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.
Some interesting and technically impressive replies here. I’m painfully aware that in this context my reply will seem appallingly gauche, but… I use Amazon Photos.
I’ve got an old NAS that has all our precious photos and vids on, but Amazon Photos comes free with prime and, as the multiple firesticks we’ve got for IPTV have a screen saver that can slideshow your pictures, it means that we actually view the many thousands we’ve got on our main TVs.
What can I say - it just works, it’s convenient and accessible. I’m sure if I was a professional photographer I’d have a way different approach, but that ain’t me.
I had no idea it was free with prime. Full res backup?
Yep. According to the T&C’s you get " full resolution photo storage" and it’s unlimited. They limit video to 5 gig.
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.
Oh boy.
So myself (and others) use Nextcloud to back photos up to my self-hosted Nextcloud instance.
This creates it’s own incremental backups on a backup drive on the same server as the actual installation. I also sync the files to another drive just using the Nextcloud sync client, and these can then be read cleanly by Immich, Photoprism, whatever else I’m running that day.
I sync the photos into a paid Ente plan that I got cheap paying for 2 years to get a 5 year plan in what they said was their last ever black friday sale. End to end encrypted but hosted by them.
I then have a borg backup of all files across all the Nextcloud accounts as well as all my other self hosted stuff. This is stored on a backup disk but is also synced to Backblaze B2 storage for offsite.
I then also burned all files to Mdisc 100GB disks including a duplicate copy stored offsite.
The photos and videos I have collected over my life are very important to me, as you might be able to tell.
Nextcloud for uploading all data, then Immich reading from a shared dir
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.
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.
If I really wanna save a photo, I print it out. For video, I don’t really have anything anymore. I would be doing a physical backup, too, but I don’t currently have a VIVO card (to record to VHS/Betamax) or a DVD burner to be able to do that. I simply keep them on a physical drive that is in my possession.
Google Photos stores everything I don’t care much about but I don’t like to rely on something I have no real control over. If they go down, I lose my shit. The only way I could lose my shit RN is if I somehow lose the drive I never move anywhere, or it breaks.
I signed up for a plan over at ente.io a couple of years ago, has been smooth ever since. Great app, great sync, I don’t self-host but I believe they offer that option.
An few old internal hdds that are being used as external hdds
Photos + Videos: Immich
The backup repository: Veeam
How many: Don’t really know. 14 versions made daily?I backup to Nextcloud and then use the Memories app to access them. I’ll admit that it’s not as flashy as Google Photos but actually it almost is.
I backup with nextcloud too but never messed with memories. My next big project is organizing my photos and moving to immich.
Yeah immich has been on the roadmap for me for a while too… but i think NC+Memories is just good enough to make me lazy enough to neglect/delay the Immich move 🤣
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 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.
I don’t use GAFAM storage.
Without dereferencing that acronym, I’m not sure whether I’m using GAFAM storage either.
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 if you ever decide to switch to a paid plan)
All my photos are on nextcloud, on my own home server, which uses a raidz setup for reliability. No further backup.
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.
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.
I use r-sync to compress and store them on two external drives. Same with all my other personal files.
I just have set up synching 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.
