this resonates with me.
what solution are you using?
By the way, how do you share files between Nextcloud and Photoprism? It's my biggest problem with NC, it's hard to share files with other apps.
One of my machine is always on and is backuped to the cloud everyday. Effectively making a backup of all my devices at once.
Better yet, since syncthing can also save staggered copies of modified files, a rm -rf * will be synced but the backup machine will still have copy from about 10s ago. This saved me a few times.
Once I realized that I had deleted a file a few months later. And I found it into the syncthing backup, itself within the cloud backup.
Very freeing.
I want an easier way to edit the comments on photos (as embedded metadata) that I haven't found yet. Any image browser where I can hit a convenient hotkey, type "Summer 2023 at the river with cousins X and Y" and move on would be great. If anyone has a suggestion I'm listening keenly! If this is built in to something on MacOS or a linux default desktop (like KDE or something I'm less familiar with), or is a small paid non-subscription app, I would buy it.
When I take a picture with my phone, it automatically gets backed up to iCloud, Google Photos, OneDrive, and Amazon Photos (free with prime).
When I had a personal computer, photos would sync to my computer and get backed up to BackBlaze also.
And on the Mac Apple engineers have made sure the photos are not synced in a simple easy folder hierarchy that can be backed up elsewhere.
Google Photos just works.
If you delete a photo on your phone, does it automatically get deleted from all those services in near-realtime?
Do you have an archive solution in place (distinct from your lack of a backup solution)?
I have 2TB on iCloud, 2TB on Google Drive, unlimited back up of photos on Amazon Drive and 1TB on OneDrive. When my OneDrive account gives out of space, I’ll just use one of the other 6 accounts that come with an Office 365 subscription.
I guess for an archive solution, I would use my personal AWS account that’s only used to store my videos that fell off the back of a truck once I took my Plex server off line.
I have 2TB of videos stored in AWS S3 Deep Glacier archive. I’m charged like $2 a month for it.
Here's a hypothetical - imagine you deleted a photo from your phone, and then modified (in place) a different photo.
Is your expectation that the first would be deleted from the various places you have it backed-up? (If not, then what's your process for fully destroying a photo?)
Would the second be propagated to each of your SaaS storage providers overwriting the existing, or renamed and situated adjacent to the original? And if you modified it in-place a second time?
If your phone were then to stop working and needed replacing, would the restoration process restore your phone to before, or after, the above deletions / changes were made? ie. would the deleted photo exist on your phone, would the second photo be pre, mid, or post modifications?
(I draw the distinction between backups and archives whereby backups get you to where you were most recently (pre incident), and archives let you restore to something like 'Tuesday afternoon, two weeks ago'. I'm talking here purely about backups vs sync though.)
OneDrive - I have an Office365 subscription
Amazon Photos - free with Amazon Prime
Google Drive - inertia and it still has the best search. I had it when it was free, unlimited storage
So you have no backup.
Everything else is in Immich
Pictures and videos I take get backed up to Google Photos
Once a year I do a Google Takeout and import into Immich
This way I get the best of both worlds
With AWSPics, sync your photos (just a simple directory tree on your local device) to S3 (I just do it manually from time to time from my desktop, but no doubt it can be done automatically at regular intervals, and/or it can be done directly from a phone), then Lambda functions generate thumbnails and browsable galleries (as static HTML), then you can view it all via CloudFront (password-protected using Origin Access Identity).
AWSPics isn't really being actively maintained these days. But it still works fine for me. The setup is cheap, you basically just pay for the S3 storage (currently costing me a bit under $1/month - and I guess you could use a cheaper S3-compatible alternative like Backblaze and reduce your costs further). No server to set up or maintain. Durable backup built-in. Fast reliable CDN built-in.
Sadly I've not found a self-hosted like-for-like replacement. My photos now move from my phone to a folder that's backed up to s3 via Restic [2].
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/02/04/googl...
[2]: https://restic.net/
Works pretty well, although I wasn't seeking it out or researching other options
I'm unclear if Syncthing inherently encrypts transfers, but layering it within Tailscale would add that. No?
> All device to device traffic is protected by TLS. To prevent uninvited devices from joining a cluster, the certificate fingerprint of each device is compared to a preset list of acceptable devices at connection establishment.
