Self-hosted photo and video management solution. Easily back up, organize, and manage your photos on your own server. Immich helps you
browse, search and organize your photos and videos with ease, without sacrificing your privacy.
Anyone know of a good managed hosting (or vps) for Immich that doesn’t break the bank? I have about 5TB of photos/videos and I don’t feel safe without a remote backup. I played with self hosting and I really (really) like Immich but I keep Google photos/Drive just to ensure I won’t lose anything.
I do something similar — I have a raspberry pi and a HD, with daily rsync and snapshots (monthly retained indefinitely, weekly retained for a month, daily retained for a week). It’s at family’s house, connected to my home via WireGuard via a VPS. Tailscale (or anything really) would also work here.
It’s a great setup! Just have some watchdog reboot if it can’t talk to home (a simple cronjob with ping -c1 home.lan || reboot or similar).
Even our “slow” 35Mbps upload speed is way more than enough for incremental rsyncs of my Immich library. The initial sync was done in person, though.
I remember before, you could use crashplan to easily backup to a computer at a friend’s house and vice versa. Anyone know any similar tools? The biggest requirement would be that it’s easy enough to use that someone who doesn’t know what “self hosting” is can do it.
I have several of these and they been solid, before I would get refurb or open box from amazon and send them back if the smart failed, guessing a lot of people just stick their old drives in the box and return it so it wasn’t great
Local storage on a VPS is expensive, and I’ve never been happy with a lower powered server serving media. Personally I self-host and send a backup to Backblaze B2 for offsite (using Rclone).
I use Borgmatic for incremental, deduplicated backups but make sure you save your encryption key somewhere you can access it if your house burns down.
I have local storage for my photos, then backup to object storage using Borgmatic and Rclone to B2. But you’re right, you can’t directly use object storage with Immich.
If you’re fine with self hosting, you can just self host it and backup your local drives to a remote location. That’s what I do.
For backup software, I use Duplicacy. But Veeam, Borg, etc… would work just fine. For images, since they’re just static files and you don’t really need a version history, you could get away with a scheduled rsync job. Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.
For remote storage, I’d first consider a Hetzner storage box since they are flat-rate pricing and pretty dang cheap at $13/mo for 5TB. You might also consider StorJ, B2, S3, etc… I’d just stay away from any lesser known ultra-cheap storage providers.
Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.
I rsync as well, but use snapshotting on the remote drives. So, a bad rsync would suck but shouldn’t really result in data loss. Ransomware on my local+remote server would of course be very bad…
I have 10tb and just ended up getting a 8 bay Synology. Practically turnkey and the photo app is pretty nice. A work of warning. Once your photos get to around 7tb, the photo system sometimes crashes. I spoke to a dev at Synology and there is a fix coming.
There are products that will let you back up onto your buddy’s free space and vice-versa, but the simplest pricy thing you can do is to drop a NAS at a friend’s place and set up a VPN.
But maybe the monthly fee is okay for now. Maybe consider proton for files instead?
That’s what I do. 1.6TB currently on rsync.net, only my personal artifacts excluding all media that can be reacquired and it’s a reasonable $10/mo. Synced daily at 4am.
If I wanted my backups to include my media collection or anything exceeding several TB, I would build a second NAS and drop it at my parents’.
I just have my data folder and database being copied to backblaze. It’s relatively cheap. Most hosting providers don’t necessarily do backup unless you configure that on your own anyway.
Anyone know of a good managed hosting (or vps) for Immich that doesn’t break the bank? I have about 5TB of photos/videos and I don’t feel safe without a remote backup. I played with self hosting and I really (really) like Immich but I keep Google photos/Drive just to ensure I won’t lose anything.
I use Netcup VPS
Layer 7 storage servers might be what you are looking for.
Continue to self host, create a yearly backup on external harddrive which you keep offline at a trusted family members house.
I do something similar — I have a raspberry pi and a HD, with daily rsync and snapshots (monthly retained indefinitely, weekly retained for a month, daily retained for a week). It’s at family’s house, connected to my home via WireGuard via a VPS. Tailscale (or anything really) would also work here.
