Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

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)

Currently Ente - looking for a replacement. Ente's apps are non-native and it shows - really sluggish and poor. I wish they would prioritise that, but they don't. But this is not really a backup - it's a sync - and like a shadow of iOS Photos app on iOS because, well, those APIs are not natively accessible to other apps on iOS. Ente is more like Google Photos' FOSS and E2EE alt.

For actually backing up my personal data (including videos and photos) I use:

1. borgbase (with borg's GUI Vorta; FOSS and E2EE)
2. backblaze b2 (using restic's GUI backrest; FOSS and E2EE) – these both have exactly the same personal data being backed up.
3. then there's tarsnap (this is a much smaller - must save at all costs - data set). Tarsnap is very unwieldy (literally stuck in time - not in a good way) but I have been backing up since long and I do not have another reliable solution. Its client code is readable publicly - don't know it's FOSS or not; apparently not. But E2EE.

(1 and 2 are really great apps!)

I also use a sync tool with a lifetime plan (but it sucks and I am finding a replacement, so won't even name it; it says E2EE but they are so irresponsible that I removed anything sensitively personal from sync set). PS. This was my first and last lifetime anything of my life.

Photos + Videos: Immich
The backup repository: Veeam
How many: Don't really know. 14 versions made daily?

I have a trueNAS server with at least 2 copies of them on different zfs pools (nextcloud for main copy), then I have a 2TB external storage on my MacBook.

This is all backed up to backblaze and one drive

All photos from my and the wife’s phones are backed up to nextcloud and google photos on our own domain

It needs a bit of a tidy up

I use immich for all mobile/old jpg and video stuff.

For raw photos I use syncthing to keep a synced copy from my nas to my external drive so I can edit on the go in full speed vs network connection.

My previous laptop had two m.2 slots but current tablet only has one so I had to move the 4tb external

I'm using Immich, and I'm hopefully setting up Duplicati with a friend so we both back up (encrypted) each others files. Self hosted, and the 3-2-1 backup rule!

Synology NAS. Had it for a few years. Comes with Synology Photos, which is like Google Photos in terms of functionality (but local, of course).

I've heard good things about immich too, but haven't tried it yet.

I've tried Ente and that's also a good solution for how turnkey it is.

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 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.

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 RAID1 like a caveman

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.

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.

I still burn DVDs as photo backups.

An few old internal hdds that are being used as external hdds

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.

I use r-sync to compress and store them on two external drives. Same with all my other personal files.

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.

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.

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 keep it simple, two Exos drives in raid1 on a desktop computer facing the network. If you want to make it do other stuff it's an easy foundation to build on. For a while I used a robocopy script to cut from my dash cam sd card's event folder any time it was hooked up.