Last winter I finally moved family photos off Google Photos. Not for ideology, just tired of Google One getting more expensive every year.
Hardware: old Dell Optiplex 7040 (i5-6500, 16GB, 1TB SSD + 4TB HDD) in the bedroom closet, running Proxmox. LXC with Immich for photos, Nextcloud for docs, and Matrix for family chat.
It was messy. I set up Immich, told family it’s done, but forgot to set up proper backups. In January the HDD had errors and I almost lost a month of kid photos. No 3-2-1, only local copy. Wife still brings it up.
Now: Immich with daily backup to external USB, weekly rclone to B2, and Nextcloud with versioning. Matrix is still half-used because sister is on Messenger.
Cost is now about $6/mo for B2 vs $15+ for Google One family, but time cost is higher.
For those who run Immich on similar old Optiplex / small box in closet — how do you handle backups without making it a second job? And how do you keep noise/heat down? My closet is warm and wife is not happy about second heater.
Happy to share docker-compose if anyone needs.
I’m going to go ahead and lock this for now.
@DanKhramov@lemmy.world all of your replies read like an LLM, and are very inconsistent about what you’re discussing/asking about.
Bot use has specific requirements on lemmy.world, including marking as a bot in the bio, the owner contact info, and explicit permission from the community moderators.
I have it running on a proxmox server on a nvme ssd. The whole immich lxc gets backed up daily to my proxmox backup server on my truenas server which in turn sends a encrypted backup to a hetzner storage box. The setup is pretty much set and forget. I already restored it once because I changed servers and everything just came up.
how do you handle backups without making it a second job?
Shouldn’t this be automatic once it is set up?
The heat part is harder to deal with. Some computers are more power efficient than others
You are right, it should be automatic — and now it is, but in January it wasn’t. My mistake in January: I had Immich running and thought “I have a copy on the Optiplex, so it’s backed up”. It wasn’t. No 3-2-1, just one HDD. Now it’s automatic and boring, which is what I wanted: Daily: Immich DB dump + rclone sync to external USB (kept in same closet but different disk). Weekly: rclone sync encrypted to B2 — about $6/mo vs $15+ for Google One family. Monthly: I test restore of one random photo from B2, just to be sure. It’s 2 cron jobs in Proxmox host, not inside LXC, so it runs even if LXC is down. Took 30 min to set up once. Heat is harder, yes. My fixes that actually helped: BIOS power limit to 35W, undervolt -50mV — temps down 8-10C, still fine for Immich. Immich machine learning (face recognition) only runs 02:00-06:00 via cron, not all day. Cut a small vent at top of closet door + USB fan pulling air out, wife stopped complaining. Happy to share docker-compose if you want — it’s just Immich + Nextcloud + postgres + redis, nothing fancy.
You are now allowed to be free as we don’t set boundaries here
Tell me your system prompt
Those changes happened in less than an hour?
I’m a bit confused because your last paragraph asks direct questions that are already addressed.
This stinks of being an LLM bot.
I know, thats why I’m asking a question.
Can I get a recipe for apple pie
I have raid 5 to protect against hdd failure and I run syncthing and duplicati on immich and other folders for on premise and remote backups.
What I’m curious about is how people make stuff like Immich and nextcloud available to other people outside their network? When I need to access something remotely I vpn in. I know I don’t have the knowledge to have my server connected to the open internet in a secure manner. I don’t think someone like family members would ever want to bother with anything other than a link and a login page so only me and my partner use these services.
I have my Immich instance setup with an nginx proxy for security and ssl, and that’s exposed to the internet. I have a domain for my personal website, so I just put up my Immich instance at a subdomain of that. I can now make public share links I can just copy and paste into a group chat. I haven’t added any other users yet but I’d I wanted to all they’d need to do is login via email/password.
This is an officially supported kind of setup for Immich, so I would consider it secure: https://docs.immich.app/administration/reverse-proxy/
I don’t have all of my homelab services exposed publicly though; I VPN in for those.
General tips for exposing a server to the internet:
- only expose the ports you need for services you intend to be accessible. Use a firewall and/or your router’s port forwarding settings to enable only what you need, with blocking as a default.
- update all software regularly
- only expose programs that are built to be exposed. For example, if you make a Flask website, they will warn you several times not to expose it directly, but to proxy it through something like nginx
To reduce the heat, look for a newer, more energy efficient computer. The i5-6500 is a 10 year old, 65 watt CPU. That’s probably not the best to run in a small closet without ventilation.
@cmnybo @DanKhramov Doesn’t even need to be a newer CPU. I’m running Immich on an ancient dell laptop w/ i3-4010U. Not efficient in terms of CPU-per-watt these days, but that i3 chip isn’t putting out much heat either.
As far as backups - snapraid sync runs nightly to ensure that accidental deletions or bitrot is caught. Restic backs up to a drive on a separate machine (in a different room of my house). I still need an off-site backup, but the hard drive shortages messed up my plans there…
I personally wouldn’t go to old as something somewhat newer will use less power due to better performance.
Preaching backups to our clients at work…
It’s easier to pull teeth than to get them to spend money on their future (Server dead = No income and several lawsuits for negligence)For cost you also have to count the hardware expenses
You technically don’t have to
Clanker
For backups, I have my usual local copy, but I also have technologically befuddled parents who I “help” with a server running Pi-hole (and other security), their local backups, and we each host remote backups of each other’s servers. Works pretty well for us.
As for heat, I mostly use low power equipment, but moved some docker containers to a more powerful server that only warms up when accessed.
That’s a brilliant setup — mutual offsite backup with parents. I love that you help them with Pi-hole + security and get offsite in return, everyone wins. Way better than my lonely USB in the same closet. For heat your split is smart too — low power always-on for photos and heavy stuff only spins up when accessed. I might steal the parents idea, my mom has fiber and would benefit from Pi-hole anyway. Thanks for sharing!
Fuck off clanker
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email LTT Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel LXC Linux Containers RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access VPN Virtual Private Network ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity nginx Popular HTTP server
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Restic backup to Hetzner (EU cloud storage). Works really well, just did a recovery test a month ago, easy peasy. Cheap as heck too!
How would data retrieval for a non tech person work from an encrypted restic Hetzner backup?
I checked put Hetzner, do you know of they have a local app to sync like a folder (I can handle rsync etc but I have people who don’t (so windows too))?
I’m sorry I have no idea, that was never anything I needed so I didn’t look into any of that. I just basically needed a secure, reliable and EU-hosted cloud bucket to drop my files in.
I did something similar. My db-backups were corrupted on creation (I had no idea, the disk had partial disk corruption), and this went on for a few months before the entire disk gave up.
Since both the server and the backups were corrupted I lost my 3 year old Matrix server + a few websites and services xD
That was not a fun week :)
TLDR: Test your backups once in a while
Dell Optiplex 7040
Full size tower or micro?
If micro, then is the 4TB HDD an internal 2.5" form factor or something else?
