So I’m looking to disconnect myself from Google and their tracking (as much as possible) and I was thinking about installing GrapheneOS on my Pixel phone. I mostly use my phone for Lemmy, Signal, NewPipe and taking photos. The last one is my biggest bother at the moment. The Google Photos environment is so convenient - I take a photo, it uploads it to my Google Photos collection, and after a while, it deletes it from my phone to clear space, keeping only the cloud backup. Is there a functionality like this disconnected from Google that I would be able to implement on my GrapheneOS phone? I’m looking to invest in the Proton environment (mainly Mail and Drive) so I could use that for storage. Cheers
Nextcloud, as mentioned, is a great option but does require a bit of work, albeit not much. I would recommend a Synology server. They’re fantastically simple and this was my approach after trying Nextcloud. I did this to divorce myself from Google. Synology has many mirrored services
But it’s a more costly option correct? Because rather than using an old machine, I would have to purchase a $500+ machine from them.
It is expensive but trust me Synology DSM is awesome and beatiful and it works really well.
second/third this. synology nas’s are great! I’ve been running one for almost a decade now. They run a good line between being very powerful and very user friendly so you don’t have to be super technical to get them working. To a large extent, they can almost be completely plug and play, depending on what you’re looking for.
So if I understand correctly, Synology DSM is operating system that can be installed on any NAS drive? Or do you have to first buy their enclosure to use it? I found a used Synology enclosure with 2tb disk for $200 and I’m wondering if I should get it. Is stuff like Synology Moments (which is presume is just an app on the DSM system) free or is it extra?
Synology DSM is only available on Synology hardware. It is not something you can buy from them and install on your own NAS.
However…
There is Xpenology that works fairly well. I ran one for a couple of years and loved it, but updating it difficult and potentially dangerous to your data, some apps will not work and the latest DSM7 does not look like it will ever be available. I finally gave up last year and bought an Asustor AS3304T. Their ASM software and apps are not on par with Synology but it gets the job done for me at a significantly cheaper price.
Yes, DSM is the OS on all the synology nas enclosures. I’ve heard you can install it on custom built nas devices, but I don’t know the details there, or if its easy to do or not. I would suspect its probably more difficult than not, just because synology is in the business of selling their nas devices more than anything. I have no idea how it would work installing it on 3rd party hardware at all, though.
As for synology moments, its an app that can be installed on DSM. Most of the additional apps are free (moments included), but off hand i know of one notable exception: Surveillance. You need a per camera license for their surveillance software, and IIRC every nas device comes with a “free” 2 camera license, but you have to purchase more if you want more cameras.
They actually have a pretty good ecosystem of apps on synology as well, including things like docker, plex, git, etc. that can all be installed directly on the nas itself and run as a service off of it.
It’s worth noting that if you’re buying the enclosures directly from synology, they generally don’t come with any HDDs at all, you have to buy those separately. Not sure where you’re seeing your “$200 for enclosure + 2TB”, but i just wanted to put that out there as “make sure it actually includes drives if its through an official store or something” warning.
Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions!
Is there any benefits of buying directly from them? I think I would get a single bay enclosure and 4tb disk (I should be able to close in a $200$250 range).
It probably wouldn’t be just me using it though - I would probably include my partner in it. Is it possible to have separate accounts for Drive and Moments so our photos/files wouldn’t overlap?
EDIT: Have you used the self hosted email functionality? Can you recommend it over let’s say Proton Mail?
Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions!
No problem!
Is there any benefits of buying directly from them? I think I would get a single bay enclosure and 4tb disk (I should be able to close in a $200$250 range).
Not really. I just wanted to point out that base purchasing from official stores does NOT include storage, generally. As far any “advantages”, the only i can think of is that you know its brand new if it comes from an official synology store. Depends on how comfortable you are with second hand or refurb hardware if that’s what you’re looking at (though other stores can be selling brand new as well)
It probably wouldn’t be just me using it though - I would probably include my partner in it. Is it possible to have separate accounts for Drive and Moments so our photos/files wouldn’t overlap?
Yep. It has multi-user support, and you can even designated shared spaces for photos you can both access. Each of the synology cloud offerings (photos, drive, and all the other stuff) generally requires one account per user that is sectioned off into their own area.
EDIT: Have you used the self hosted email functionality? Can you recommend it over let’s say Proton Mail?
Nope, i haven’t. I’d be wary of self-hosting email in general, though, just because i feel like that’s a one-way ticket to all your emails being marked as spam.
You can have many accounts. Moments has been replaced by Photos (much better). Personally, I wouldn’t hassle with running an email server. I use mailbox.org
Don’t go single bay. Go 4 bay and set up RAID-6. This way, any two drives can fail at once and you won’t lose data. This actually happened to me once. One drive went bad and the second drive went bad while I was waiting for the first replacement to re-sync.
