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?
I have a 2N+C backup strategy. I have two NASes, and I use rclone to backup my data from one NAS to the other, and then backup (with encryption) my data to Amazon S3. I have a policy on that bucket in S3 that shoves all files into Glacier Deep Archive at day 0, so I pay the cheapest rate possible.
For example, I’m storing just shy of 400GB of personal photos and videos in one particular bucket, and that’s costing me about $0.77USD per month. Pennies.
Yes, it’ll cost me a lot more to pull it out and, yes, it’ll take a day or two to get it back. But it’s an insurance policy I can rely on and a (future) price I’m willing to pay should the dire day (lost both NASes, or worse) ever arrive when I need it.
Why Amazon S3? I’m in Australia, and that means local access is important to me. We’re pretty far from most other places around the world. It means I can target my nearest AWS region with my rclone jobs and there’s less latency. Backblaze is a great alternative, but I’m not in the US or Europe. Admittedly, I haven’t tested this theory, but I’m willing to bet that in-country speeds are still a lot quicker than any CDN that might help get me into B2.
Also, something others haven’t yet mentioned is, per Immich’s guidance on their repo (Disclaimer right at the top) is not NOT rely on Immich as your sole backup. Immich is under very active development, and breaking changes are a real possibility all the time right now.
So, I use SyncThing to also backup all my photos and videos to my NAS, and that’s also backed up to the other NAS and S3. That’s why I have nearly 400GB of photos and videos - it’s effectively double my actual library size. But, again, at less than a buck a month to store all that, I don’t really mind double-handling all that data, for the peace of mind I get.