worth selfhosting immich or similar? what about backups? - eviltoast

I have recently repurposed and old Hp Stream to a home server and successfully run Immich. I really like it and even a small 500GB disk is way more than the 15GB Google offers.

My issue though is about backup. I would only be comfortable if all the data is backed up in an off-site server (cloud). But the back up storage will probably cost as much as paying for a service like ente or similar, directly replacing Google photo.

What am I missing? Where do you store your backup?

    • butitsnotme@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I followed the guide found here, however with a few modifications.

      Notably, I did not encrypt the borg repository, and heavily modified the backup script.

      #!/bin/bash -ue
      
      # The udev rule is not terribly accurate and may trigger our service before
      # the kernel has finished probing partitions. Sleep for a bit to ensure
      # the kernel is done.
      #
      # This can be avoided by using a more precise udev rule, e.g. matching
      # a specific hardware path and partition.
      sleep 5
      
      #
      # Script configuration
      #
      
      # The backup partition is mounted there
      MOUNTPOINT=/mnt/external
      
      # This is the location of the Borg repository
      TARGET=$MOUNTPOINT/backups/backups.borg
      
      # Archive name schema
      DATE=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S')-$(hostname)
      
      # This is the file that will later contain UUIDs of registered backup drives
      DISKS=/etc/backups/backup.disk
      
      # Find whether the connected block device is a backup drive
      for uuid in $(lsblk --noheadings --list --output uuid)
      do
              if grep --quiet --fixed-strings $uuid $DISKS; then
                      break
              fi
              uuid=
      done
      
      if [ ! $uuid ]; then
              echo "No backup disk found, exiting"
              exit 0
      fi
      
      echo "Disk $uuid is a backup disk"
      partition_path=/dev/disk/by-uuid/$uuid
      # Mount file system if not already done. This assumes that if something is already
      # mounted at $MOUNTPOINT, it is the backup drive. It won't find the drive if
      # it was mounted somewhere else.
      (mount | grep $MOUNTPOINT) || mount $partition_path $MOUNTPOINT
      drive=$(lsblk --inverse --noheadings --list --paths --output name $partition_path | head --lines 1)
      echo "Drive path: $drive"
      
      # Log Borg version
      borg --version
      
      echo "Starting backup for $DATE"
      
      # Make sure all data is written before creating the snapshot
      sync
      
      
      # Options for borg create
      BORG_OPTS="--stats --one-file-system --compression lz4 --checkpoint-interval 86400"
      
      # No one can answer if Borg asks these questions, it is better to just fail quickly
      # instead of hanging.
      export BORG_RELOCATED_REPO_ACCESS_IS_OK=no
      export BORG_UNKNOWN_UNENCRYPTED_REPO_ACCESS_IS_OK=no
      
      
      #
      # Create backups
      #
      
      function backup () {
        local DISK="$1"
        local LABEL="$2"
        shift 2
      
        local SNAPSHOT="$DISK-snapshot"
        local SNAPSHOT_DIR="/mnt/snapshot/$DISK"
      
        local DIRS=""
        while (( "$#" )); do
          DIRS="$DIRS $SNAPSHOT_DIR/$1"
          shift
        done
      
        # Make and mount the snapshot volume
        mkdir -p $SNAPSHOT_DIR
        lvcreate --size 50G --snapshot --name $SNAPSHOT /dev/data/$DISK
        mount /dev/data/$SNAPSHOT $SNAPSHOT_DIR
      
        # Create the backup
        borg create $BORG_OPTS $TARGET::$DATE-$DISK $DIRS
      
      
        # Check the snapshot usage before removing it
        lvs
        umount $SNAPSHOT_DIR
        lvremove --yes /dev/data/$SNAPSHOT
      }
      
      # usage: backup <lvm volume> <snapshot name> <list of folders to backup>
      backup photos immich immich
      # Other backups listed here
      
      echo "Completed backup for $DATE"
      
      # Just to be completely paranoid
      sync
      
      if [ -f /etc/backups/autoeject ]; then
              umount $MOUNTPOINT
              udisksctl power-off -b $drive
      fi
      
      # Send a notification
      curl -H 'Title: Backup Complete' -d "Server backup for $DATE finished" 'http://10.30.0.1:28080/backups'
      

      Most of my services are stored on individual LVM volumes, all mounted under /mnt, so immich is completely self-contained under /mnt/photos/immich/. The last line of my script sends a notification to my phone using ntfy.