So yeah, transport is encrypted. I do believe they need to put that fact front and center, though. It took me a few minutes to find out. (Thanks for making me find out, though! I use Syncthing heavily and it never occurred to me to even question this.)
I can rest easy :)
Didn't use the "rolling trashbin" feature yet but need to look into that
Do remember that as you delete photos on your phone to save space, it will delete them on the PC. You would need the PC side to move the photos to a different directory (a cronjob would do).
On Mac (I am aware you have said Windows) So if I were you I’d just dump app the photos locally in normal folder hierarchies (yes drag and drop; not going hunting in Library folder) and then backup wherever you want them. Here’s something https://support.apple.com/en-in/HT205323. Googled it. Absolutely no idea whether it works or how.
Then put something like Dropbox on the job on iOS and it’ll keep uploading your pics and videos which will show up inside one folder on your Windows as well.
My point is — you can’t rely on iCloud after you setup your backup up sync strategy. So get all your data at one point then start your parallel backup/sync setup (and maybe leave iCloud on as well if price is not a concern).
- Go to https://privacy.apple.com - Choose "Request a copy of your data" - Select iCloud Photos
After a few days you'll receive a download link to the full iCloud Photos library. Perhaps only available in EU (it's a GDPR-mandated feature).
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fe-file-explorer-pro/id4994701...
I consider myself to be technological advanced, but other than niche photographer, i wonder if 99.99 % of population would ever go through the effort of setting such a service ?
The added benefit of integrating federated social media is that if you want to share a file with your friends, there's zero load time because the file is already backed up on their Box, or it's striped across multiple Boxes and downloads quickly.
It would have to be dirt cheap though, like a Chromecast.
What is the problem being solved here? Apple already offers a solution – iCloud.
Why would they want to sell you a box for offline backups?
Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box. They want to sell us a subscription. My assertion is that Apple’s model of selling hardware would work for home servers.
The problem is something like: “I need to keep my family photos/files safe” or “I need to store customer orders and data” or “I need a way to protect my data when I drop my phone in the toilet.”
Even giant companies with eye-watering IT budgets see the appeal of having someone else manage their physical hardware and software infrastructure.. I haven’t worked at a company that owned its own servers in nearly a decade.
Apple doesn’t want to sell us a box and coincidentally nobody wants to buy a box.
It’s easy to reason about data locality. I can have a literal social network of just my actual friends and no tech company gets to spy on it.
Cloud backups are still good for disaster recovery if they are fully encrypted.
You know, with such a scary and complex network of online adversaries and government agencies, I wonder if I could pay someone else to manage that risk for me. My business is selling online greeting cards for pets and I don’t really specialize in network security and data protection.
By all means the software will be open-source (and mostly off-the-shelf if possible) so anyone can install it on whatever device they have, but the killer product will be the Box.
How do you figure?
Also you may be interested in checking out https://kubesail.com/homepage and https://privaterouter.com/
I use synology myself, don't have experience with qnap but I think it will be pretty similar. plug the box, activate the service, download the phone app and your photos are automatically synced and browsable from the device. You can add other services but the basic functionality is there.
Or the internet cube (https://internetcu.be/) ?
If this app can do background sync of the camera roll directly from iOS to an Android device in one step I may switch to it and stop using both Mobius Sync and Photosync.
While I'm sure this is probably true, the number of features Apple is depriving us from due to alleged "security reasons" is baffling.
It's a general excuse among firms that want to keep their monopoly and walled garden (OpenAI does the same).
Having a separate API for photo access is annoying while developing this use case, but it's appropriate for a couple different reasons: for one, if apps could access the raw files, that could reveal metadata like location. For another, filesystem access wouldn't properly handle cloud-synced photo libraries.
Perhaps photos on iOS are persisted into some sqlite-style database on the device rather than as individual files...
The Dropbox iOS app would be a good example here. It acts as a ReplicatedFileProvider so apps on the device can access your Dropbox files, but it also provides an optional config flow where users can ask for their photos to be backed up. Then, the Dropbox app fetches the photos through PhotoKit and writes the .JPEGs or .HEICs to a folder of your choosing into your Dropbox files.
If you don't use the photos app, you can keep them all in the files app and it syncs just fine. Annoying to use since the files app is nowhere near as nice for photo browsing/management.