By your parents a computer and put it on their network and back up locally and remotely on their system. Bonus run immich for them also.
I get all my back up redundancy but helping others host.
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
85 points (96.7% liked)
Selfhosted
57329 readers
1413 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I use hetzner storagebox for similar needs. It's not encrypted, so you need to manage that by yourself, but they support a ton of protocols and pricing is decent, even if they're increasing the price shortly.
What does the setup look like on your end? Is there like, an app? Also how would I look into managing encryption by myself?
I use Borg Backup to backup specific folders of my hard disk to my hetzner storage box.
The software is triggered by corn/systemd to start a backup.
JFYI - after many years of trusting Borg with my backups, I found Kopia to be MUCH faster, in both snapshots creation time and browsing/diffing. I backup my whole home every 6 hours, so going from ~20min down to ~3min is an appreciable win. There's also a web endpoint to Kopia that may make backing up on the go easier when you can't trust your tunnel to home.
Does borg need an entire python venv?
I was looking at "modern" backup tools while back and when I saw borg was python I decided not to bother.
Instead I focused on restic for a little while and then rsync was already there and I already knew the commands so... Rsync. Though I still have restic on my list.
If you want to go on the restic route, you can try BackRest: it's a web interface for restic with graphs and all.
I'm using proxmox backup server to make copies of full virtual machines, it takes care of encryption and verification of the data, so it's not exactly the same than your scenario. Borg Backup is commonly recommended, but restic and dejadup are worth checking out too.
Buy two 4tb extern drives. Copy your photos onto both. Leave on at your mom's house in a closet. Leave the other in a locker at work or a safety deposit box.
No monthly fees, no techbro cloud capitalists.
This is the way
Time is money, and the time it would take to keep those backups up to date is not worth it over cloud backups.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Backblaze B3, backup software of your choice pointed at the Immich library. Photos get put into Immich, backup runs, data encrypted and saved offsite.
Backup software of your choice pointed at the Immich library
Any recommendations? Preferably something something with a homeassistant integration or docker container with webui so I can more easily access it remotely. New to all this.
I use Duplicati and I THINK it has a container option? It is a web UI though.
I have my Immich library on a network drive and I took the lazy way and have my desktop duplicati just back up the network drive instead of directly on the server 😅
Looks like it does have a container option! $100/year for Backblaze computer backup is above what I was hoping to spend but it's unlimited and I'm looking for a set it and forget it option so I'll probably do exactly that, thank you.
This is what I did, only I set it up such that my family’s computers are backing up to my large external drive, and this drive is connected to the computer with the unlimited BB running and backing up. Just to get a little more benefit out of the cost.
There's a plan where you pay some tiny amount per gb. Thats the one to use.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I use restic to backup immich (and everything else) to b3.
Be sure to stop the docker container while you backup to avoid skew.
Backblaze saved my ass at the end of last year when I had a hardware failure.
Not the same, but for my Immich backup I have a raspberry pi and an HDD with family (remote).
Backup is rsync, and a simple script to make ZFS snapshots (retaining X daily, Y weekly). Connected via "raw" WireGuard.
Setup works well, although it's never been needed.
raspberry pi and an HDD with family (remote)
Is this the way to go for off-site backups w/ family? In terms of low power draw, uptime, etc.
I've been pleased with it. Family is very relaxed about projects like this, but yeah it's low power draw. I don't think I have anything special set up but the right thing to do for power would be to spin down drive when not in use, as power is dominated by the spinning rust.
Uptime is great. Only hiccups are that it can choke when compiling the ZFS kernel modules, triggered on kernel updates. It's an rpi 3/1GB RAM (I keep failing at forcing dkms to use only 1 thread, which would probably fix these hiccups 🤷).
That said, it is managed by me, so sometimes errors go unnoticed. I had recent issues where I missed a week of rsync because I switched from pihole to technitium on my home server and forgot to point the remote rpi there. This would all have been fixed with proper cron email setup...I'm clearly not a professional :)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Hetzner Storage Box Costa 3,81€ per month for 1TB and you can acess it via SSH or WebDav.
