I’ve set up a self hosted photo system with immich, and it works doing automatic backups of photos from the filesystem, eg using termux/cron, although it is a bit flakey. Immich also works for backup, but it’s less ideal.
iPhone seems to be a lot harder, backup in immich doesn’t work, it seems that iPhones have a complicated was of handling background tasks which make background backups very difficult.
Does anyone know a way of doing any kind of backup automatically, without plugging in a cable and without using iCloud?
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Have you tried keeping immich active for the initial large photo backup so that the background task backup only has the newly taken photos to take care off?
I imagine you’ve checked the Immich faq already:
https://docs.immich.app/FAQ/#why-is-background-backup-on-ios-not-workingYes I’ve tried following the FAQ, I’m trying to help family members to use it so we can collect photos together, and these hands-on tricks are a bit harder to convince people to do. An automatic background backup would be much easier
The only thing I can think of then is to get your family members to start curating the photos into different albums using the Immich app. That way the sync gets to work and you get the usage statistics of the app up higher allowing the background task to run. If you create some shared albums and ask them to contribute photos to them f.e.
Or simply telling them about your shared album and getting them to check it out using the app.
The photosync app is amazing! I think I paid a onetime fee of 5$ for pro
Have you tried it yourself? Does it work hands-off in a set and forget way, or do you have to open it for the background tasks to run?
I can second this. Photosync works very well. Although i had to use an external library on immich so that photosync can directly send files to that folder.
Mobius sync is syncthing for iPhone. It works really well.
Have you tried using it yourself? One of the troubles I’ve found is apps saying they will do something but it doesn’t happen because the OS has obscure ways of controlling background tasks. And it prioritises apps that get opened manually, which doesn’t work for a backup that is meant to be set and forget
It’s on my mother in law’s iPhone, and connects to my server running syncthing. It’s very reliable. Been running for around 6 months with no issues. I have 4 mobile devices connecting to my server with syncthing, 3 android 1 iPhone
You’re doing the biggest ad against iPhones. I was planning to get one but man it would suck if I can’t even have a background task of my own choosing
iPhone isn’t a phone for doing things of your own choosing. The whole concept of iphone is you slot into the apple way. Apple knows best 👍
I’m not sure how it does it, but my Synology NAS can act as a Time Machine server and my laptop backs up to it, no cloud involved. So I know it’s possible, but I don’t know what kind of open source solutions are available.
Yes I was trying to find out about time machine related approaches, which could work from my NAS as well (ok it’s actually a rpi). From what I can tell auto backup from a laptop is possible, however the only way apple lets you backup from your phone is if you plug a cable into a computer so iTunes does the backup (and then afterwards goes to the NAS). Direct from phone seems to be blocked
Searching the App store for synchthing didn’t turn up synchthing but it did turn up a bunch of sync type apps like
- Synctrain
- Resilio sync
- Goodsync
…etc. Might be worthwhile to try out a few.
Yes thanks. Immich would be fine as well based on the description of what these apps do, but the problem seems to be having it run in background.
All these solutions need regular manual intervention, while a backup system needs to be automatic and reliable. From an iPhone the only backup option I can see is through their cloud unfortunately (or potentially through regularly plugging into a cable)
Synctrain runs Syncthing under the hood. I use it with my other Syncthing devices flawlessly.
Möbius Sync is also a Syncthing implementation.
Synctrain is not awful
