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.
How would data retrieval for a non tech person work from an encrypted restic Hetzner backup?
Honestly, out of the box it doesn’t. Restic is CLI only, there’s no built-in “click to restore” flow. For a non-tech person you’d need two things ready ahead of time: the repo password and access keys stored somewhere they can actually find (password manager, printed sheet, whatever works), and a GUI tool, because asking them to run terminal commands isn’t realistic.
emuell/restic-browser on GitHub is a decent option, cross-platform, lets you browse snapshots and restore files without touching a CLI, though it still needs restic installed on the machine and the repo credentials to unlock anything.
Or use an AI to help with restore. Should work as long as you have the passwords and keys secured and ready to use.