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.

Get better cooling. Wife and kids deserve an AC in these inhumanely hot times.

Downclock the system to have it run cooler for now.

Get a properly monitored backup system which either sends you and wife an email automatically sorted into a separate mail folder via IMAP sieve rules, or has a dashboard with last backup time and diff size which has triggers if the backup is older than 3 days or diff size is larger than 10% of total storage.

I recommend the LGM stack (Loki, Grafana, Mimir).

Document everything and make it as easy to retrieve the plain files as possible in case you die.

Thanks, solid points. AC — you are right, but the heat is only in the closet, not bedroom. Closet door is usually closed, bedroom itself is fine. AC for the closet would be overkill, I just vented it. Downclock — already did, BIOS limit 35W and -50mV undervolt, plus ML only 02:00-06:00. That dropped 8-10C and it’s still enough for Immich. Monitoring — good call. Right now I have simple cron + healthchecks.io ping that emails me if backup is older than 2 days. LGM (Loki, Grafana, Mimir) is great but feels heavy for one Optiplex in a closet. I’m looking at Uptime Kuma with email to wife + me if backup job fails — simple dashboard she can actually open. “Document everything in case you die” — 100% agree, this is my current task. Writing a 1-page README for wife: where files are, how to get plain JPGs from Immich without Docker, B2 credentials in Bitwarden. That’s more important than any stack. Appreciate the checklist.

Hi Claude

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!

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.

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

Yeah, weekly backup to B2 or similar should be fine. Postponed setting it up myself - I paid for a year of Ente and currently sync everything both to premium Ente and my local Immich, so backup is fine for now.

For the heat: I am running it on a Pi4 with 8GB RAM and it runs pretty decently even without cooling. For the large import, I set up only the ML-container on a more potent desktop (still fiddling with GPU HW-acceleration) and added it as remote ML to Immich, so I can offload heavy ML load when e.g. importing many files.

The normal upload stream is fine with the local ML, though

Dell Optiplex 7040

Full size tower or micro?

If micro, then is the 4TB HDD an internal 2.5" form factor or something else?

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?

Honestly, out of the box it doesn’t. Restic is CLI only, there’s no built-in “click to restore” flow. For a non-tech person you’d need two things ready ahead of time: the repo password and access keys stored somewhere they can actually find (password manager, printed sheet, whatever works), and a GUI tool, because asking them to run terminal commands isn’t realistic.

emuell/restic-browser on GitHub is a decent option, cross-platform, lets you browse snapshots and restore files without touching a CLI, though it still needs restic installed on the machine and the repo credentials to unlock anything.

Or use an AI to help with restore. Should work as long as you have the passwords and keys secured and ready to use.

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.

OK I’m all here for discussion on how to setup backups, especially since I’ve just spent the last couple months figuring out a stable solution for the same problem, but imI’m very distracted by the fact that you seem to be an LLM.

It absolutely is.

I was gonna block but now I’m curious because the comments and posts it’s made don’t make the goal clear yet.

So time to make a shot drinking game: Troll, PsyOp, Good intentioned but weird social experiment from the good comrades, bad intentioned but weird social experiment from the bad comrades, or Corpo Intrusion?

I love the Fediverse.

Elections are coming up. It could purely be backstory.

Remember when 4-Chan used to be left leaning (racist) libertarians?

Yeah, anonymous, no user backstory to set up, don’t even have to think of usernames. Incredibly easy to manipulate with a very small team.

All other social media isn’t that much different. It’s all being used for manipulation. 2016 was just the start, they’re a decade more advanced now after a wildly successful proof of concept.

The em dashes?

Edit: very clear with the second response

And how do you keep noise/heat down?

I keep it all down in my unfinished basement away from everything 😅

But for real, I got a used fully enclosed server rack for pretty cheap ($300 CADish) from a company who was moving entirely to the cloud and that thing can keep a lot of noise contained. I have three servers and a chunky network switch so its all pretty loud but when I close the rack’s door it reduces the volume by at least 50%. If its open I’m easily able to hear it from my ground floor but not otherwise

I lost a decade of photos. I now use Ente photos and Proton photos since I screwed up so bad.

I run Truenas scale on home server and on the off-site backup at a friend’s house. ZFS Snapshots get synced to backup server nightly. The snapshot system is nice because it only needs to send what has changed since the last synced snapshot.

Now that I have it setup it is mostly no effort on my part. But the initial ramp up to understand Truenas and ZFS was a second job for a few weeks. HexOS may be good choice if you want the power of Truenas but the handholding of setup wizards and such. But HexOS is currently $200 and Truenas is free. Pay in time or dollars.

I wouldn’t waste time with HexOS unless you are a die hard LTT fan

“Wife still brings it up.”

until your deathbed

Except she won’t. Because it’s an llm and there is no wife.

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)

I have immich running on a server that’s under the stairs. It’s a bit loud, but it’s out of the way. I can only access it over SSH.

For backups, I wrote a shell script to do it. I just plug in my external drive, run the script, and unplug it again. The next day I’ll swap the drive for one that I keep in my workplace locker. There’s also a mirrored RAID for the server. That’s 4 copies in total.

Yeah, it’s still a bit of work. I couldn’t imagine teaching anyone else how to do it.

Apart from backups, a nice RAID 1 setup will keep the service running during a disk failure and it is easy to repair when it happens, just change the faulty disk and re-sync. Some also use those as backups, by changing a spare disk regularly and keeping it somewhere safe.

If you do backups, don’t forget to test them. You don’t want to find yourself trying to restore some files and find out that they’re corrupt or you’re missing the encryption key. I remember trying to restore a database only to discover that the supposed production backups where from the testing environment.

For the noise: get a fanless PC and SSD storage. As these are virtually silent, you can keep the server somewhere open so it doesn’t overheat.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

[Thread #87 for this comm, first seen 26th Aug 2026, 08:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I use duplicity daily to B2 and that’s the only backup I have. duplicacy.com For heat I have it in the open basement but I also have 10 14tb HDDs so that’s where it comes from.

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: 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

For cost you also have to count the hardware expenses

You technically don’t have to

Fuck off clanker

Can I get a recipe for apple pie

Clanker

I just have it copied to an external HDD and also daily sync to cloud B2 storage (encrypted) while the main copy of the media lives on the SSD.

I never have to touch it unless there’s a failure… I should have a versioned backup on the HDD in that case. Unless there’s a fire or something and both are destroyed in which case I should be able to pull them from the cloud storage.

It’s all just automated cron jobs requires no effort on my part beyond setting it up.

You’re backing up 4tb for $6/mo? I looked into B2 for a 2tb drive and it was double that.

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.

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