Live data from Hacker News

Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

github.com

131–140 of 354 posts

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#131
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have absolutely no desire to manage my own backup. When I take a picture with my phone, it automatically gets backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive, and Amazon Photos (free with prime). When I had a personal computer, photos would sync to my computer and get backed up to BackBlaze also.

> When I take a picture with my phone, it automatically gets backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive, and Amazon Photos (free with prime). If you delete a photo on your phone, does it automatically get deleted from all those services in near-realtime? Do you have an archive solution in place (distinct from your lack of a backup solution)?

I don’t want it to be synced. I want my pictures and videos to be backed up.

I have 2TB on iCloud, 2TB on Google Drive, unlimited back up of photos on Amazon Drive and 1TB on OneDrive. When my OneDrive account gives out of space, I’ll just use one of the other 6 accounts that come with an Office 365 subscription.

I guess for an archive solution, I would use my personal AWS account that’s only used to store my videos that fell off the back of a truck once I took my Plex server off line.

I have 2TB of videos stored in AWS S3 Deep Glacier archive. I’m charged like $2 a month for it.

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#132

I wish Google Photos UI was better but it still seems to be the best solution. Hosting something like this seems like it would cost more time/money/frustration than its worth. On the other hand, I always think its awesome to see self hosted solutions! It helps to create competition.

Google Photos isn't a lossless backup

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have absolutely no desire to manage my own backup. When I take a picture with my phone, it automatically gets backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive, and Amazon Photos (free with prime). When I had a personal computer, photos would sync to my computer and get backed up to BackBlaze also.

It gets backed up to all of these? On iOS I have tried all except Google and they are all finicky. Even iCloud/Photos.app seems to have a brain of its own. And on the Mac Apple engineers have made sure the photos are not synced in a simple easy folder hierarchy that can be backed up elsewhere.

Yes, I have to launch OneDrive to start the backup and Amazon photos.

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#134

Trying to get off dropbox. 1) Anyone try Backblaze for photo backups? Is it worth trying? 2) Why is immich photo and video only? 3) Why docker? I miss the days of just files and scripts on any host.

If you have your own server somewhere, Nextcloud is a very nice free self-hostable Dropbox replacement.

To your third point, I scratched my head and looked suspiciously at Docker from a distance for years, but since I've started playing with it, I absolutely love it and would not go back. Every dependency that you need is wrapped up in a single image, so installing the application is as simple as pulling the image and booting up a container from it; no worries about conflicts with other services, broken or conflicting dependencies, or breaking something later on when you make other changes. Don't like the exact installation and want to make your own? Make or modify a dockerfile, and build a new image. Want to upgrade? Just destroy the container and create a new one with the updated version - all your data, config files, etc. are (or should be!) in separate volumes from the container itself so you lose nothing, and in fact you can easily experiment with different releases, or rollback if something goes wrong. For myself, I treat all my containers as ephemeral and always recreate them whenever I restart them - it costs nothing and I know that the system is easily reproducible. Speaking of volumes, backups are a breeze - all my Docker volumes are just subdirectories of /docker/volumes so all I have to do is back that up every night and I've got a complete copy that I can instantly restore (or clone!). It really is incredibly convenient.

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#135
post #85
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dream of selling a Box that plugs into the wall that backs up all of your photos and videos and maybe acts as an ActivityPub server, and you can add your friends who also have a Box, and your friends' Boxes back up all of your photos and vice versa. The added benefit of integrating federated social media is that if you want to share a file with your friends, there's zero load time because the file is already backed…

Honestly I think Apple has a good model for this. The value would be in making the box plug-and-play. Apple has proven people will pay a premium for devices that Just Work. It could still be built on open software. Some kind of a cross between Apple’s opinionated approach to defaults and RedHat’s pay-for-support model of developing open source software.

Y'all are literally unironically pitching The Box from the TV show Silicon Valley.

What is the problem being solved here? Apple already offers a solution – iCloud.

Why would they want to sell you a box for offline backups?

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#136
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think Apple has a good model for this. The value would be in making the box plug-and-play. Apple has proven people will pay a premium for devices that Just Work. It could still be built on open software. Some kind of a cross between Apple’s opinionated approach to defaults and RedHat’s pay-for-support model of developing open source software.

Yeah, the Apple TV should do it.

Okay, crazy idea. What if you didn't even need a piece of hardware and the service included online storage? It would simplify it even more for the end user so they didn't have to plug in hardware and maintain it. We could call this service something like eOnlineStorage or iBackupPhotos, maybe charge a varying price up to $9.99 a month for it.

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this is upvoted so much, I wonder what people's complete setup is for something like this to replace, say, Google Photos. So once the photos are on a "server", what do people recommend for albums, sharing, metadata, geotagging, search, etc?

Personally I keep the last 365 days in my Google Photos Everything else is in Immich Pictures and videos I take get backed up to Google Photos Once a year I do a Google Takeout and import into Immich This way I get the best of both worlds

how do you get the photos out of Google Photos (and delete them from there I assume?)? I started on a CLI that could track photos across different accounts and make it easy to move then between them i.e. from GP to s3 or to a local drive etc. Was going to include duplicate detection. But if there is already another tool...?

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#138
post #132

I wish Google Photos UI was better but it still seems to be the best solution. Hosting something like this seems like it would cost more time/money/frustration than its worth. On the other hand, I always think its awesome to see self hosted solutions! It helps to create competition.

Google Photos isn't a lossless backup

Really?!

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#139
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can set the folder on the PC side to be 'receive only'.

And to avoid mishaps, you can also set the phone side to be send only. Do remember that as you delete photos on your phone to save space, it will delete them on the PC. You would need the PC side to move the photos to a different directory (a cronjob would do).

Actually you can setup syncthing not to delete the file in the receiving folder https://docs.syncthing.net/advanced/folder-ignoredelete.html

Re: Self-hosted photo and video backups directly from your mobile phone

#140

People have mentioned SyncThing and Seafile as straight backup options. Another option one could consider is FolderSync[1]. It has a number of cloud back-ends it can interface with, but I use it to periodically SFTP to my home server to backup several areas in my phone, including photos, camera and app backups. Two niceties for me it has: * Two-way sync. I'll often clean up my camera roll on my PC, and that syncs bac…

I would also vote for FolderSync. I run seafile and nextcloud for other purposes, but have settled using FolderSync for phone --> NAS nightly backups and it is slick. I've been using Photoview to view backed up photos locally.
Post reply on HN