Any users here mind sharing their experience?
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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.
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 || 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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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?
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
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.
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.
I use Netcup VPS
Happy to share my experience. Pros: capable replacement for Google photos, Face recognition, location map, etc Support for albums and sharing. Support for reading folders from local network
Roll the dice on these, YMMV ( there are not really cons to me but I work in tech and deal with far worse things)
Actively being developed. Good- things are fixed, new features added. Bad, have to update the server regularly , multiple times some weeks.
Cost: free. You get what you pay for. There's a donation cost, and I've been meaning to do that, but for free you may not get the help like for something you pay for. They do have an active community on Discord, so there's that.
Editing in mobile client only.
Exposing to the Internet seems a bit tricky if you plan on doing it right ( securely) but you can use tail scale for external access, works fine.
I've been happy enough with it to turn off my google photo backup . Oh they do warn you to not to use this as your main backup since it's under active development. Something what to consider. Hope this helps, happy to answer questions
Edit: cleaned up grammar for clarity
If you're just interested in the synch part, I've been using it without any issues for several months. Worked in a pixel 6a, upgraded to a pixel 8 pro and continued right where I left off
The only caveat I see is updating the server/app regularly.
Updating is definitely recommended for sure but I find myself waiting between updates. I'm still running 1.134.0 and have been for a while just because I'm not having any issues and haven't gotten around to it.
I agree with everything else here as I have had the same experience.
Edit: This recent update I will likely update to though.
Depends, if you're ok exposing an open port to the Internet then its not tricky at all, assuming you know how to port forward and are not double natted. They warn you to not do this though. I second that warning.
This page explains the 3 main options https://docs.immich.app/guides/remote-access/
Ideally you'd just do a reverse proxy, which is the most complex option. Tasks include getting a host, cert, and setting it up.
I went with tail scale, it was easy but requires an additional client component on every device and one in the server.
I've never had any issues with the old setup oddly enough, they talk like it barely functions lol
I had issues uploading big files to it due to it stopping uploading once app is minimized. As long as app is open on screen, it would upload files with no interruption. New version seems to fix this issue for me.
Interesting, background sync was completely broken on the new beta timeline for me. I had to open the app, and disable then reenable sync every time I had new photos.
I'm back on the old version because it's basically 100% reliable.
The app can be basically unresponsive (my experience) as it's checking to make sure everything is synced. It's gotten much better over the last few months and the beta experience was wonderful it just broke (app side) a few times and told me an asset wasn't uploaded even though it was.
Me too, and the new one I didn't even realize this change happened. I saw there were no breaking changes, updated, and saw "oh, it isn't synced anymore" so I reselected the folders, it ran a sync check on everything, which took a while, and everything works fine again.
I didn't even realize there was a difference until now, but I guess there is a start/stop sync switch.
I'm really happy to see this post acknowledge speed issues where there are many items, 100k+. I have around this and have always found Immich to be laggy, while others say how it's the fastest ever.
I will have to give it another go.
Does the app clear storage space on your phone ever? Last I looked, it only mirrored pictures to Immich, so everyone’s phone eventually fills up storage. Had to stick with Nextcloud because it deletes after uploading.
I'm using immich and really like it, but I'm not using the Android app. I have synthing on my phone, and I let syncthing send the photos to my server. Then Immich detects the files in the syncthing folder.
Is there any benefit to using the app? Or would using the app be basically the same thing that I'm doing now?
The app let's you see/search all your photos, I have a ton of photos not on my phone.
Ah, gotcha. That's a use case I hadn't thought of. Mine is just the photo backup for my current phone, so when I have my phone with me, I can see all of the photos on the phone itself.
The app is pretty similar to Google Photos. You can search locations, people, etc. It's cool and works well enough, but I just use it as a secondary backup. Google Photos is still primary for me for now. I'd recommend giving it a try though. You can use the app without syncing anything just to see what it looks like first.
I don't know if this is one of the changes they introduced in 1.142 but the Android app has been so much smoother since that update!
GIFs no longer play in the android app and the 'add to album' button (when viewing a single image) has disappeared. 🙁
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