offsite backup of immich photos.
Here's my scenario:
New to Docker, will be isUbuntu server. + Portainer + NPM +CF tunnels
Backup couple of phones locally to immich then have some way to do incremental offsite backup (one drive via rclone ?).
I'm not tied to what kind of backup, it can just be a flat file restored to a new immich instance. Or actual photos which can be restored to another solution when my ssd dies.
Any better options?
Also anyone using an external drive for such backup? How have you set that up?
37 Replies
I’d also probably throw in a immich database backup in there as well so you don’t have to rebuild everything
That's a good suggestion.
Since i haven't installed it yet (gathering all the info) is this a "one click"option built in to immich?
Thanks again
Any suggestions on the off site & external USB backup?
I mean one drive is probably your first off site backup
You could use backblaze b2 or amazon s3 as your second
Idk what you mean by external USB drive backup - other than a fast, nearby restore not sure what other help it would be
Ok I see your point about the USB backup & conceed.
Any tips on how go on about backing up to one drive?
I’ve used rclone before but I would def back up to something other than a consumer cloud service (google drive, onedrive, etc..)
Great options if you have free or included storage with something and they all have free data downloads afaik but you don’t control it so they could lower your capacity or something
Like what google just did with google suite
I see your point, have a MS dev account with couple of TB of storage
Same i think i have like 5TB but the UI sucks it’s never used
Yeah UI is bad bad, i have used rclone with it and it works good enough
Any suggestions on how to setup the rclone + inmich ? I have setup rclone before not sure about rclone + immich.
i have a job running a backup via restic (encrypted backup using sftp) every night vs a RP1 in my parents house.
RP1 is connected to a 500gb HDD at the moment. So far has been working for a couple of months. Proof of concept phase for first 2 years.. after that i will upgrade. I plan to "upgrade" to RP Zero 2 W once that is available again and a larger drive.
and RP1 is connected to my local server via zerotier
I am sure there are a million other ways to do backup so this is another example.
Can restic do unencrypted backups (heard that makes it slow) ?
Also can it backup only the changes?
Are you backing up the photos or some immich specific files?
I'm backing up the original files that immich has. And yes it can do incremental backups that is nice. If you want to turn off encryption then I guess you could use rsync as it can also only back up the difference.
All the encryption is done on the server side. In my instance rp1 is totally adequate as it only receives data and does not need CPU power at all.
But my immich lives on a x86 PC with i7 and boatloads of RAM so I got that uumf on the server side.
I don't have a lot of RAM right now, 8gb with a6th gen i5 on a decent ssd
It's an older i7 so your i5 is probably still fine. I recommend trying it for your setup.
And you can do incremental backup with rsync which eliminates that encryption barrier.
Off topic: why didn't you go with photoprsm ?
Immich is much more modern than photoprism and I have been following Immich since Alex started posting updates on Reddit. I like the design of Immich more and Photoprism does not appear to have that nice modern UI plus it does I tested it locally and it wasn't as fast. I like Immichs micro service structure.
Honestly I checked them last 1.5 years ago so I'm sure they have improved it now a good bit.
One thing that turns me off also is their paywalled component. Perhaps that was the main straw for me back then if it already existed.
The only thing i may need is user management from their pay wall. But i don't know yet what they mean my user management.
But i will try to stick with immich as that's what teddit selfhisted has come up with from time to time
If you’re savvy you could also create a docker container to do all this that way it all stays contained and within the microservices structure
That’s what I’m planning to do
That is a good idea. I have not gotten there yet as my setup works but I like it being contained in docker.
When you it complete it, can you share some details here please
Just updating this thread:
I was able to backup using kopia + rclone.
I haven't been able to do kopia in docker yet while using rclone mount.
Will keep checking as I would dearly want it to be a docker container.
@A2251 when you say a "job" running restic, do you mean this as a Cron job on your RP1? Can I ask how you're doing this?
Cron runs a restic command that accepts sftp source to rp1. The actual command is run on the x86 machine. Both machines are in the same virtual network thanks to tailcale.
Hmmm I see, so the x86 server runs the command to backup to your RP1 which is off-site at your parents house, and it's able to do that because of tailscale. Cool! That gives an interesting idea
Thank you
No problem. Best of luck!
Another option which works a bit 'cleaner' than kopia + rclone is Duplicati.
It has an extensive built in repository (where you want to save your backups) which eliminates the use of rclone.
Nice gui web server and good snapshot retention logics.
Just did a 30GB snapshot to onedrive in around 30 mins
I personally would recommend duplicacy over duplicati
It's not free (at least the GUI version isn't free)
But it's inexpensive and I've found it far more reliable than duplicati
Can you talk about what you found unreliable in duplicati ?
I made an ansible script to setup immich using docker, and setup cron jobs to upload backups to Backblaze B2 using rclone. It takes time as I have around 100k of files (close to 200gb) but it does its job. I also plan to do a local backup to external disk. Hope it is useful
I've just had issues with backups completing with duplicati in the past
if it's working for you you're probably fine though
also some of fs level dedup stuff with duplicacy is cool
Someone had made a great gitlab repo consolidating backup solutions and comparing which ones are best. This is how I landed on restic. Actually I tried kopia first that worked great but was lacking in documentation. That is how I ended up using restic. I'm sure in the grand scheme of things duplicati or other backup solutions are fine.
Can you share your script? I am interested in adding this to my Ansible playbook.
sure: https://github.com/Freika/homelab/blob/master/immich.yml, feel free to fork and use as you wish
Cron jobs generally scare me, hence why I like a constant systemd based service running to do my backups
can you please provide an example?
Of why cron jobs scare me?
of systemd based service, but sure, example of cron would be good to have as well 😄
The duplicacy web app is run through a systemd service
It's always very obvious when there is an issue
If your cron job is messed up there aren't even cron logs to look into