this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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[–] Kirk@startrek.website 15 points 10 months ago (10 children)

Anyone know of a good managed hosting (or vps) for Immich that doesn't break the bank? I have about 5TB of photos/videos and I don't feel safe without a remote backup. I played with self hosting and I really (really) like Immich but I keep Google photos/Drive just to ensure I won't lose anything.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 25 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Continue to self host, create a yearly backup on external harddrive which you keep offline at a trusted family members house.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 7 points 10 months ago

I do something similar


I have a raspberry pi and a HD, with daily rsync and snapshots (monthly retained indefinitely, weekly retained for a month, daily retained for a week). It's at family's house, connected to my home via WireGuard via a VPS. Tailscale (or anything really) would also work here.

It's a great setup! Just have some watchdog reboot if it can't talk to home (a simple cronjob with ping -c1 home.lan || reboot or similar).

Even our "slow" 35Mbps upload speed is way more than enough for incremental rsyncs of my Immich library. The initial sync was done in person, though.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Good enough. Simple, cheap. Brilliant.

[–] BaroqueInMind@piefed.social 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

Anyone reading this have any suggestions as to where we all can source cheap high-volume drives, such as refurbs pulled from upgraded old racks?

[–] kambusha@sh.itjust.works 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'm looking to source a cheap trusted family member if anyone has one going?

[–] derry@midwest.social 2 points 10 months ago
[–] victorz@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Lots of families seem to be relocating these days for some reason... Maybe try reaching out there. 👍

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] xylol@leminal.space 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I have several of these and they been solid, before I would get refurb or open box from amazon and send them back if the smart failed, guessing a lot of people just stick their old drives in the box and return it so it wasn't great

[–] arcayne@lemmy.today 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah serverpartdeals is legit. Between work and home, I think I've tested & deployed 150+ drives from them over the last 3yrs. No duds, no failures, no complaints. Great customer service on the corp side for big orders, too. 10/10 would recommend.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I got one from goHardDrive on eBay (link). It was cheap enough, looks flawless, and knock on wood has been working fine.

Googling around, the brand gets...mixed reviews. My use case is such that of this drive fails it's not a big deal.

[–] papertowels@mander.xyz 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I remember before, you could use crashplan to easily backup to a computer at a friend's house and vice versa. Anyone know any similar tools? The biggest requirement would be that it's easy enough to use that someone who doesn't know what "self hosting" is can do it.

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Syncthing.

https://syncthing.net/

But keeping the service live at all times isn’t really a backup.

[–] papertowels@mander.xyz 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

As someone who tried syncthing with their non-self hosting friends, let me tell you, that edit folder option is terrifying for the general public lol

I guess you can do "local"backups then syncthing them over, but thats a bit contrived

[–] AtariDump@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

BitTorrent sync.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Local storage on a VPS is expensive, and I've never been happy with a lower powered server serving media. Personally I self-host and send a backup to Backblaze B2 for offsite (using Rclone).

I use Borgmatic for incremental, deduplicated backups but make sure you save your encryption key somewhere you can access it if your house burns down.

[–] chisel@piefed.social 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you're fine with self hosting, you can just self host it and backup your local drives to a remote location. That's what I do.

For backup software, I use Duplicacy. But Veeam, Borg, etc.. would work just fine. For images, since they're just static files and you don't really need a version history, you could get away with a scheduled rsync job. Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.

For remote storage, I'd first consider a Hetzner storage box since they are flat-rate pricing and pretty dang cheap at $13/mo for 5TB. You might also consider StorJ, B2, S3, etc... I'd just stay away from any lesser known ultra-cheap storage providers.

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 1 points 10 months ago

Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.

I rsync as well, but use snapshotting on the remote drives. So, a bad rsync would suck but shouldn't really result in data loss. Ransomware on my local+remote server would of course be very bad...

[–] utjebe@reddthat.com 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

At such volume it is difficult to come up a service that does not break a bank. Storage is expensive.

Perhaps immich + monthly backups to S3 glacier. That is if you don't have a second and third site available

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah it sucks because Microsoft charges $10/mo for 6tb.

[–] randombullet@programming.dev 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Reverse proxy if your home internet is decent.

50mbps upload is fine for me.

I had it running on a mini PC with 8tb of storage, but I couldn't get the latency down to where I want it, so I moved it to a VPS.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Problem with that is there is no backup in case of flood/fire/tornado etc.

[–] lightsblinken@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

That's what I do. 1.6TB currently on rsync.net, only my personal artifacts excluding all media that can be reacquired and it's a reasonable $10/mo. Synced daily at 4am.

If I wanted my backups to include my media collection or anything exceeding several TB, I would build a second NAS and drop it at my parents'.

[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 10 months ago

I just have my data folder and database being copied to backblaze. It's relatively cheap. Most hosting providers don't necessarily do backup unless you configure that on your own anyway.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

There are products that will let you back up onto your buddy's free space and vice-versa, but the simplest pricy thing you can do is to drop a NAS at a friend's place and set up a VPN.

But maybe the monthly fee is okay for now. Maybe consider proton for files instead?

[–] jaschen306@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago

I have 10tb and just ended up getting a 8 bay Synology. Practically turnkey and the photo app is pretty nice. A work of warning. Once your photos get to around 7tb, the photo system sometimes crashes. I spoke to a dev at Synology and there is a fix coming.

[–] UnfairUtan@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 10 months ago

Wow, 7tb for $21/month. That's much better than I've been seeing.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 1 points 10 months ago

Layer 7 storage servers might be what you are looking for.