[hombre_fatal]

A good example of that is the guys on r/homelab explaining how they built a NAS so their wife could save her phone media without Google Photos.

Man, paying Google/Apple $5/mo is surely a much better solution for her. And are you really doing 3-2-1 on that?

Save the dicking around for your own stuff.

[stratts]

Both my wife and I are reluctant to upload our entire photo collection spanning 20+ years to the cloud. Immich has been working really well for us, the experience for her is just as seamless as it would be for Google Photos, I think.

And at $180/yr for the 2TB of storage we'd need to pay for, vs. maybe $200 in hardware, it pays itself off pretty quickly... if you exclude the time spent setting it up and administering it. But I don't mind, it's a bit like digital gardening for me.

[kyriakos]

$200 hardware only? my main concern with storing photos locally is the need for a NAS. Even at 2-3TB you still need: a NAS device, 2-3 hard drives and the mini pc to run immich + power bill to run them. it will cost more than $180/yr. cost should not be the main factor people store photos locally.

[stratts]

You don't need a NAS, really. My setup is a second-hand i5-7300U fanless mini-PC I got for $90, 2 x second-hand 4TB HDDs, and 2 x USB 3.5" enclosures. It's messy but it works... I haven't measured power in a bit but I reckon it pulls around 20-30W, which is around $15-20 a year at my current prices.

We back it up daily using restic to an old 2TB NAS that's at my parents place + the occasional manual backup

[aljaz823]

How is that by itself not a NAS?

[stratts]

It is, but OP said you need both a NAS and a mini PC

[waynesonfire]

180/year? That's ~150watt server. That's a very powerful NAS. You'll be paying $200 per month form a cloud provider for such performance. A performant home low power NAS can be build that will consume easily, 30-40W. It won't need to be upgraded for over a decade. Ideally, 5x HDDs with 5 year warranty. The only expense is rolling upgrades of HDDs as storage fills up.

Backup to cloud glacier storage is ~$1.20 per TiB-month

Cost is absolutely a factor. self-hosting can't even be touched. And, the that's just the start of the value proposition.

[CamJN]

My local backups certainly cost more than $180/year just in hard-drives alone.

[poulpy123]

It's what I paid for my system without the drives. And I don't remember how much I'm paying for the power bill but it was like 15 or 20€/ year more.

If it was just for backuping my photos I would just buy an external hard drive or 2 tough

[user_7832]

> Man, paying Google/Apple $5/mo is surely a much better solution for her. And are you really doing 3-2-1 on that?

Just some days back someone on reddit posted how their 14yo son (via a family/linked Google account) used Gemini Live to, err, enjoy himself with the camera on.

All his accounts are now permanently locked for CSAM.

So, yes, not being beholden to a megacorp absolutely has its uses.

[Aurornis]

That Reddit post was thoroughly debunked as untrue. It had some obvious plot holes and inconsistencies.

Google even came out and said that’s not how account suspensions work: They don’t sequentially ban other accounts that have been associated with a device that was associated with an account, as many pointed out.

I’m surprised how many people fell for that obvious piece of Reddit creative fiction. I think we’ll be hearing about it as an urban legend for years.

Reddit has become a place for posting fiction on advice subs. It started on the relationship advice subs but has spread to all of the advice subs now, like the legal advice post you saw. You have to read Reddit with a lot of skepticism.

[user_7832]

Thanks, it's good to know this thing wasn't true. I wasn't aware of it at all.

Unfortunately I have seen other horror stories (dad takes a picture to send to the doctor, it uploads to iCloud/Google photos, account gets banned) to be wary of trusting any such large corp.

Partly tangential, but just yesterday there was a post of someone with a checzk password who got locked out of their iPhone. Now of course an iCloud backup might have actually helped them here, but the reliance on "It's Apple, it'll work" is a very common thing (understandably!), but unfortunately not true.

[user_7832]

Oh, by the way - this was the account he used for his business (I don't remember if it was a custom domain). He's pretty much lost his only way of communicating with customers. This isn't just a "whoops, let me make a new email" situation.

(You can go to the legal advice UK subreddit if you want to see the post.)

[Aurornis]

> (You can go to the legal advice UK subreddit if you want to see the post.)

It was removed quickly because it was obviously untrue. The details of the story weren’t even consistent across the posters comments.

[pbasista]

> Man, paying Google/Apple $5/mo is surely a much better solution for her.

According to which criteria?

There are values beyond "basic convenience" that are important as well. Being independent from a subscription service is one of them. Having full control over your own media being another.

