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by stratts 60 days ago
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.
1 comments
kyriakos 60 days ago
$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.
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stratts 60 days ago
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

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aljaz823 60 days ago
How is that by itself not a NAS?
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stratts 60 days ago
It is, but OP said you need both a NAS and a mini PC
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waynesonfire 60 days ago
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.

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CamJN 59 days ago
My local backups certainly cost more than $180/year just in hard-drives alone.
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poulpy123 58 days ago
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

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