Man, paying Google/Apple $5/mo is surely a much better solution for her. And are you really doing 3-2-1 on that?
Save the dicking around for your own stuff.
And at $180/yr for the 2TB of storage we'd need to pay for, vs. maybe $200 in hardware, it pays itself off pretty quickly... if you exclude the time spent setting it up and administering it. But I don't mind, it's a bit like digital gardening for me.
We back it up daily using restic to an old 2TB NAS that's at my parents place + the occasional manual backup
Backup to cloud glacier storage is ~$1.20 per TiB-month
Cost is absolutely a factor. self-hosting can't even be touched. And, the that's just the start of the value proposition.
If it was just for backuping my photos I would just buy an external hard drive or 2 tough
Just some days back someone on reddit posted how their 14yo son (via a family/linked Google account) used Gemini Live to, err, enjoy himself with the camera on.
All his accounts are now permanently locked for CSAM.
So, yes, not being beholden to a megacorp absolutely has its uses.
(You can go to the legal advice UK subreddit if you want to see the post.)
It was removed quickly because it was obviously untrue. The details of the story weren’t even consistent across the posters comments.
Google even came out and said that’s not how account suspensions work: They don’t sequentially ban other accounts that have been associated with a device that was associated with an account, as many pointed out.
I’m surprised how many people fell for that obvious piece of Reddit creative fiction. I think we’ll be hearing about it as an urban legend for years.
Reddit has become a place for posting fiction on advice subs. It started on the relationship advice subs but has spread to all of the advice subs now, like the legal advice post you saw. You have to read Reddit with a lot of skepticism.
Unfortunately I have seen other horror stories (dad takes a picture to send to the doctor, it uploads to iCloud/Google photos, account gets banned) to be wary of trusting any such large corp.
Partly tangential, but just yesterday there was a post of someone with a checzk password who got locked out of their iPhone. Now of course an iCloud backup might have actually helped them here, but the reliance on "It's Apple, it'll work" is a very common thing (understandably!), but unfortunately not true.
According to which criteria?
There are values beyond "basic convenience" that are important as well. Being independent from a subscription service is one of them. Having full control over your own media being another.
Moreover, subscriptions in general have disadvantages. For example:
1. If a subscription service decides to increase their prices tenfold, there is nothing a customer can do to stop them.
2. If they decide to stop operating completely, a customer also has no say into the matter.
3. If the subscription service decides to just unilaterally stop offering the service to a particular user, they can do so at their own discretion, at any time.
This all means that whatever value is being "obtained" by using a subscription service, it is only going to last for as long as the provider wants it to last.
Of all the dicking around one can do in a homelab, and I'm guilty of plenty of it, setting up some network storage for photo backup is easily one of the highest value things you can do.
My spouse is more tired to Google, but for myself if I got cut off i'd just have to change some recovery email addresses.
Brothers, maybe they don't want you to see all their private chats with AI?
For me, I run Immich off a Beelink S12 Pro mini PC, with the photos themselves stored on my Synology NAS. Every night, I backup the VM with docker that runs Immich to the NAS, then the entire NAS gets backed up to Synology’s Cloud. My upfront costs were the NAS, the drives, and the mini PC, and my ongoing costs are electricity and the cloud storage fee for Synology’s cloud (about $70/year for a terabyte). That’s not cheaper than Google, but it does prevent them from having access to photos of my kids and family.
My personal backup has been flawless (so far).
Would have spent a couple thousand $ by now, if stayed on it.
and yes, most people willing to endeavor into the area are hobbyist, with all that entails
however, reading even one story of someone losing access to their cloud photos for xyz reason, is enough to decide that you ought to have some mechanism in place to ensure ownership of your data
Cost wise on the right hardware it is very cheap to run, add the privacy/personal control aspect it's no wonder so many people do it.
Using a VPS entirely removes the hardware aspect, but it also mostly defeats the point of self hosting.
https://ente.com is open source, and self hosted, and end to end encrypted.
At the very least, it should be a separate network segment between 'things that have to run all the time, especially for other people' and the network you set up weird storage arrays or BGP or whatever you're having fun with.