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I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter
by drdexebtjl 1mo ago
I use Immich, but saved me money it has not.
Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable.
And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good.
Still worth it, imo.
- tehlike 1mo agoGoogle takeout is pretty good with exporting photos.
- adolph 1mo agoLast I checked Takeout is a single zip file. Once you have a photo repository of a certain size, that approach becomes difficult, no?
- madduci 1mo agoThey do also split up to 2GB archives. So they are very manageable
- tehlike 1mo agoYou can change the split size. But yes.
- tehlike 1mo agoI exported something like 450GB photos in chunks of 50GB iirc. Tip: export the takeout to Google drive then download it from there. Otherwise link downloads have # of times you can retry before they are deleted.
- TheJCDenton 1mo agoBe aware that for a few 100's Go the google takeout files will contains corrupted data. You have to make at least 2 takeout to be sure to have all your files in good shape. The problem is notto download but to verify and be sure nothing else is missing.
- Noaidi 1mo agoI was in a paranoid psychotic state a few months back and I delete my whole photo library. About 40GB or my life for the last 15 years. Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.
- esafak 1mo agoOf all my possessions, I would discard my photos last.
- tehlike 1mo agoSame here. My family photos are a treasure to me.
- crossroadsguy 1mo agoExactly. Though when something similar happened to me, and I was able to salvage most of it, the next thing I did was: discard/reject/delete: ≈400GB → 25GB → 3GB (< a decade ago; I remember) (I was shocked to see how little of that really mattered). and since then I have been backing up starting from that 3GB set which, more than a decade later, is obviously more now, but the learning was don't let amount of data control/tame you, it should be the other way round. So I can just use multiple PAYG backup destinations without worrying about insane costs. The amount of photos and videos I took also went astronomically down after that. I realised what I was missing - I had lost the data and for the most part I didn't have many of those scenes/moments to begin with. Because I was busy taking those digital photos and videos.
- dominotw 1mo agois nas + backup to amazon glacier a good solution?
- tripleee 1mo agoYes. Should have 1 onsite + 1 offsite backup ideally.
- fuzzzerd 1mo agoI always follow 321 for important things. Three copies, two media types, one offsite.
- pkulak 1mo agoYes, but it's hard. I've not found something that works well with glacier, because most backup solutions want to write state, modify files immediately, etc, and glacier can't do that. It would need to be an append-only backup; strictly. I do a bit of a hybrid. Borg to expensive, always available storage, but really large stuff that rarely changes and is less important, I exclude and manually throw in glacier once a year or so. Think, all your blue-ray rips, etc.
- semi-extrinsic 1mo agoFor cold / glacial backups, M-disc will run you $200 for 10x 100GB discs, plus around $300 for a pair of USB Blu-ray burners. With that, your data up to 500 GB can be written in duplicates and stored at two physical locations (one drive at each location), with very strong guarantees that it will be readable far into the future. If you write 2 additional disks per year, this is a $500 initial investment plus $20 per year. Compared to Google's "AI Plus" plan you break even in year 5, assuming Google keeps pricing flat. Of course you don't get any cloud access or similar.
- drdexebtjl 1mo agoI wouldn’t back up directly to Glacier, because you want to be able to verify your backups, and reading from Glacier is expensive.
- altmanaltman 1mo agoPeople setting up homelab often talk about money saved but never account for the time they have to spend as well not just in setting it up and maintainence. If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much. I still run a homelab because I like it and yes its good to be able to run several services for "free" but the commitment is never free. This is also true for businesses. I used to think why do companies don't use open source and save so much on infrastructure costs etc but in reality those costs don't really matter to them and self-hosting costs in terms of time and resources do add up + no gurantee as provided by enterprise level services etc.
- Banditoz 1mo agoEh, once it's set up the maintenance cost is minimal. Cron'd backups and such and you won't have to worry.
- altmanaltman 1mo agoYes I would consider my system optimal in terms of backup process etc. But I still tinker with it, try out new things, maintain the machines itself, it is a hobby. And it does consume time for me at least. But either way, I am sure a google pro subscription is still cheaper for me than the time value of setting up and maintainence, in the sense we are talking about saving money in real terms
- tripleee 1mo agoThis is exactly the reason why companies aren't just going to vibe-code their own software. It's more expensive to maintain than it is just to pay for it outright
- semi-extrinsic 1mo agoDepends heavily on the software cost and how far from core competency it is. If the company already has a developer team and the software is an expensive domain-specific CRUD app for internal use without significant compliance or risk factors - sure, go DIY. If the company does not employ any devs, or if the core logic of the software is a business secret of the vendor, or it is customer facing, or there are significant compliance / risk factors - you are better off paying for it. Unless the cost is astronomical, or the company is motivated also by anger at rent-seeking MBA f*ckers at the vendor.
