"Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!"
What's a good strategy to migrate away from iCloud photos? I have a library roughly 1.6TB in size. My ultimate goal is to stop paying so much for storage and also have full control of my library 🙂
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High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution. - Issues · immich-app/immich
Even if you're running immich at home you still have to store backups somewhere, which costs about as much as icloud
well I have multiple storage units I plan to replicate the backups. So the setup I have is a pretty large kubernetes cluster in my homelab. I assume this is where I run immich. Then I'd schedule backups of the backups to other storage arrays.
but the main question is whether this is worth the effort with such disclaimer.
"Do not use it as the only way to store your photos and videos!" makes me a bit nervous.
to other storage arrays.Are these in the same place, or offsite? This is referring to two things: 1. Immich is still under heavy development, things may break or be unstable, so it could be the case that your Immich install doesn't work for a while or such and you wouldn't have a nice way to access your photos
I will have a replication in the same physical place then offsite storage in the cloud for super cold storage.
2. If you're dealing with data this important you should have rock solid backups
Perfect
Just wanted to establish that it's not really a way to save money :P But that's OK of course
then I probably should have a staging/integration environment to test any major changes.
yes I should rephrase this. Cost is one aspect but not the only driver.
Not too sure whether immich-go or immich-cli is the best for iCloud downloads (I think -go but I might be wrong), either way, CLI is what you want for such a massive upload
If you have well tested offsite backups you’re good to go. You sound like you know what you’re doing
The warning is designed for people who would setup immich on an old laptop, no backups, then get mad if there’s a bug or their drive breaks
hey there! i was in the SAME boat a few weeks ago! (i'm now a VERY HAPPY immich user! like you, i also own off-site servers for my backups ... and i run an immich test server to fully try out an update before applying it to my "real" Immich server.)
i've been in icloud since the beginning and had over 3TB of photos and videos shot on my iphone since the original iphone. i REQUESTED MY PHOTOS DATA FROM APPLE (https://privacy.apple.com/) ... waited about a week to get the links ... downloaded all the originals ... and then used Immich-CLI via my Mac to upload them to my QNAP server over 25G fibre. CLI was a lifesaver! so fast!
i probably could have dragged the files over from Photos, however i'm sure that would have been cumbersome at best. plus i wanted all the ORIGINALS, straight from apple.
fyi, you don't need to copy any of the albums / shared albums that apple includes in these downloads. that was something i found out later (ugh). they are simply dumbed-down versions of your originals (i.e. 720p video and 1MP/4MP photos). you will have duplicates if you copy over these album files to your server also!
SINCE THEN ... i have disabled icloud photos on all my devices and i've downgraded my icloud storage to the least possible (50GB for $1 or 200GB for $3 - i chose the latter because i have family sharing enabled), to only store my device backups (only about 4-6GB per device).
hope this helps, my friend! 🙂