Hi fellow self-hoster.
Almost one year ago i did experiment with Immich and found, at the time, that it was not up to pair to what i was expecting from it. Basically my use case was slightly different from the Immich user experience.
After all this time i decided to give it another go and i am amazed! It has grown a lot, it now has all the features i need and where lacking at the time.
So, in just a few hours i set it up and configured my external libraries, backup, storage template and OIDC authentication with authelia. All works.
Great kudos to the devs which are doing an amazing work.
I have documented all the steps of the process with the link on top of this post, hope it can be useful for someone.
If anyone’s interested, here’s my Immich backup script. You setup rclone to use an S3 storage service like BackBlaze which is quite cheap. I also use a crypt which means RClone will encrypt and decrypt all files to/from the server. S3 configuration and crypt setup.
Then set this up as a cron job. With the “BACKUP_DIR” option when you delete a photo it will get moved to the “deleted” folder. You can go into your S3 provider’s lifecycle settings and have these get deleted after a number of days. I do 10 days. Or you can skip that and they’ll be gone forever.
#!/bin/bash SRC_PATH="/path/to/immich/library" DEST_REMOTE="b2crypt:immich-photos/backup" BACKUP_DIR="b2crypt:immich-photos/deleted" RCLONE_OPTIONS="--copy-links --update --delete-during --backup-dir=$BACKUP_DIR --suffix `TZ='America/New_York' date +%Y-%m-%d`.bak --verbose" rclone sync $SRC_PATH $DEST_REMOTE $RCLONE_OPTIONSYeah, I don’t know what any of these words mean. I just want to click “export” and back all the data up to a flash drive. Is that too much to ask?
Well yeah you could go on the site and select whatever photos and hit download I suppose.
There’s no way to do that for your entire library. Also I assume that would not retain the Immich-specific metadata like the ML object tags and the “people” tagged in the photos.
You should have a backup solution for your server that should cover this, without that you should probably stick with managed photo backup services.
Thats…why I’m asking?
…is that not what Immich is?
Are you paying for Immich somewhere? Then you’d have to trust the administrator to back your data up. I had assumed you were self hosting and by managed services I meant like Google Photos, or indeed someone else’s Immich setup.
No.
Not doing that for reasons that shouldn’t need explaining.
If you’re self hosting then you could just copy all the files from your server onto an external drive. I have to say that’s not a great backup solution though, and you should learn more about administration of Linux servers so that when things break you can fix them. I wouldn’t rely on it as a safe solution to your photos otherwise.