Last winter I finally moved family photos off Google Photos. Not for ideology, just tired of Google One getting more expensive every year.
Hardware: old Dell Optiplex 7040 (i5-6500, 16GB, 1TB SSD + 4TB HDD) in the bedroom closet, running Proxmox. LXC with Immich for photos, Nextcloud for docs, and Matrix for family chat.
It was messy. I set up Immich, told family it’s done, but forgot to set up proper backups. In January the HDD had errors and I almost lost a month of kid photos. No 3-2-1, only local copy. Wife still brings it up.
Now: Immich with daily backup to external USB, weekly rclone to B2, and Nextcloud with versioning. Matrix is still half-used because sister is on Messenger.
Cost is now about $6/mo for B2 vs $15+ for Google One family, but time cost is higher.
For those who run Immich on similar old Optiplex / small box in closet — how do you handle backups without making it a second job? And how do you keep noise/heat down? My closet is warm and wife is not happy about second heater.
Happy to share docker-compose if anyone needs.
Get better cooling. Wife and kids deserve an AC in these inhumanely hot times.
Downclock the system to have it run cooler for now.
Get a properly monitored backup system which either sends you and wife an email automatically sorted into a separate mail folder via IMAP sieve rules, or has a dashboard with last backup time and diff size which has triggers if the backup is older than 3 days or diff size is larger than 10% of total storage.
I recommend the LGM stack (Loki, Grafana, Mimir).
Document everything and make it as easy to retrieve the plain files as possible in case you die.
Thanks, solid points. AC — you are right, but the heat is only in the closet, not bedroom. Closet door is usually closed, bedroom itself is fine. AC for the closet would be overkill, I just vented it. Downclock — already did, BIOS limit 35W and -50mV undervolt, plus ML only 02:00-06:00. That dropped 8-10C and it’s still enough for Immich. Monitoring — good call. Right now I have simple cron + healthchecks.io ping that emails me if backup is older than 2 days. LGM (Loki, Grafana, Mimir) is great but feels heavy for one Optiplex in a closet. I’m looking at Uptime Kuma with email to wife + me if backup job fails — simple dashboard she can actually open. “Document everything in case you die” — 100% agree, this is my current task. Writing a 1-page README for wife: where files are, how to get plain JPGs from Immich without Docker, B2 credentials in Bitwarden. That’s more important than any stack. Appreciate the checklist.
Hi Claude