I have recently repurposed and old Hp Stream to a home server and successfully run Immich. I really like it and even a small 500GB disk is way more than the 15GB Google offers.

My issue though is about backup. I would only be comfortable if all the data is backed up in an off-site server (cloud). But the back up storage will probably cost as much as paying for a service like ente or similar, directly replacing Google photo.

What am I missing? Where do you store your backup?

  • @orankiEnglish
    4•5 months ago

    There was a good blog post about the real cost of storage, but I can’t find it now.

    The gist was that to store 1TB of data somewhat reliably, you probably need at least:

    • mirrored main storage 2TB
    • frequent/local backup space, also at least mirrored disks 2TB + more if using a versioned backup system
    • remote / cold storage backup space about the same as the frequent backups

    Which amounts to something like 6TB of disk for 1TB of actual data. In real life you’d probably use some other level of RAID, at least for larger amounts so it’s perhaps not as harsh, and compression can reduce the required backup space too.

    I have around 130G of data in Nextcloud, and the off-site borg repo for it is about 180G. Then there’s local backups on a mirrored HDD, with the ZFS snapshots that are not yet pruned that’s maybe 200G of raw disk space. So 130G becomes 510G in my setup.