-written tool to extract my images and videos from Apple Photos and back them up incrementally
This is VERY interesting. Do you have a project on, say, gitlab, with this code?
As a fellow Apple photos user, why do you enjoy using Apple photos, and can you describe any organizational customizations you have made?
Sure! There’re actually a couple of things I like:
- It’s actually one of the few apps that still work like a traditional photo management app: It works on the base of a file-based library that has synchronization added on top. This enables me to freely move my library around, easily create backups of it or even reverse-engineer it. I’m aware there are brilliant foss apps like DigiKam (KDE/Linux) but they lack other aspects like synchronization and are not as tightly integrated.
- I’m still able to be somewhat independent on Apple: Since the library is file-based and I can extract my images using either my own tool or one of the tools available on GitHub, I can easily migrate away from apple should they start doing fishy things.
- Privacy-wise Apple seems to be one of the better options: Metadata like face recognition are computed locally on-device. I know there are more privacy oriented options like Ente, but their feature-set is not quite as mature as I need it.
- I just really like the apps: They’re well-integrated, easy to use and I like the editing capabilities. I also like the way they handle edited photos etc.
Organization-wise there’s nothing special. The only thing I do is to organize my images into albums.
To sum it up: It’s highly subjective but for my workflow it’s a good mix of autonomy and still good user experience.
For stuff I care about I have one copy in a NAS and another copy in an external HDD. For the few things I really care about, additionally, there are copies scattered in most drives I own.
I don’t use cloud rentals, to me they feel wrong as backups, maybe as short term backups.
I use r-sync to compress and store them on two external drives. Same with all my other personal files.
I’m currently in the middle of switching.
I’m using immich, running on a raspberry Pi, saving to my NAS mounted as a network drive. I access it remotely via a CloudFlare tunnel.
However CloudFlare doesn’t like serving video for free, so I’ma move to a VPS running pangolin and a few other security tools.
I also plan to find a better off-site disaster recovery backup solution for my NAS. Maybe AWS glacier, or maybe another NAS at my parents connected via tailscale, where I can send periodic full backups.
I just have set up syncthing between my mobile and my PC. The DCIM directory is getting synchronized, together with a “share” directory that contains random stuff and my KeePass database. It is my only backup, photos are so omnipresent, if I lose them it’s not a big problem.
Cold backups, anything else is vulnerable to hacking and electric damage.
But it’s important to scrub the backups from time to time, so it’s not when your hard drive dies that you discover that your backups were corrupted.
If files are really important then I would get 2 backups, one hot synchronised daily or hourly and a cold synced once a month. But for hobby photos I find that one backup is enough.
Cloud hosting is out of the question for privacy and cost reasons. I have almost 1TB of photos, I can buy a lot of hard drives for the price of just one year of cloud.
I have a two terabyte external hard drive. Because I don’t trust clouds anymore.
