My goal is to to fully ditch Google Photos for Immich. I have about ~3TB of photos and videos. Looking for a super simple way of backing up the library to cloud storage in case of a drive failure without spending a ton.
Ideally, this will require nothing on my part besides copying files into a given folder. And ideally the storage will be encrypted and have basic privacy assurances.
Also if it matters my home server is running Debian.
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.
Hetzner Storage Box Costa 3,81€ per month for 1TB and you can acess it via SSH vor WebDav.
Hetzner will increase their prices by April, still a good value
https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/statement-price-adjustment/
Another +1 for Hetzner.
I did an initial backup of my music (so I wasn’t concerned about encryption) with plain old
rsyncto 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
rcloneto 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.
+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).
borg backup + ms office family, it comes with 6*1TB (split in 6 accounts)
(split in 6 accounts)
This makes it not really suitable for this.
Backblaze desktop is your best option.
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.
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
You could check out FolderFort. Sometimes they have lifetime pricing. I paid something like $170 for 3TB lifetime.
They have SFTP access in beta.
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?
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.
Time is money, and the time it would take to keep those backups up to date is not worth it over cloud backups.
This is the way
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 SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #123 for this comm, first seen 1st Mar 2026, 17:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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.
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.








