What is the best way to make a backup? (in my case of Immich)
reddit / selfhosted

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abbondanzio · 2023-12-11 17:36

Hi,
I installed proxmox on my NUC8i7BEH and among the various services
exposed in lan I have Immich.

I was wondering, what way to go about backing up photos/videos to
Immich? I see as an ignoramus 3 possibilities

1) Simple backup of the entire LXC container that I deposit via SAMBA
to an HDD connected to my Windows PC.
2) Backup only the photos and videos that are in /srv/immich/uploads
by copying them to the HDD connected to my Windows PC
3) Compress and encrypted upload photos and videos to a hosting site
like mega (?).
4) Using official backup and restore by Immich?

On the NUC I only have a 1tb SSD, I don't know which way to choose.
The paradox of choice!

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jwink3101 · 2023-12-11 19:22

I don't know what is all together best but (a) my guess is #4 and (b)
it doesn't matter as long as you test and verify it.

When I am backuping up a service, I will try to re-deploy on a new
machine and see that it is back. I will also document what I did so I
can reference it later.

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dankkster · 2023-12-11 19:38

Or 5. Use ZFS and Proxmox backup server.   Hands down the winner.

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coffeeincardboard · 2023-12-11 20:00

I have my immich content files on a network share, which I can then
backup directly. Separately, you can backup the immich database
volumes. Best practice for that is setting up an automatic dump job,
since copying the database would otherwise require shutting down the
service.

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Awkwardkard-194 · 2023-12-11 21:23

I‘m using borgbackup to create an encrypted backup on a remote
location and I’m manually transferring my photos and videos to an
external drive from time to time.

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xihu0208 · 2023-12-12 06:15

I use Immich for storing photos and videos on my NAS, with the immich
database itself hosted locally. Here's my backup approach:

1. Every night, I use an rsync script to back up the Immich database
to my NAS.
2. I then back up the Immich media database to S3 storage (an
encrypted S3 \*deep archive\*, like Amazon Glacier Deep Archive). The
storage cost is quite affordable (Amazon charges about $0.00099 per
GB), though retrieval costs are much higher.

My strategy is based on the fact that the Immich database is
relatively small and simple to restore, so it doesn't require
extensive redundancy. The media library is backed up to S3 storage.
Despite high retrieval fees, the media is essentially stored on three
different devices (my phone, NAS, and S3), making it unlikely that
I'll ever need to recover from S3. Plus, the value of my photos
justifies the cost.

The media library suits deep archiving well because there's little
modification to files once uploaded; it's mostly about adding new
files (In fact I only use the --copy flag when uploading to S3 with
Rsync). To save costs, consider configuring the S3 lifecycle to
initially store data as standard storage, then transfer it to deep
archive after a brief period (1 day for example). This is because API
costs for deep archives are generally much higher than for standard
storage, so this step can be more cost-effective, depending on your
service provider.


Disclaimer: I'm in country where Amazon S3 is not easily accessible,
so I'm actually not using the Amazon S3, but you get the idea.