Moreover, subscriptions in general have disadvantages. For example:

1. If a subscription service decides to increase their prices tenfold, there is nothing a customer can do to stop them.

2. If they decide to stop operating completely, a customer also has no say into the matter.

3. If the subscription service decides to just unilaterally stop offering the service to a particular user, they can do so at their own discretion, at any time.

This all means that whatever value is being "obtained" by using a subscription service, it is only going to last for as long as the provider wants it to last.

[denkmoon]

and lose a lifetime's worth of pictures because Google identified a pic of your toddler in their pyjamas as CSAM and nuked your life. Or your 13y/o kid fiddled with themselves infront of gemini. etc

Of all the dicking around one can do in a homelab, and I'm guilty of plenty of it, setting up some network storage for photo backup is easily one of the highest value things you can do.

[sekh60]

Our child is only 6 but these fears are done of the reasons we have immich at home (amongst other things). We still have Google storage for photos, but just in case they take a photo or video that gets flagged we do not want to lose everything. I am though trying to get in the habit of having an annual photo book printed to have some used copies of memories.

My spouse is more tired to Google, but for myself if I got cut off i'd just have to change some recovery email addresses.

[puppymaster]

ha even better on /r/localllm husbands are scratching their head why their wives and kids just won't use their local chatgpt. It's fast and i bought 4 5090 for this why won't they use it!

Brothers, maybe they don't want you to see all their private chats with AI?

[sylens]

The upfront costs are pretty big but over time it’s not too bad to do 3-2-1. I doubt you’ll come out on top of Google every time - there’s a reason their prices are so low, and that’s more of an incentive to leave than to save a few dollars.

For me, I run Immich off a Beelink S12 Pro mini PC, with the photos themselves stored on my Synology NAS. Every night, I backup the VM with docker that runs Immich to the NAS, then the entire NAS gets backed up to Synology’s Cloud. My upfront costs were the NAS, the drives, and the mini PC, and my ongoing costs are electricity and the cloud storage fee for Synology’s cloud (about $70/year for a terabyte). That’s not cheaper than Google, but it does prevent them from having access to photos of my kids and family.

[lostmsu]

Well no, Google at some point in mid 201x screwed up some of photos hosted on Photos.

My personal backup has been flawless (so far).

Would have spent a couple thousand $ by now, if stayed on it.

[whoahwio]

yes, the economics, and ease of use, of google/apple cloud storage is unmatched

and yes, most people willing to endeavor into the area are hobbyist, with all that entails

however, reading even one story of someone losing access to their cloud photos for xyz reason, is enough to decide that you ought to have some mechanism in place to ensure ownership of your data

[snoman]

I just sync down everything from my wife/kids’ Google Drive/Dropbox/whatever nightly to my NAS. Usability of a cloud solution, but with on-prem backup.

[dugite-code]

Except with modern tooling it's not a huge task anymore to run these services.

Cost wise on the right hardware it is very cheap to run, add the privacy/personal control aspect it's no wonder so many people do it.

[Gigachad]

Software wise I find stuff pretty easy to set and forget. It's hardware that's always been the issue for me. When your power or internet goes out, everything goes down. While you move property, every thing is down. Currently my server has developed an issue with randomly crashing and rebooting I haven't been able to resolve yet.

Using a VPS entirely removes the hardware aspect, but it also mostly defeats the point of self hosting.

[prmoustache]

Your personal photos likely do not need 99.99999999999% of availability, especially if you still have a local copy of the most recent and interesting ones on your smartphone.

[anon7000]

I don’t think it defeats the point at all. Uploading photos to Google is a massive privacy concern. Apple is maybe better in that way, but very limited cross-platform support, and when I’ve tried it, poor performance & pricing. Neither do well at higher end photography either.

[Gigachad]

I self host for privacy, which makes me feel uncomfortable about all my private data sitting unencrypted on a server I don't control. It's better in that you don't have fully automated google AI scanning your data, but it's still exposed. None of the self hosted apps are designed with e2e encryption in mind so you'd be better off using icloud.

[oarsinsync]

> None of the self hosted apps are designed with e2e encryption in mind

https://ente.com is open source, and self hosted, and end to end encrypted.

[denkmoon]

Lets say you don't leave it unencrypted on disk, only in memory. Do you really think vps providers are slurping your personal data out of a VM's memory in the same way google do dragnet personal data gathering? If your adversary is the government, sure they probably can do that, but otherwise it seems unlikely.

[easterncalculus]

Got a lot of downvotes here but this is just good advice. One of the good things about the split between the "homelab" and "selfhosted" communities - they are solving fundamentally different things.

At the very least, it should be a separate network segment between 'things that have to run all the time, especially for other people' and the network you set up weird storage arrays or BGP or whatever you're having fun with.