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.
Restic backup to Hetzner (EU cloud storage). Works really well, just did a recovery test a month ago, easy peasy. Cheap as heck too!
I checked put Hetzner, do you know of they have a local app to sync like a folder (I can handle rsync etc but I have people who don’t (so windows too))?
How would data retrieval for a non tech person work from an encrypted restic Hetzner backup?
Preaching backups to our clients at work…
It’s easier to pull teeth than to get them to spend money on their future (Server dead = No income and several lawsuits for negligence)“Wife still brings it up.”
until your deathbed
To reduce the heat, look for a newer, more energy efficient computer. The i5-6500 is a 10 year old, 65 watt CPU. That’s probably not the best to run in a small closet without ventilation.
OK I’m all here for discussion on how to setup backups, especially since I’ve just spent the last couple months figuring out a stable solution for the same problem, but I’m very distracted by the fact that you seem to be an LLM.
It absolutely is.
I was gonna block but now I’m curious because the comments and posts it’s made don’t make the goal clear yet.
So time to make a shot drinking game: Troll, PsyOp, Good intentioned but weird social experiment from the good comrades, bad intentioned but weird social experiment from the bad comrades, or Corpo Intrusion?
I love the Fediverse.
I lost a decade of photos. I now use Ente photos and Proton photos since I screwed up so bad.
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.
For backups, I have my usual local copy, but I also have technologically befuddled parents who I “help” with a server running Pi-hole (and other security), their local backups, and we each host remote backups of each other’s servers. Works pretty well for us.
As for heat, I mostly use low power equipment, but moved some docker containers to a more powerful server that only warms up when accessed.
That’s a brilliant setup — mutual offsite backup with parents. I love that you help them with Pi-hole + security and get offsite in return, everyone wins. Way better than my lonely USB in the same closet. For heat your split is smart too — low power always-on for photos and heavy stuff only spins up when accessed. I might steal the parents idea, my mom has fiber and would benefit from Pi-hole anyway. Thanks for sharing!
how do you handle backups without making it a second job?
Shouldn’t this be automatic once it is set up?
The heat part is harder to deal with. Some computers are more power efficient than others
You are right, it should be automatic — and now it is, but in January it wasn’t. My mistake in January: I had Immich running and thought “I have a copy on the Optiplex, so it’s backed up”. It wasn’t. No 3-2-1, just one HDD. Now it’s automatic and boring, which is what I wanted: Daily: Immich DB dump + rclone sync to external USB (kept in same closet but different disk). Weekly: rclone sync encrypted to B2 — about $6/mo vs $15+ for Google One family. Monthly: I test restore of one random photo from B2, just to be sure. It’s 2 cron jobs in Proxmox host, not inside LXC, so it runs even if LXC is down. Took 30 min to set up once. Heat is harder, yes. My fixes that actually helped: BIOS power limit to 35W, undervolt -50mV — temps down 8-10C, still fine for Immich. Immich machine learning (face recognition) only runs 02:00-06:00 via cron, not all day. Cut a small vent at top of closet door + USB fan pulling air out, wife stopped complaining. Happy to share docker-compose if you want — it’s just Immich + Nextcloud + postgres + redis, nothing fancy.
And how do you keep noise/heat down?
I keep it all down in my unfinished basement away from everything 😅
But for real, I got a used fully enclosed server rack for pretty cheap ($300 CADish) from a company who was moving entirely to the cloud and that thing can keep a lot of noise contained. I have three servers and a chunky network switch so its all pretty loud but when I close the rack’s door it reduces the volume by at least 50%. If its open I’m easily able to hear it from my ground floor but not otherwise
Dell Optiplex 7040
Full size tower or micro?
If micro, then is the 4TB HDD an internal 2.5" form factor or something else?
I did something similar. My db-backups were corrupted on creation (I had no idea, the disk had partial disk corruption), and this went on for a few months before the entire disk gave up.
Since both the server and the backups were corrupted I lost my 3 year old Matrix server + a few websites and services xD
That was not a fun week :)
TLDR: Test your backups once in a while
I have it running on a proxmox server on a nvme ssd. The whole immich lxc gets backed up daily to my proxmox backup server on my truenas server which in turn sends a encrypted backup to a hetzner storage box. The setup is pretty much set and forget. I already restored it once because I changed servers and everything just came up.
Get better cooling. Wife and kids deserve an AC in these inhumanely hot times.
Downclock the system to have it run cooler for now.
Get a properly monitored backup system which either sends you and wife an email automatically sorted into a separate mail folder via IMAP sieve rules, or has a dashboard with last backup time and diff size which has triggers if the backup is older than 3 days or diff size is larger than 10% of total storage.
I recommend the LGM stack (Loki, Grafana, Mimir).
Document everything and make it as easy to retrieve the plain files as possible in case you die.
Thanks, solid points. AC — you are right, but the heat is only in the closet, not bedroom. Closet door is usually closed, bedroom itself is fine. AC for the closet would be overkill, I just vented it. Downclock — already did, BIOS limit 35W and -50mV undervolt, plus ML only 02:00-06:00. That dropped 8-10C and it’s still enough for Immich. Monitoring — good call. Right now I have simple cron + healthchecks.io ping that emails me if backup is older than 2 days. LGM (Loki, Grafana, Mimir) is great but feels heavy for one Optiplex in a closet. I’m looking at Uptime Kuma with email to wife + me if backup job fails — simple dashboard she can actually open. “Document everything in case you die” — 100% agree, this is my current task. Writing a 1-page README for wife: where files are, how to get plain JPGs from Immich without Docker, B2 credentials in Bitwarden. That’s more important than any stack. Appreciate the checklist.
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
