from Hacker News

Show HN: Minimalist, self-hosted iOS photo backup and sharing

by a1pulley on 11/11/20, 8:31 PM with 2 comments

• by a1pulley on 11/11/20, 8:31 PM

  After I maxed out the microSD on my iPhone with pictures of my new kid, I found that the experience of using a USB cable to download them to my laptop had a high enough energy barrier that I wouldn't do it regularly enough to protect myself from data loss.

  I wrote this hacky little thing to make it easier to backup my photos, share them, and free up space on my phone. An iOS app uploads photos to my NAS, where I run a media server that lets us browse photos from other devices. I periodically sync the photos directory on my server to AWS Deep Glacier for redundancy.

  Paying for iCloud or Google Photos probably makes more sense in terms of time invested: I'll probably end up investing a lot of it migrating from old drives or cloud providers to new ones. However, given the importance I attach to generation-spanning data like baby pictures, I'd rather have a digital solution that's as close as possible to a physical album—something that's always with me in the house.

• by cameron_b on 11/12/20, 1:44 PM

  I'd be interested in hearing of other solutions derived from the same problem.

  My wife and I were in the same boat. I'm not as skilled with raw creation, so I learned LVM and docker and I'm backing up my phone with NextCloud currently. ( to an Odroid XU4, running Ubuntu 20.04 ) It isn't very powerful, but it comforts me to know that it was cheap. Data integrity is a challenge I can own.