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 post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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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.
Media doesnt dedupe.
And OP liekly doesnt have every picture 4 times.
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.
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.
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.
If you're already running ZFS, sanoid would be an option.
Okay, how do you get sanoid & syncoid to run, because I've tried, and I'm just too dummy. When it makes a backup, is it literally making a zfs data record/pool/whatever on the other machine? Or is it more like a file? I have a Proxmox running cockpit (SMB & NFS) and the machine is connected to a USB drive bay that has ZFS. My immich is saving pictures to my ZFS drive bay via SMB.
I've tried to do
syncoid pool_name/data/immich root@cockpit.service.IP.addr:mnt/samba/backups
but I get hit with:
::: spoiler Long ass error message
WARNING: ZFS resume feature not available on target machine - sync will continue without resume support.
INFO: Sending oldest full snapshot Orico2tera4/data/immich@syncoid_nova_2026-01-27:13:38:44-GMT-05:00 to new target filesystem root@192.168.0.246:/mnt/samba/backups (~ 42 KB):
/dev/zfs and /proc/self/mounts are required.
Try running 'udevadm trigger' and 'mount -t proc proc /proc' as root.
44.2KiB 0:00:00 [ 694KiB/s] [===========================================] 103%
CRITICAL ERROR: zfs send 'Orico2tera4/data/immich'@'syncoid_nova_2026-01-27:13:38:44-GMT-05:00' | pv -p -t -e -r -b -s 43632 | lzop | mbuffer -q -s 128k -m 16M | ssh -S /tmp/syncoid-root1921680246-1772385641-845218-1784 root@192.168.0.246 ' mbuffer -q -s 128k -m 16M | lzop -dfc | zfs receive -F '"'"'/mnt/samba/backups'"'"' 2>&1' failed: 256
:::
I've tried reading the github docs and some forums but I'm dummy. I just want to have backups that I can encrypt and keep in a cloud for cheap somewhere. Does it literally have to be two different machines (god I'm dumb)? Can I just auto run ZFS snapshots and encrypt then save those to Drive/OneDrive/Whoever?
You can do a sanoid sync to another zpool or dataset on the same machine or a remote host, they behave the same. It's replicating that dataset on the other machine, then sending the snapshots after that point over via zfs send. You can instruct sanoid to prune those snapshots after the send and start new ones for the next send, or just accumulate them so you have points in time to revert to.
IIRC, you can send a zfs snapshot to a file, but I can't recall how to do that, so AFAIK, you can't just send it to a file based service like Onedrive. You can use a service like zfs.rent and send them a harddrive with your base sync on it (encrypt it) and then once they've brought it online, you can sync to that. Best to test out your methods with the drive hooked up locally.
I know it's anathema to Lemmy, but the best help you'll get is Claude where you can paste the errors in and have it sort it out for you as you troubleshoot. It's pretty good at shit like that.
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.
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’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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.