I’ve mostly just relied on Google Photos, and I really like its features. However, I have always been deathly afraid of losing access to my Google photos account and losing all of those, so I need a better way to actually back up my photos. Right now all I do is do a Google Takeout every so often, but that’s inefficient as hell.
How do you do it? How do you backup or sync your photos with a PC/local server?
Syncthing, super easy to set up and use on android and linux. It works with everything, not just photos.
To access files stored on my home server from my phone, I use Material Files with sftp set up
Syncthing is awesome. I’m never losing data to a damaged or stolen device again, and it makes accessing data from a computer and sending data to the phone so much easier.
But we have to keep in mind that syncthing doesn’t protect by default us from accidental deletion, so it’s not a 100% replacement for a backup.
Quote Syncthing! I’ve also a Nextcloud instance shared with my girlfriend in order to share selected photos.
Just gonna chime in and agree with this guy. Syncthing is great! I use it with Android and Windows for my photos and password manager.
The same but I am just using my ordinary laptop bc my laptop has 2 tb, I don’t have storage concerns
I use syncthing. Once setup its really nice.
Syncthing is what I use as well. Great for automatically syncing photos to my PC, and backing up my PC files to my phone. Pretty close equivalent to Google photo sync, and your files stay private.
Same here, syncthing is fantastic and I use it for all kinds of stuff - including backing up phone media.
I recently set up an immich server.
Yes! Immich is incredible. It’s a self hosted Google images for anyone that doesn’t know, and it’s really close to being an exact replica.
I absolutely love it. https://immich.app/
Another +1 for immich, set it up a week ago and have been in love, minor growing pains but already making serious progress
Personally, I prefer using a cable to transfer photos and videos from my device to my PC. Once they are on my computer, I make sure to back them up onto external hard drives.
So you don’t do backups as it can’t be automated.
Once a week becomes once a month then once a year then “uhm i think i copied everything a few months ago, it’s somewhere”, then one day the phone breaks and you lose a lifetime of photos.
I just use Google Photos.
Google 1. I should really do a manual back up as well but I get lazy.
I use syncthing to sync my camera folder on my pixel 6a phone with a folder on my NAS.
Then I have an old moto x with pixel experience rom (the rom has unlimited Google photos backup) and syncthing. This phone turns on once a day at night with a smartplug - the folder on my NAS syncs with a folder on phone. The phone backs up the photos to Google photos at full quality.
I’m still mad that Google took away the photo backup for pixel phones. But this seems to work for now
Same! I overuse Syncthing lol. I’ve got my photos syncing plus going bidirectional with my screenshots and documents directory and it’s so convenient and streamlined. I’ve got a 1TB in my laptop so it hasn’t been an issue and it’s nice to know between 2 devices with photos saved offline and Google Photos I’m not sweating.
Look into getting a USB-C flash drive and transfer the photos to that. You can find a 128gb drive for $15.
USB flash drives are not reliable for long-term storage. Please make sure you have another backup if you keep your photos on one.
I have two backups systems. One uses rclone the other is a python script using ADB.
I use Syncthing to sync all my important files from my phone to my server, and back. As soon as I have an WiFi connection, Syncthing synchronize all my files :)
Syncthing-fork /sdcard so I don’t need to worry about losing my phone. Saved me when my nexus 5x suddenly boot looped
+1 for synching-fork. I have mine sync to my server and every week run rclone copy to B2 using the rclone encryption. 3-2-1
Why the forked one and not the main branch?
It’s much better. For example, if you say “sync only while charging”, you can open the app while you’re on battery, to check status or settings, instead on main it just kicks you out “you’re not charging”
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immich is really promising. Works well for the basic stuff (and quickly adding features) but it’s still early days.
With my Samsung s22+ I can just plug in a usb-c cable to my PC and then browse the files on my phone to back them up.
I also have a flash drive where one side is usb-c and the other is USB A. SanDisk Dual Drive
Another alternative (more technical) could be to to use Solid Explorer which has the ability to setup remote connections to online backup. It also has a built in FTP server you can start on your phone and then from your PC you can connect and get your photos.
I ran out of space on my Google photos 😔 I’ve converted to Christianity and pray every night to God in heaven that my phone doesn’t die.
I selfhost a Nextcloud server at home, and use its “auto upload” functionality to automatically upload my photos and videos as I take them.
I have that server automatically backed up (in encrypted format) nightly to an Amazon S3 bucket and then to an external hard drive once a month.
That’s pretty interesting. I’ve thought of setting up a Nextcloud but it didn’t ocurr to me it could help out with this.
About your S3 backup strategy, I have a couple of questions, if you don’t mind:
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Do you essentially just make an encrypted .zip or .tgz of your whole NC instance and upload it straight? Or do you have some kind of delta updating
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What S3 tier do you use? Intelligent-Tiering or something else?
I actually have the files stored in a pool on a TrueNAS machine, which handles the backup process for me in an automated fashion. I have it set to do ZFS snapshots and ship those.
I used IA tiered storage for a long time; Though I actually moved to Wasabi recently, as it’s cheaper. It’s just easier to say S3 because people recognize it lol.
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