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.
I run Truenas scale on home server and on the off-site backup at a friend’s house. ZFS Snapshots get synced to backup server nightly. The snapshot system is nice because it only needs to send what has changed since the last synced snapshot.
Now that I have it setup it is mostly no effort on my part. But the initial ramp up to understand Truenas and ZFS was a second job for a few weeks. HexOS may be good choice if you want the power of Truenas but the handholding of setup wizards and such. But HexOS is currently $200 and Truenas is free. Pay in time or dollars.