Last winter I finally moved family photos off Google Photos. Not for ideology, just tired of Google One getting more expensive every year.
Hardware: old Dell Optiplex 7040 (i5-6500, 16GB, 1TB SSD + 4TB HDD) in the bedroom closet, running Proxmox. LXC with Immich for photos, Nextcloud for docs, and Matrix for family chat.
It was messy. I set up Immich, told family it’s done, but forgot to set up proper backups. In January the HDD had errors and I almost lost a month of kid photos. No 3-2-1, only local copy. Wife still brings it up.
Now: Immich with daily backup to external USB, weekly rclone to B2, and Nextcloud with versioning. Matrix is still half-used because sister is on Messenger.
Cost is now about $6/mo for B2 vs $15+ for Google One family, but time cost is higher.
For those who run Immich on similar old Optiplex / small box in closet — how do you handle backups without making it a second job? And how do you keep noise/heat down? My closet is warm and wife is not happy about second heater.
Happy to share docker-compose if anyone needs.
Yeah, weekly backup to B2 or similar should be fine. Postponed setting it up myself - I paid for a year of Ente and currently sync everything both to premium Ente and my local Immich, so backup is fine for now.
For the heat: I am running it on a Pi4 with 8GB RAM and it runs pretty decently even without cooling. For the large import, I set up only the ML-container on a more potent desktop (still fiddling with GPU HW-acceleration) and added it as remote ML to Immich, so I can offload heavy ML load when e.g. importing many files.
The normal upload stream is fine with the local ML, though