A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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One of the best pieces of self-hosted software ever to exist.
Edit: This is Immich! for the folks who don't know.
What is it and what does it do?
Immich: Image Backup* solution — like Google Photos or Ente Photos but self-hosted.
*Backup in the sense of uploading your photos to a server you own. You should backup the database as well as your library with 3-2-1 method.
Ente is also open source and can be self-hosted.
If it works then great. I find it pretty lacking compared to Immich.
I guess they fill different niches. I use Ente for the e2ee, that's pretty important to me. Immich definitely seems more like a drop in Google Photos alternative, I just use software on my computer to do that instead.
E2EE is definitely important for uploads on someone else's server. On my server? Ehhh, not so much. The entire drive is already encrypted. Another layer of encryption would just slow it down. Just my opinion.
I would think e2ee would be important if youre uploading files when away from your local network. If that isn't enabled, then it's far less important. At that point, it would only matter if there was a compromised client harvesting your wifi packets.
Even without e2ee or a VPN, just plain old HTTPS should be enough to secure that part, or am I missing something?
True, but if you control both endpoints, e2ee and https look very similar.
If this is happening via a VPN you almost definitely already have transit encryption
Fair point, and if ypure worried about privacy while transferring images, a VPN should have already been considered.
Immich automatically uploads when I connect to wifi so that's not really a problem. Nor am I personally concerned with someone MITMing my personal photos, I just want them out of corporate silos that use them to exploit me or hand them over to the gov in a dragnet.
Their auth is better than the tool itself (last time I evaluated options which was maybe a year ago)
Oh they update a lot. The clients have gotten really snappy, which is nice because browsing photos felt a bit cumbersome before. There's now automatic albums and facial recognition, if you opt in to that. Was going to say that there's no editing tool but there is. It's quite basic though, three tabs, crop, transform (rotate, flip, resize), and colours (brightness, contrast, saturation, and blur for some reason lmao).
There's also a bunch of sharing features. You could share images or albums directly, or even create embeds for if you have a portfolio website. I pretty much only use it as a backup service though.
What 2 different media types are you using for the "2" part?
Spinning and flash.
FLASH! AAAAAAAA
The world needs those two gifs combined so we can more easily (and awesomely!) answer this question in the future.
Why does it need to be two types? Can't I have 2 spinning?
You put them in a safe. Safe falls down, spinning is gone.
You put them in a safe and forget about them for some time. Flash is gone, spinning still has data.
Good point!
You can do two spinning but then you should at least use drives from different manufacturers to reduce the risk of them failing at (roughly) the same time.
if you have off-site backup, that could potentially count as the two types, but probably not in the spirit of the backup.
I have two spinning disks, a SATA SSD cache, and off-site backup
Short: It is a second Hardrive using borg that backs up the primary Hardrive.
Long: My Backup strategy:-
Databases and other imp files:
For databases the backup happens every night that gets saved on the server itself. Then when my laptop connects either to the home network or to the Internet, the backup zip files on my server syncs to my laptop via syncthing. Then my laptop's data is backed up to OneDrive (encrypted) — this includes the immich database backups. I usually keep 7 days worth of backup files just incase some get corrupted and I can just go back to the previous day.
Library
Since my Immich Library is big, daily borg backups are not possible for 200 gigs. So I have scheduled them every Sunday morning when I rarely use the server. The hardrive is exclusively used only for Immich. That hardrive is then backed up to another hardrive using borg and also to my OneDrive using rclone. (All encrypted). So 3 copies of the data, 2 on 2 different hardives (1 is primary) and 1 offsite.
I do nightly borg backups of much more than 200gb. The idea of incremental backups is you're only doing the changes, and photos don't tend to change.
What challenge did you come across with a 200GB backup?
I second this?
https://immich.app/
From the logo, it looks like immich
https://immich.app/
Immich! Photo management: https://immich.app/
Immich
Google photo self hosted alternative