It’s a great setup! Just have some watchdog reboot if it can’t talk to home (a simple cronjob with
ping -c1 home.lan || rebootor similar).Even our “slow” 35Mbps upload speed is way more than enough for incremental rsyncs of my Immich library. The initial sync was done in person, though.
I remember before, you could use crashplan to easily backup to a computer at a friend’s house and vice versa. Anyone know any similar tools? The biggest requirement would be that it’s easy enough to use that someone who doesn’t know what “self hosting” is can do it.
Syncthing.
https://syncthing.net/
But keeping the service live at all times isn’t really a backup.
https://duplicacy.com/
As someone who tried syncthing with their non-self hosting friends, let me tell you, that edit folder option is terrifying for the general public lol
I guess you can do "local"backups then syncthing them over, but thats a bit contrived
Good enough. Simple, cheap. Brilliant.
Anyone reading this have any suggestions as to where we all can source cheap high-volume drives, such as refurbs pulled from upgraded old racks?
I’m looking to source a cheap trusted family member if anyone has one going?
Lots of families seem to be relocating these days for some reason… Maybe try reaching out there. 👍
Location?
https://serverpartdeals.com/
I have several of these and they been solid, before I would get refurb or open box from amazon and send them back if the smart failed, guessing a lot of people just stick their old drives in the box and return it so it wasn’t great
I got one from goHardDrive on eBay (link). It was cheap enough, looks flawless, and knock on wood has been working fine.
Googling around, the brand gets…mixed reviews. My use case is such that of this drive fails it’s not a big deal.
Local storage on a VPS is expensive, and I’ve never been happy with a lower powered server serving media. Personally I self-host and send a backup to Backblaze B2 for offsite (using Rclone).
I use Borgmatic for incremental, deduplicated backups but make sure you save your encryption key somewhere you can access it if your house burns down.
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Yup, seems the issue for this is still open.
I have local storage for my photos, then backup to object storage using Borgmatic and Rclone to B2. But you’re right, you can’t directly use object storage with Immich.
I actually misunderstood the reply and thus deleted my comment.
If you’re fine with self hosting, you can just self host it and backup your local drives to a remote location. That’s what I do.
For backup software, I use Duplicacy. But Veeam, Borg, etc… would work just fine. For images, since they’re just static files and you don’t really need a version history, you could get away with a scheduled rsync job. Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.
For remote storage, I’d first consider a Hetzner storage box since they are flat-rate pricing and pretty dang cheap at $13/mo for 5TB. You might also consider StorJ, B2, S3, etc… I’d just stay away from any lesser known ultra-cheap storage providers.
I rsync as well, but use snapshotting on the remote drives. So, a bad rsync would suck but shouldn’t really result in data loss. Ransomware on my local+remote server would of course be very bad…
I have 10tb and just ended up getting a 8 bay Synology. Practically turnkey and the photo app is pretty nice. A work of warning. Once your photos get to around 7tb, the photo system sometimes crashes. I spoke to a dev at Synology and there is a fix coming.
There are products that will let you back up onto your buddy’s free space and vice-versa, but the simplest pricy thing you can do is to drop a NAS at a friend’s place and set up a VPN.
But maybe the monthly fee is okay for now. Maybe consider proton for files instead?
Reverse proxy if your home internet is decent.
50mbps upload is fine for me.
I had it running on a mini PC with 8tb of storage, but I couldn’t get the latency down to where I want it, so I moved it to a VPS.
Problem with that is there is no backup in case of flood/fire/tornado etc.
rsync.net is awesome.
That’s what I do. 1.6TB currently on rsync.net, only my personal artifacts excluding all media that can be reacquired and it’s a reasonable $10/mo. Synced daily at 4am.
If I wanted my backups to include my media collection or anything exceeding several TB, I would build a second NAS and drop it at my parents’.
I just have my data folder and database being copied to backblaze. It’s relatively cheap. Most hosting providers don’t necessarily do backup unless you configure that on your own anyway.
At such volume it is difficult to come up a service that does not break a bank. Storage is expensive.
Perhaps immich + monthly backups to S3 glacier. That is if you don’t have a second and third site available
Yeah it sucks because Microsoft charges $10/mo for 6tb.
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