- odo1242 1mo agoIn my case: I did the math and it would take me ~4-5 years to recoup the initial investment (of about $450) in my homelab (comparing my server + 3 copies of 2TB with the cost of a 2TB google drive subscription). (Also excludes the time spent building the server, and I found very good deals; if you get a regular NAS this becomes about ~10 years) There is, however, a fixed component cost to building such a setup that gets amortized the more disks you buy- I believe it becomes worth it to use a NAS cost-wise over about ~5-6TB of data (and definitively worth it when you get into the tens of terabytes). Or if you need low-latency storage / any type of performance - neither the cloud nor my homelab has removed my need for my portable NVMe drive
- odo1242 1mo ago(The other benefit of having a homelab is, of course, you can run services that aren’t limited to cloud offerings and run processing on the data locally)
- nickthegreek 1mo agoBut its all under 1 roof and can be taken from you in a fire or be stolen?
- odo1242 1mo agoI mean it could also get dropped yea, sure. This is just a neutral discussion of the costs, I'm not making an argument for anything. (As for data, the third hard disk isn't actually bought yet and is meant to represent an offsite backup. I might use something like AWS Glacier or Hetzner Storage Box for this anyways cuz this is mostly for experimentation. I just like the idea of having a homelab.)
- nickthegreek 1mo agoYa, my setup still includes the google drive expense as that’s my offsite.
- 1mo ago
- pkulak 1mo agoAbsolutely. I pay Borgbase $10 a month (about). I could probably get a huge storage limit in Google for that money. But it's worth it to me to be answerable to no one. I can't, say, sign in to my Google account with an unlocked phone and get banned. Boom, photos gone, no matter how many backups Google made on my behalf. And if I'm gonna do a "takeout" every month and back that up; might as well host myself. Immich is also absolutely amazing software.
- bilalq 1mo agoYeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday. I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.
- QuiEgo 1mo agoYou can use https://www.photosync-app.com/home https://www.photosync-app.com/home if all you want is a local backup. It has a killer feature Immich is still missing: encryption at rest of the photos.
- drdexebtjl 1mo agoJust use LUKS, eCryptfs, or ZFS encryption. It’s not the application’s job to do encryption at rest, it’s the filesystem’s.
- QuiEgo 1mo agoI personally find it nicer to unlock my phone to decrypt (Face ID) then dealing with having to auth with my headless server. Is there a way to manage this without putting the keys for LUKS or similar somewhere risky? Main threat is someone stealing the NAS during a break in.
- drdexebtjl 1mo agoYou can store the key in the TPM. If someone steals the NAS, they can only decrypt it if they continue running the exact same software, which you harden (e.g. disable password login from the TTY). Or you can SSH in and type the key once per reboot.
- sylens 1mo agoJust run both Google Photos and Immich on your phone. Open Immich once a week to sync all your recently taken photos.
- megagpt5 1mo agoWhat's the math for the cost of getting banned from Google for some stupid AI reason?
- kqr 1mo agoI jumped on the lifetime offer I received from rsync.net at some point (one of the few providers I would trust with such an offer!), so I no longer pay for backup as long as I stay below some ridiculously high number...
- orev 1mo ago“You _will_ lose them”, as in, somehow Immich will do something to lose them (like making a mistake in a dedupe process which deletes the wrong things), or are you just saying you also need to keep backups?
- fanatic2pope 1mo agoOnce a year I go through my photos and select my favourites and have them printed to paper. Using Google's print service (as an example) you can spend about $80 to have 150 photos printed into a book. If you do this once a year you will soon have a lovely shelf of paper photos you can easily store, easily look at and show to other people and hand down to your kids and their kids, etc. Long term I suspect my collection of books is far more likely to survive than my google account.
- hakcermani 1mo agoHad gazillion copies of folders and iphoto libraries in various backups, but since i moved to linux as daily driver was on the hunt for a good photo archiver. Just recently started using Immich. Tried Photoprism too which would have also fit my need well, but somehow Immich won the coin toss ! (After many years was able to pull that one pic my wife was after from my archive !). My all those duplicates have been now been pulled and deduped and condensed into an immich library. I used to want people to send me full res pics by email to preserve location and find my people easily, but Immich does such a good job with face identification that i stopped worring about what people send me over whatsapp (at least I can find all photos of any one person going back to the first pic i have with them !, my own pics are always geotagged). Regardless of cloud versions for sharing i need my own local backup. i run immich in docker on Ubuntu, 2 mirrored ZFS drives for redundancy and backed up to rsync.net via restic. (rsync.net i need anyways to back up other data). Have to try the mobile app still, want to end up with a low res version of my entire library (about 1 TB) on my mobile, face tagged for easy sharing ! Thats next on the list to complete my personal photo management endeavour !
- onel 1mo agoI don't think cost is the main reason you should move. Things like photos, gmail are definitely subsided by google so it's not a fair comparison. It's getting pretty easy to add backup for self hosting so that is becoming the smallest problem. Agree with you, still worth it