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.
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.
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…
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?
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
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?
