Alternative to Google Photos
Alternative to Google Photos
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
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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.
So if I understand correctly, Synology DSM is operating system that can be installed on any NAS drive? Or do you have to first buy their enclosure to use it? I found a used Synology enclosure with 2tb disk for $200 and I'm wondering if I should get it. Is stuff like Synology Moments (which is presume is just an app on the DSM system) free or is it extra?
Synology DSM is only available on Synology hardware. It is not something you can buy from them and install on your own NAS.
However...
There is Xpenology that works fairly well. I ran one for a couple of years and loved it, but updating it difficult and potentially dangerous to your data, some apps will not work and the latest DSM7 does not look like it will ever be available. I finally gave up last year and bought an Asustor AS3304T. Their ASM software and apps are not on par with Synology but it gets the job done for me at a significantly cheaper price.
Yes, DSM is the OS on all the synology nas enclosures. I've heard you can install it on custom built nas devices, but I don't know the details there, or if its easy to do or not. I would suspect its probably more difficult than not, just because synology is in the business of selling their nas devices more than anything. I have no idea how it would work installing it on 3rd party hardware at all, though.
As for synology moments, its an app that can be installed on DSM. Most of the additional apps are free (moments included), but off hand i know of one notable exception: Surveillance. You need a per camera license for their surveillance software, and IIRC every nas device comes with a "free" 2 camera license, but you have to purchase more if you want more cameras.
They actually have a pretty good ecosystem of apps on synology as well, including things like docker, plex, git, etc. that can all be installed directly on the nas itself and run as a service off of it.
It's worth noting that if you're buying the enclosures directly from synology, they generally don't come with any HDDs at all, you have to buy those separately. Not sure where you're seeing your "$200 for enclosure + 2TB", but i just wanted to put that out there as "make sure it actually includes drives if its through an official store or something" warning.
Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions!
Is there any benefits of buying directly from them? I think I would get a single bay enclosure and 4tb disk (I should be able to close in a $200$250 range).
It probably wouldn't be just me using it though - I would probably include my partner in it. Is it possible to have separate accounts for Drive and Moments so our photos/files wouldn't overlap?
EDIT: Have you used the self hosted email functionality? Can you recommend it over let's say Proton Mail?
Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions!
No problem!
Is there any benefits of buying directly from them? I think I would get a single bay enclosure and 4tb disk (I should be able to close in a $200$250 range).
Not really. I just wanted to point out that base purchasing from official stores does NOT include storage, generally. As far any "advantages", the only i can think of is that you know its brand new if it comes from an official synology store. Depends on how comfortable you are with second hand or refurb hardware if that's what you're looking at (though other stores can be selling brand new as well)
It probably wouldn’t be just me using it though - I would probably include my partner in it. Is it possible to have separate accounts for Drive and Moments so our photos/files wouldn’t overlap?
Yep. It has multi-user support, and you can even designated shared spaces for photos you can both access. Each of the synology cloud offerings (photos, drive, and all the other stuff) generally requires one account per user that is sectioned off into their own area.
EDIT: Have you used the self hosted email functionality? Can you recommend it over let’s say Proton Mail?
Nope, i haven't. I'd be wary of self-hosting email in general, though, just because i feel like that's a one-way ticket to all your emails being marked as spam.
Pending on your use case, it's probably fine; If you just want to have your own photos backup/home cloud server, it will probably serve you very well. This particular model is not very powerful (though most synology nas enclosures aren't super beefy in general), so as long as you arent expecting it to be a work horse for any heavy duty calculations (transcoding in plex, hosting VMs or docker containers, etc.), it will probably work out great. It would probably also struggle if you expect to have lots of user (10+) using it frequently.
I want my own person cloud storage I could access from anywhere in the world with some Google Photos functionalities and probably some tinkering but not a lot. It would be just me and my partner using it, but mostly just me. Maybe install a PiHol? Is that an option? What other possibilities are there?
Don't go single bay. Go 4 bay and set up RAID-6. This way, any two drives can fail at once and you won't lose data. This actually happened to me once. One drive went bad and the second drive went bad while I was waiting for the first replacement to re-sync.
It gives you extra protection from data loss when a drive inevitably fails. Keep a new replacement drive for when one fails.
Schedule an integrity check once a quarter, and you are protected from bit-rot.
Do regular backups to an external drive for the important stuff. Remember, this is where you're keeping your family photographs and your important financial and legal documents.
If you are really serious about covering yourself, keep your backups off-site, so you're covered in case of fire, flood, or military shelling.
You can have many accounts. Moments has been replaced by Photos (much better). Personally, I wouldn't hassle with running an email server. I use mailbox.org
I third this. I got my first one in 2014, recently upgraded to a faster model. I just popped my raid6 drives imcthe slots and continued normal ops.
I have openvpn configured so I can access it outside my home network, if I must, everything else is locked down tight.
It. Just. works. If you want to get sophisticated, you can. It will run docker containers, for example.
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.
Yeah, backup is very easy, I backup to a locally attached external hard drive as well as to a cloud service. There are loads of options and ways to manage backups