It gives you extra protection from data loss when a drive inevitably fails. Keep a new replacement drive for when one fails.
Schedule an integrity check once a quarter, and you are protected from bit-rot.
Do regular backups to an external drive for the important stuff. Remember, this is where you’re keeping your family photographs and your important financial and legal documents.
If you are really serious about covering yourself, keep your backups off-site, so you’re covered in case of fire, flood, or military shelling.
I third this. I got my first one in 2014, recently upgraded to a faster model. I just popped my raid6 drives imcthe slots and continued normal ops.
I have openvpn configured so I can access it outside my home network, if I must, everything else is locked down tight.
It. Just. works. If you want to get sophisticated, you can. It will run docker containers, for example.
A single bay “J” model should be around $200 including a 4tb drive. You can achieve a lot with that, especially if your focus is automated photo backup
Do you keep an offline backup of your Synology NAS drive? In case it’s disk craps out.
Yeah, backup is very easy, I backup to a locally attached external hard drive as well as to a cloud service. There are loads of options and ways to manage backups
I’ve been using Immich. Very useful and easy for non techies to use. I know it says beta software, and it is; but it is more reliable than Lemmy…
Are you using it with multiple users/devices syncing? I’m looking to get out of Photoprism, and Immich caught my eye a little while back.
What’s your hardware setup for this?
VM on a Proxmox host, running Rocky Linux. 4G Ram, 2CPU, sshfs to NAS for picture storage.
Sshfs to Nas? Does that mean you have a persistent ssh session open from your host and are using it as a file system to a self hosted Nas at your home? Or did I misunderstand that?
Using SSHFS ; so yeah basically a long running SSH session. You can use other methods that your NAS and OS host support if you feel like it though. The NAS is located on the same network as immich is. NAS has 10TB storage, the vm only has 25GB, enough for the system install and running updates.
it deletes it from my phone to clear space, keeping only the cloud backup
One copy of of anything isn’t a backup, it’s a move. Yes, in this case, Google is doing its own backups but you’re giving them all the trust and control.
Immich! I’ve been using it for a while and it’s amazing
I replaced Google Photos with a Synology NAS + Synology Moments (app). It handles the backup from my phone, organizes the images, has facial recognition, object recognition, etc. Object recognition was REMOVED from the newer Photos app, but Synology is apparently bringing that feature back this year.
You can clear up backed up photos from your phone through the Moments app (not sure about the other Photo apps from Synology), but you’ll still want to have an actual backup solution for what’s on your NAS.
How much did you pay for your Synology setup? What is it? Do you have an offline backup?
I’ve got the DS920+, and don’t recall how much I paid for it as it was a few years ago. I’ve since upgraded the HDDs as my needs grow, and it’s as easy as either adding a new one to an empty bay.
I have several forms of backups, including a daily HDD connected to the NAS via USB, a monthly off site backup that’s kept outside of my home, and cloud backups.
Do you have an easy access to your Synology Moments library from outside of your home network?
Yes, I’ve got it set up for both internal and external access.
If you’re paranoid about hackers like I am, you can set up a cert based VPN, lock down all ports, and use the VPN client to access your NAS from anywhere.
Bonus if you have fiber, as upload to internet from home is as fast as download. That means fast download from your NAS.
Cheers for that. I’ve cut the cord from Google Photos without a solid replacement and it’s been… pretty miserable tbh.
I’ll look into setting up a Synology NAS, as it seems to be a relatively inexpensive solution moving forward (Proton is nowhere near what I’m looking for feature-wise and other self-hosted foss solutions aren’t really there yet afaict).
Another vote for syncthing. It just magically works in the background and is very reliable. I take a photo on my phone and within seconds it’s on my Photos library on my computer. (gThumb and/or Shotwell for Linux work well. )
If you can setup a small server (nothing fancy, an old refurbed office PC does just fine) you can setup NextCloud. I use it for a Google Drive/Photos replacement. Doesn’t have as many nice features, but it works if al you want is archiving.
You can also check out the Self-Hosted Git Guide, there is a whole section for Photo/Video management. https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#photo-and-video-galleries
Syncthing is another good option. I’ve never used NextCloud, though, so I’m not sure which is better.
Syncthing is great if you wanna to sync everything inside a folder, i’ve used in the past to backup savefiles of drm free games, but for photos nextcloud is a better option since work almost the same as google photos auto finding the folder with images and asking kf you wanna to sync them instead of doing manually
Is there a capability of having stuff on the cloud, but not locally, but they will still be accessible on the phone given the computer/server is on and that I’m online on my phone.
