Hi fellow self-hoster.
Almost one year ago i did experiment with Immich and found, at the time, that it was not up to pair to what i was expecting from it. Basically my use case was slightly different from the Immich user experience.
After all this time i decided to give it another go and i am amazed! It has grown a lot, it now has all the features i need and where lacking at the time.
So, in just a few hours i set it up and configured my external libraries, backup, storage template and OIDC authentication with authelia. All works.
Great kudos to the devs which are doing an amazing work.
I have documented all the steps of the process with the link on top of this post, hope it can be useful for someone.
Thats…why I’m asking?
…is that not what Immich is?
Are you paying for Immich somewhere? Then you’d have to trust the administrator to back your data up. I had assumed you were self hosting and by managed services I meant like Google Photos, or indeed someone else’s Immich setup.
No.
Not doing that for reasons that shouldn’t need explaining.
If you’re self hosting then you could just copy all the files from your server onto an external drive. I have to say that’s not a great backup solution though, and you should learn more about administration of Linux servers so that when things break you can fix them. I wouldn’t rely on it as a safe solution to your photos otherwise.
I’m not looking to become a sysadmin, thanks. I just want somewhere to safely store and organize my private photos.
I don’t know how to access the filesystem and copying the library folders would not back up the metadata.
A great backup solution would be what I mentioned elsewhere. Just put a button to export it to a flash drive or an encrypted file server.
And that’s fine and understandable. But I don’t think that Immich is for you. It’s not consumer-grade software. It’s a piece of Linux server software that requires occasional maintenance and administration. We haven’t seen a breaking update in a while but Immich does occasionally release updates where things will break if you don’t dig in to the config files and reconfigure it.
If they implemented a proper backup system I wouldn’t have to worry about it breaking. That’s why I want it.
There’s nothing else I need to access the backend for.
@Ulrich @bdonvr It will indeed be hard to use Immich without some technical knowledge at the moment. The documentation explicitly warns that the software is changing fast and might break a few things.
I’m sure that some day they will have a paid hosted tier that will de-risk the technical aspects such as backups and resilience but thats not here yet.
Perhaps you could take a look at Ente Photos for a non-Google, privacy friendly (and encrypted) photo hosting solution.
https://ente.io/
@Ulrich @bdonvr Another alternative I could recommend that balances self-hosting and ease-of-use would be to perhaps acquire a Synology NAS.
I find that their OS is super user friendly and they have built-in alternatives to a lot of Google apps (email, docs, photos, drive, etc).
You still have to worry about potentially having an off-site backup, but they also have solutions for that in their OS’s app store (for duplicating an entire NAS to a remote one for example).
@Ulrich @bdonvr I use a Synology DS220+ myself with a few TBs of hard disks. I regret not having bought another model with more disk bays but thats another story. :)
Although I’m a developer and I could handle it all myself, I also don’t want to complexify my setup more than it needs to.
Partly because I have other things to do but also because there is a pretty big risk factor that’s not entirely clear when you’re in charge of your own infrastructure and backups and all that.