Any one is interested in local private backup solution alternative to iCloud | Hacker News Reader

Any one is interested in local private backup solution alternative to iCloud

reddit.com

2 pointssprhawk11 comments

Hi Everyone.

I don't like backup to any Cloud services. I was always doing my iOS backup via iTunes on macOS manually, then backup my macOS via Time Machine on an external USB disk. I can only do backup periodically once a month.

Now I have had my first kid, My family, four iPhones, are filled full of photos and videos quickly, even I can backup manually, my wife and parents cannot do periodically. As a maker enthusiasm, I am "forced" to write my own software to do iOS backup automatically.

The first version is now working on my x86 mini-pc, when your iOS devices "trusted"(the iOS requirements) the PC, it can connect your iOS devices via USB wire or WiFi, and fully backup your iOS data like iTunes did. No app required, automatically and running in background , saved in your own disks.

After each successfully, it can make a snapshot of the backup, let you recover iPhone at any backup point.

Additionally, It also exposes a Time Machine service via SMB( just a samba service), can be used as a Time Machine backup target for your Mac. In future, I want to make it work for Android Phones, Windows and Linux, just work like the same.

Further, I want to add a photo management service to collect photos from all these backup, and expose a Web-based UI for your own private photos library.

I'm working on a release running on Raspberry Pi 4B (2GB at least). And I want to charge a fee of $1 for one perpetual license for each device (with one month updates, any time you want to upgrade to new version, you can buy another $1 updates license).

I want to know anyone is interested in it? To backup your iOS devices in your local private storage, running on your Raspberry 4B device ?

For file backups (not device backups) I typically suggest to my beta users that they use Resilio Sync for this. SyncThing on non-iOS works well too. They both run on headless boxes, too. I wonder if whole-device backups are really necessary, though, if you've backed up all the important files already?

If you don't feel the need to build out the web-based photo UI, you could try out PhotoStructure. Self-hosted, your data stays on your machines, and I've designed it to scale up to xeons and down to my odroid and RPi.

I am using syncthing to sync my PC files. I'll add synching into the software bundle some day, it is cool.

My own core requirement is backing up iOS.

Whole-device backup is cool when you want to.

1. setup a new device as same as old ( backed up ) one.

2. prevent from you forgetting to put your important files in syncing folders.

3. even some commercial backup solution can boot up a system via a backup.

I guess your PhotoStructure for Desktop is built as an Electron bundled application?

Isn't it too heavy for RPi ?

You're right: PhotoStructure for Desktops is currently packaged with Electron, but I'm not happy with how heavyweight it is. I see it as a way to "kick the tires" and a way for my Grandma to run it without opening a terminal.

PhotoStructure for Servers has two flavors: a docker image that's based on Alpine (it's a ~300mb image and typically takes ~30mb RAM to start), and, if you're more comfortable running Node directly, you can git clone the repo that the docker image is built from and run directly.

Imports are slow on an RPi (it's about 1/4 the bogomips of my decade-old MBP), but the UI is quite snappy. This is because the import front-loads all the computationally expensive work, like metadata extraction, inference, image resizing, and video transcoding.

Also: Libraries are both cross-platform and cross-edition. Start importing on a Mac with Desktop, rsync the library to your NAS, and continue with docker.

Cool

Great idea! Especially for Linux users if one can thus avoid the need of having either Mac or Windows install to do backups.

Maybe you could have higher margin if you’d sell it together with the 4b hardware bundled with some media server installed and configured to transcode into iPhone format.

Thanks!

What I am doing is building image with Yocto, but also I have an idea to release software as a normal distribution, for example Ubuntu 20.20, to let user install anything they need.

What do you think this idea?

If your software cold be installed on Ubuntu with apt it would be helpful as well. The main advantage is the ability to make backups to Linux. Raspberry or not - that’s secondary in this context imho.

For hardware bundled, I am following methods introduced by "Lean Startup", I need to start my project as small as possible. To sell hardware it too big business for my one-person project.

1. Why not NAS?

NAS can only do part of it. For existing solutions for iOS I can see, that needs an APP, and only can backup photos and contacts which is allowed by Apple to third party apps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com