Hetzner will increase their prices by April, still a good value
https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/statement-price-adjustment/
+1 for Hetzner Storage Boxes, even thought with the general increase in pricing for hardware I don't know how long they'll be able to keep them so cheap.
To back up the data automatically, I use BackRest (it's a nice web interface that uses restic under the hood).
Another +1 for Hetzner.
I did an initial backup of my music (so I wasn't concerned about encryption) with plain old rsync to get a feel for the system first, do a restore, etc. to feel comfortable with it all - and see if there were any hidden costs.
Then I wiped all that and moved over to rclone to encrypt my data into different chunks (photos, music, work, etc)
It all worked well and they even skipped charging me 1 month becuase I hadn't exceeded their minimum charge (rolls up to the following month)
I've had proactive emails from them notifying me of work which might have reduced my ability to access their system, but ad it was outside the time of my backups, then no issue.
I use filen.io. encrypted and the barrier to entry is really low. Only gripe is that the CLI tool doesn't support cron jobs yet.
I’ve been using Backblaze buckets to hold data I serve to friends with GameVault, and a few other things. Sitting at just shy of 1TB if memory serves? I’m paying about 4 bucks a month.
If you serve it through cloudflare, you aren’t charged for bandwidth. Which works out nicely because I use a cloudflare worker to redirect all download requests in GameVault. Super speedy downloads for my users, zero bandwidth coming off my home network.
I second backblaze. Switched to them about 5 years ago when AWS and GCP were charging me $20-30 for storing my backups. The same backups cost $5-7 on backblaze.
I’ve had a good experience with pCloud. One-time lifetime fee. Just set the Immich directory in its entirety as a backup folder.
3TB is a weird place to be with their pricing, though. You can buy 2 TB twice, iirc.
How the fuck does that business model work? 10TB is cheaper than Backblaze B2 in 20 months.
It’s not unlimited transfer like Backblaze. Also not as fast.
And ideally the storage will be encrypted and have basic privacy assurances.
Why would you trust a company to encrypt for you when Cryptomator exists ?
Also, a couple of 4TB drives for cold backup (one offsite) avoids another subscription.
Pcloud has lifetime deals with encryption.
I've had it for a very long time and paid once long ago. It works on Linux as well.
Hetzner storage box plus borgbackup (also to save on storage since it dedups).
I also use Hetzner, but with restic (through the web interface BackRest) instead of borg.
Is restic fine? Or should I migrate to Borg?
I think they are analogous. If you like your setup keep using it ;)
Use Restic backups to a local drive then sync that with something like rsync to ovhcloud cloud archive (not cold archive but that can work too). You can also skip the local copy but it's better to have one and if you sync weekly it gives you opportunities to do things like cull photos you took too many of before it slaps them all up. There are plenty of GUI based restic interfaces now if you want a quick check or browse. Use healthchecks.io to monitor the cronjobs and alert you if they aren't working.
And ideally the storage will be encrypted and have basic privacy assurances.
Do it locally with cryptomator or similar so the cloud will only see encrypted data.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| NFS | Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency |
| RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SMB | Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
[Thread #123 for this comm, first seen 1st Mar 2026, 17:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Borgbase has good options for Borg and restic backups.
I highly recommend using one of these 2 for proper backups. Borg with borgmatic scripts are fantastic
I'm in a similar predicament except my backup target is offsite storage reachable via SSH. What are people's thoughts between kopia and restic for such datasets?
I have backed up and restored several TB of data using restic. It's been great in my experience.
I've mostly used it to back up to Wasabi but if I was setting it up now, I'd take a good look at CloudFlare R2.
If you've already got a host, you might implement the rest server.
You could check out FolderFort. Sometimes they have lifetime pricing. I paid something like $170 for 3TB lifetime.
They have SFTP access in beta.
My current solution is to pay for a few TBs of cloud storage, which is enough for my backup needs. My server has a few scripts on it that I wrote which all run on different cron schedules. The scripts, in general, shut down the service it's backing up, tars and compresses the files related to the service, spins the services back up, then copies the compressed archive to a central backup location, and a secondary backup on-site external hard drive. Another script runs every day which prunes old backups from the cloud storage, then uploads the new ones.
view more: next ›