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

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

#161
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 syncthing too. Over the years it has gotten rock solid for me. I use it between all my machines and phone. With various 1 to many, 1 to 1 and one way or two way sync. One of my machine is always on and is backuped to the cloud everyday. Effectively making a backup of all my devices at once. Better yet, since syncthing can also save staggered copies of modified files, a rm -rf * will be synced but the backup machin…

Sounds like a nice setup! How are you backing up from syncthing to the cloud? Are your backups encrypted?

Not the OP, but I've had great success w/ rclone + backblaze.

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

#162
post #91
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple provides access to photos just fine, using a different API. Having a separate API for photo access is annoying while developing this use case, but it's appropriate for a couple different reasons: for one, if apps could access the raw files, that could reveal metadata like location. For another, filesystem access wouldn't properly handle cloud-synced photo libraries. Perhaps photos on iOS are persisted into some…

This should be the user's choice, not Apple's. Explain the security tradeoffs then let me do what I want with my device.

That’s what I mean, there are technical reasons why it doesn’t necessarily make sense to represent photos as individual files: they might not live in a file system, they might have to be downloaded, they might have to be transparently converted from one format to another, they might have to have metadata transparently stripped. Any applications are going to need to use an API to get the right form of photo that the user wants anyway. Having a dedicated API that users can call as they need makes more sense than having the operating system hackishly pretend that your photos live in a bucket of JPEGs somewhere

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

#163
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Photos isn't a lossless backup

https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en&ref_t... According to this support article, you can store original quality. Assuming that is what you meant by "lossless".

Oh, interesting. It looks like they released that in 2021 if my googling is right. Cool.

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

#165
post #35

I prefer SyncThing on both mobile and desktop devices. It's open source and mature, the server only makes devices findable between each other. It allows 1 or 2 way sync. And it has advanced settings for keeping removed files (e.g. trashbin that cleans anything older than X days.)

Is there an iOS version?

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hosting something like this seems like it would cost more time/money/frustration than its worth. If you've never self hosted anything there is indeed a large initial time and money investment. However, going through it once it pays itself off in the long run and adding additional services or maintaining existing ones becomes trivial. Actually owning your data and having full control over it without worrying who it…

I worry about catastrophic data loss. Even at Google scale you hear stories of things going wrong and they have to resort to off-site offline storage; for stuff like photos of my kids, I just don't trust myself, the SW provider, hardware etc to sufficiently insulate me from something crazy going wrong. It only needs to happen once.

About to have my first kid, have been thinking deeply about this and decided having my own storage server is the best route. ZFS raid with redundancy to survive 2 drive losses.

Will also backup offsite and take a manual snapshot each year for all my pics. Unlikely that I will backup the Plex-style media.

I am just as afraid of Google shutting off my account as I am about losing my own data.

I’ve been thinking about creating a service to back files up for 100+ years. I think s3 will be around that long, but the offering would need to survive the saas shutdown with a way to continue paying the bills. Could have an escrow fund to incentivize devs to maintain cloud storage integrations, with some sort of a voting mechanism for subscribers (crypto tokens for corp governance?)

Just putting a few half baked thoughts into the ether in case you find it interesting.

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

#167
post #35

I prefer SyncThing on both mobile and desktop devices. It's open source and mature, the server only makes devices findable between each other. It allows 1 or 2 way sync. And it has advanced settings for keeping removed files (e.g. trashbin that cleans anything older than X days.)

Is it at all possible to backup my phone contacts on my phone using syncthing? Perhaps in conjunction with some other software.

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

#168
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try it. Adopt it. :) Just a few weeks ago, facial recognition was added and that was it for me. I finally made the switch from Google Photos and iCloud to immich. It's your self-hosted google photos alternative, with image recognition, a map, sharing folders publicly, or with other users on your server. Some parts will be buggy though, like face detection, or memories. But the whole "backup & sync" part is very relia…

I’m working on building something similar. From what I can tell, Immich, Ente, and PhotoPrism are the best of the batch when it comes to open source photo storage and management. They are all good, but it depends on what you’re looking for. Personally, I want: E2E encryption, on-device face recognition, and the ability to self-host as well as a paid option for people who don’t want to manage their own server. The exi…

If you are willing to consider closed source, paid options there is also Mylio

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

#170
post #35

I prefer SyncThing on both mobile and desktop devices. It's open source and mature, the server only makes devices findable between each other. It allows 1 or 2 way sync. And it has advanced settings for keeping removed files (e.g. trashbin that cleans anything older than X days.)

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?

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