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.
I recently set up an immich server.
immich is really promising. Works well for the basic stuff (and quickly adding features) but it’s still early days.
I use syncthing. Once setup its really nice.
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
You can keep using google photos/drive as your cloud backup with cryptomator if you would like privacy. Locally with a cable, I use a 1 tb external hard drive for all my backup needs (photos,videos and other files) and then I have a copy of that same drive’s contents on a different 1tb hard drive as a sort of backup backup drive all encrypted via veracrypt. I just remember to copy over my original photos every week or so. It should be noted that I’m not taking hundreds of photos a day though. Storage is pretty cheap nowadays if you opt for spinning mechanical hard drives and pair them with a case and its a pretty good, local backup method imo.
I really miss when Google let you sync your Photos collection to a PC with the Google drive client. There’s third party sync tools now but Google’s API limits them to the “High quality” versions instead of original
Right now I’m just using Onedrive, might setup Immich soon