EDIT: See if I had a half decent computer, but with a decent storage (let’s say 1tb) and I had on all time - could I potentially use it as my own self hosted cloud?
To your edit:
Yes.
Yes, i did with my old pc, i used zero tier one to connect with it from outside my wifi, sadly a storm came while i was at work and it fried the motherboard
I use Syncthing to get the photos and videos off our phones, and Photoprism as the photo library.
But I’m looking to see if there’s a decent replacement for the latter, as the promised multi-user support that was eventually delivered was made a paid feature, without any acknowledgement for those of us that were paid up Github supporters up to that point.
This was exactly what I thought about doing, glad to know it works.
Yeah I looked at photo prism and felt odd at how many features I’d consider core were gated behind the paywall.
Since we’re discussing alternatives to Google, does anyone know of a self-hosted alternative to Google’s location sharing? (For family members etc?)
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ca.cmetcalfe.locationshare/
Seems to be working all right - give it a shot!
EDIT: Apologies, missed the self hosted bit.
EDIT2: Found this: https://fossdroid.com/a/hauk.html
Oh nice thanks!
I’m keeping my eyes on Locus: https://github.com/Myzel394/locus
Apart from the ones mentioned there’s also Murena cloud. Good if you have e/os phone
Ooooooo I like the sound of this. What’s the community’s opinion on them when it comes to privacy? I don’t mind paying a monthly fee if it’s all taken care for me.
from my very limited research, it’s not the most private OS especially when compared to GrapheneOS. They do make it easier to switch to a de-Googled product with replacements out of the box. I do recall a lot of their other products like the Drive and what not are open source
Imo its a very nice OS. Murena cloud is pretty private. You don’t get much free space compared to Google tho.
I’m sorry for my rec since I’m not sure if it fits your needs or spec, but I use SyncThing which seems to support everything?
I’m also not sure since I don’t use it, but you could theoretically get a tasker or automator setup to force SyncThing on Wi-Fi to your backup server and another/same one to delete them monthly/based on storage space?
It’s not an all in one, as I don’t believe SyncThing does transfers but makes copies? Unsure, this seems like it may be an option for you!
Bonus: if you have any kind of music collection that you like digitally, it makes it very easy to have an automated library :)
It can definitely work! I use syncthing for my notes, music, photos, config files, and more, it’s a lifesaver. I make sure all of my files make it to my desktop and keep it backed up.
This was one of my last de-googling projects, I currently self hosting photoprism, I have syncthing that syncs my photos to a network attached storage…at 3am it copies those pictures to a permanent location (I do 3am because during the day if you want to delete any photos etc. Before it syncs with photoprism… At 4am my nas backs up to another nas (they are just a few portable HD for redundancy) photoprism works great for me, not as powerful as say Google photos, but close 2nd for me… And for accessing the photos when not at home, have setup wireguard VPN for away from home access… I see you want automatic deletion of the photos on your phone, I’d say you be able to run a CRON job that maybe every day (if you have made sure that your pictures are for sure being backed up in the middle of the night, that would automatically delete your dcim pictures folder… I also run graphene, I’ll give it a try and let you know if it works
P.s. my NAS drives are connected to a raspberry pi
I tried to get Photoprism running on my unRAID server a while ago, but the setup was quite involved and I messed up a couple of steps. Ended up dusting off my old Synology DS412+ and running Moments on it. It’s slow as hell (running on a 12 year old Atom processor and 4GB RAM) but it got me off of Google Photos.
Ente.io is also an option
I’m using Synology photos. Auto backup for everyone’s phones. Shared common library we move things into for all our photos. I miss some of the ai search capability of Google, but never enough to do anything but self host.
Does this mean the Synology is exposed to the public internet?
If you wish. You can set it up to only sync locally (intranet only) or you may expose it via DNS and port forwarding.
I would need to think about this. There are times I need to look at photos from weeks ago, but not too often…
Moving over to the Synology would make it a LOT easier to switch OSs on my phone and not install any Google services. 🤔 Let me think more about this.
This of course presumes that you have a Synology disk station. They come in a variety of different models.
I’m surprised at how much I’m able to serve from my device. I use it for cloud storage, file thinking across devices, photo management and backup across devices, ebook management, running a game server for my family, running an evernote-like service, etc etc.
It’s been really good to have full control over all my information and not have to pay ever increasing fees to various companies for various services.
I’m thinking of the DS423 for media, photos, and notes. No transcoding.
I’ve got the same hw in mine. Although I did buy and install ram to max it out. It’s not the most powerful machine out there, but it’s plenty enough for us.
Agreed, I want to have 8GB of RAM for sure. Thanks for the input. Now time to save up.
Mine is only on my local network, but I am usually VPNed in anyway.
