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.
One rclone command isn’t much more complicated than one button.
Reading the comment I replied to, it appears to be much much more complicated. And I don’t understand how anyone can claim otherwise.
Key word is “appears”. Choose your source and destination, run rclone. That’s it. No harder than going to the page, clicking export, picking a folder, save. It’s really not hard at all, give it a try.
This tells me absolutely nothing about how to do that. Source for what? Destination for what? Choose them where? What is rclone? Where do I get it? How do I run it? What does it do?
All questions that don’t need to be answered before clicking a button in the UI.
The source and destination for the data we’re discussing? Only you know where you’re keeping it and where you’re backing it up to, so you’ll have to fill in those blanks yourself. The remainder of your questions can be answered with a cursory Google search (or other search engine of your choice).
I have no idea where that data is. Immich does.
Telling me to Google it is unhelpful and rude and further backs up my point that it is more complicated. If there is a button, I don’t need to research anything, I just click it.
Immich is not magic. You were the one that set up and configured it. If you are unable to remember, I’m sure you could examine your configuration.
I am unable to provide any more information about rclone bevause I have never used it myself, but I am damn sure that if I did even the barest amount of effort to learn it on my own that I could find all the information I need and more, instead of expecting the information to be spit into my mouth like a baby bird.