You can use https://www.photosync-app.com/home if all you want is a local backup. It has a killer feature Immich is still missing: encryption at rest of the photos.

Just run both Google Photos and Immich on your phone. Open Immich once a week to sync all your recently taken photos.

(The other benefit of having a homelab is, of course, you can run services that aren’t limited to cloud offerings and run processing on the data locally)

But its all under 1 roof and can be taken from you in a fire or be stolen?

We got rid of my mom’s family photo books. Nobody has space / desire for 50 pounds of photos unfortunately. We use a rotating electronic frame now to cycle photos.

Long term your kids will probably wish they were digitized as well

What you call a commitment, many call a hobby / learning / refreshening opportunity.

> If you value your time, the cost of a google pro subscription is not much.

And I happily used a Google pro subscription for a while. Even when they doubled the price. Then they started actually limiting it to 5TB and it wasn't worth it.

I guarantee you I am saving boatloads compared to the $100/month tier I'd need for all my data. That pays off my entire hardware budget in under a year and the time I spent is worth a fraction of that.

The value of the homelab for me is things I can’t pay money to get any other way. I would never recommend it for just replacing cloud storage, ROI is not good.

There’s nothing as nice as Plex for consuming media IMHO, and home assistant/homebridge glue a pile of cheap IoT stuff into a single, cohesive, useable setup.

I am a reluctant admin. I resent spending time on it. It feels like work, which after 10 hours of doing similar things for much better pay grinds on you. Luckily it doesn’t take much time to keep it going after the initial setup.

Thread and Matter give me hope one day the IoT stuff might be okay. I have no hope I will ever be able to get the single media portal any other way.

I’d be shocked if anyone running a homelab was really saving much if any money. From personal experience, it has snowballed into a never ending science project of upgrading and tinkering which i enjoy but it probably costing me multiples of cloud subscriptions. I just find it fun and like to learn, and love to diy.

This is exactly the reason why companies aren't just going to vibe-code their own software. It's more expensive to maintain than it is just to pay for it outright

The way I see it, I am committing more time and hassle to setup my homelab now to save time, money, and hassle later when the SaaS alternate's inevitably do something hostile to me as the user.

Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.

Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.

Eh, once it's set up the maintenance cost is minimal. Cron'd backups and such and you won't have to worry.

Be aware that for a few 100's Go the google takeout files will contains corrupted data.

You have to make at least 2 takeout to be sure to have all your files in good shape.

The problem is notto download but to verify and be sure nothing else is missing.

Last I checked Takeout is a single zip file. Once you have a photo repository of a certain size, that approach becomes difficult, no?

Exactly. Though when something similar happened to me, and I was able to salvage most of it, the next thing I did was:

discard/reject/delete: ≈400GB → 25GB → 3GB (< a decade ago; I remember) (I was shocked to see how little of that really mattered).

and since then I have been backing up starting from that 3GB set which, more than a decade later, is obviously more now, but the learning was don't let amount of data control/tame you, it should be the other way round. So I can just use multiple PAYG backup destinations without worrying about insane costs.

The amount of photos and videos I took also went astronomically down after that. I realised what I was missing - I had lost the data and for the most part I didn't have many of those scenes/moments to begin with. Because I was busy taking those digital photos and videos.

Of all my possessions, I would discard my photos last.

Whatever system it is on will die, etc.

unlike Photos, you don’t have a team of professionals managing it 24/7.

(that said, takeout your Google Photos too, because single point of failure, etc).

More so that any storage system will eventually fail me thinks.

For cold / glacial backups, M-disc will run you $200 for 10x 100GB discs, plus around $300 for a pair of USB Blu-ray burners. With that, your data up to 500 GB can be written in duplicates and stored at two physical locations (one drive at each location), with very strong guarantees that it will be readable far into the future.

If you write 2 additional disks per year, this is a $500 initial investment plus $20 per year. Compared to Google's "AI Plus" plan you break even in year 5, assuming Google keeps pricing flat.

Of course you don't get any cloud access or similar.

Yes, but it's hard. I've not found something that works well with glacier, because most backup solutions want to write state, modify files immediately, etc, and glacier can't do that. It would need to be an append-only backup; strictly.

I do a bit of a hybrid. Borg to expensive, always available storage, but really large stuff that rarely changes and is less important, I exclude and manually throw in glacier once a year or so. Think, all your blue-ray rips, etc.

I wouldn’t back up directly to Glacier, because you want to be able to verify your backups, and reading from Glacier is expensive.

Yes. Should have 1 onsite + 1 offsite backup ideally.