I am trying to finally move from entirely depending on Google Photos to a proper backup strategy. I have my photos and videos downloaded from Google which are a mess right now but as long they’re with me I am fine, at least for now.
So, what I have planned is 3 way backup with Mega Drive-Google Photos- Local storage. Local storage, I will start off with storing on a pendrive and my router has a usb port so will make use of it for time being.
I know my way of doing things is noobish for a piracy community (and in general too, I am kinda embarrassed as well sharing this “strategy” of mine). Hence I’m asking for suggestions to improve my strategy. Yeah, in the future I will move to HDDs and NAS but for time being I am starting out this way.
So how do you manage your personal media? Are there any noob-friendly tools/techniques you know which drastically improve my strategy?
I selfhost immich
Immich - I moved from PhotoPrism some months ago, and am very happy I did.
Indeed. Immich is the way to go. While stating heavy development I find it quite stable. Did not have major issues with it. However I don’t use their interface much. I just use it as 2nd backup location to automatically upload stuff from my phone to something else than the big G.
Obviously this need some sort of server but a VPS will do.
The fact that you have some sort of plan for managing your photos is one step ahead of me. I have no plans and my photos are a very messy collection.
I would caution against using a flash drive (a.k.a. pen drive) for any permanent storage. I’ve had multiple flash drives fail on me. Usually it’s this super cheap kind that gets distributed as branded swag, but I’ve had some others fail too.
Immich is a selfhosted photo management server with a user interface that’s similar to google photos. Also has mobile apps.
Their motto is “privacy should not be a luxury”.
I was planning for long to try it out because it looks very promising, but I was waiting for… I don’t know what? Fuck it I’m installing it today.
- ⚠️ Expect bugs and breaking changes.
- ⚠️ Do not use the app as the only way to store your photos and videos.
Well that’s not very confidence-inducing…
To be fair though, those warnings are not really representative of the current user experience. I’ve had Immich running for about 6 months by now, and apart from the very frequent updates the only annoyance was when they recently changed their database scheme, and I had to manually add two extensions to my Postgres. Everything else has been rock solid, and has been improving at a massive pace
Have you ever logged in to a linux shell? If so, the below or similar may be familiar:
Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law.
As I see they are just
- covering their asses legally, in case someone wanted to go to court over losing family pictures
- making sure that the admin knows that they really really should do backups of the data stored there
