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

github.com

261–270 of 354 posts

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

#261

The recommended spec is 4 cores and 6GB. Running this 24/7 for a year in US where the carbon intensity is about 400 gCO₂eq/kWh would produce about 150kg of CO2 per user per year. I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach. If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted. With Google Photos, as a SaaS…

>If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted. You can configure your server to sleep (scheduled or use WoL), which will halve (or more) that carbon emission number. Speaking of which, individual action will never approach the level that corporate action could. Take a look at the practice of gas flaring (2022 estimate of ~357 milli…

Turning a service on/off makes a lot of sense for this kind of application.

I sincerely didn't post my comment to shame anymore.

Need for computing is growing fast and it is actually not negligible at all. See the link below, data centers emitted 300 MTCo2 in 2020, similar to the number you mentioned.

https://www.iea.org/reports/data-centres-and-data-transmissi...

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

#262
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile modern replacements like DigiKam, Lightroom, ON1, and so on are incredibly bloated with very slow UI response even on a very powerful desktop PC. Darktable and ON1 feel decent snappy on my ~8 year old Desktop PC. Though it was a looong time since I last tried Picasa.

Picasa was veeery fast on my dual core, 4gb ram, spinning rust laptop from 15 years ago. I’m trying to remember if I was using the laptop I got in 2006 which only had 2gb of ram or it was the upgraded one I got a few years later with 4gb, but either way it was incredibly fast on machines we would laugh at today.

We would probably also lough at the image resolution that was common back then.

I just watched a video of Picasa to jog my memory. It seems similar snappy as ON1 with 24 megapixel raw images on my 2015 PC.

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

#263
I hope I don't come across as entitled or an asshole, but Docker means I'm not getting near it. Would love to see a bare host installation option for us BSD folks so I can stick it in a jail. Looks real good though! I'll be checking in now and then to see if that happens.

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

#264
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if these services will ever reach mass adoption. I consider myself to be technological advanced, but other than niche photographer, i wonder if 99.99 % of population would ever go through the effort of setting such a service ?

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…

Something like a freedombox (https://www.freedombox.org/) ?

Or the internet cube (https://internetcu.be/) ?

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

#265
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK you can use SyncThing-like utilities, like Möbius Sync, on iOS, but not for photos, because… iOS does not consider a photo a file. Which is baffling (probably for some security reason), so I have to stick with a USB cord and ifuse + heif-convert on Linux.

What I've done is to leave a Windows VM running which has both the iCloud Photos app, as well as Syncthing, both pointing at same directory. This then works as an iCloud/syncthing bridge, letting my iPhone sync with my linux machines.

Do you ever get the feeling you're just inventing asinine problems for yourself to waste time solving?

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

#266

Trying to break down the rough cost to do this via a SaaS, someone correct me if I'm wrong here: - 4 cores/6GB RAM is $40/mo on DigitalOcean, and that's with only 160GB storage. Lowest AWS S3 tier is $0.023/GB, so assuming 1-2TB of photos that's $30-40 for additional storage. - The non-named company's 2TB subscription is $100/mo, translating to savings of only ~$20. - Building a server would be probably ~$250, electr…

There is no sane person on earth doing this kind of thing to save money. That's entirely missing the point

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

#267

I'm aparently boring. My "backup routine" consists of storing photos in iCloud, which is then syncronized "real time" to a local Mac Mini. From the Mac Mini i then run scheduled backups to a local external harddrive, as well as a local Raspberry Pi running Minio, and nightly to OneDrive. The external harddrive backup uses Timemachine, the raspberry pi backup uses Kopia, and OneDrive is done with Arq. Furthermore, i m…

but WHY? why do you go to such lengths?

You will find, in time, that nobody has an actual answer to this. It's purely nerd-lust for not doing things the simple way

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

#268
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#269
post #236

I'm aparently boring. My "backup routine" consists of storing photos in iCloud, which is then syncronized "real time" to a local Mac Mini. From the Mac Mini i then run scheduled backups to a local external harddrive, as well as a local Raspberry Pi running Minio, and nightly to OneDrive. The external harddrive backup uses Timemachine, the raspberry pi backup uses Kopia, and OneDrive is done with Arq. Furthermore, i m…

The default setting for iCloud Photos is non-e2ee, which allows US federal police access to every photo you have ever taken or saved without a warrant/probable cause. The photos also likely have EXIF GPS data and timestamps, so it's also a track log of location history.

> which allows US federal police access to every photo you have ever taken or saved without a warrant/probable cause

I'm aware of that, though it's no different from any other US based cloud provider. I am however a citizen of the EU, so there's the EU/US safe harbor (or Schrems II) agreement in place.

In the end it all comes down to trust vs convenience. I trust Apple more than Amazon or Google, and about as much as Microsoft. Apple keeps my data on EU soil, and is a lot more convenient on Apple platforms. Microsoft sends all OneDrive data to the US.

I do however use Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, which e2e encrypts photos and others. All backups, including local ones, are source encrypted.

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

#270

The recommended spec is 4 cores and 6GB. Running this 24/7 for a year in US where the carbon intensity is about 400 gCO₂eq/kWh would produce about 150kg of CO2 per user per year. I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach. If you are taking a couple of pictures a day, you only need to run this service for a couple of minutes per day, the rest is wasted. With Google Photos, as a SaaS…

> I appreciate the intent of this project, but it is not a sustainable approach. Self-hosting anything isn't sustainable. Even your modem or router isn't sustainable. But having additional backups and privacy is worth something for me. However since I'm in Europe, electricity prices here are through the roof and I try to minimize power where possible. I self host Immich on my Intel Celeron J1800 NAS that uses 19.1Wh…

What you are saying makes sense. If you are running other valuable apps, then it isn't a waste.

I am curious though, how did you come to 1.75kg per user? I calculated 20.9kg / user / year.

250/1000/1000 kgCO₂eq/Wh x 19.1 Wh x 8760 hours in a year / 2 users = 20.9 kg / user / year

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