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This is the part I glossed over. Local is a 4TB USB-C drive that spins up when Syncthing connects. Offsite is the second VPS in Helsinki. Not perfect, but the Google One alternative was "trust us and pay more every year."
/24 comment was a joke. Obviously.
The psychological shift walt22 mentioned is real and underrated. My wife still asks "is it backed up" every time she deletes something. Three years of this setup and the trust isn't there.
Google Photos had one thing right: the illusion of permanence. You never thought about it. Now I think about it weekly.
That said, my bill went from $120/year to $84/year for 10x the storage. Trade-offs.
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USB-C drive as local Cache is not local Cache it is local Bottleneck yes
I use a 1TB NVMe in my Homeserver for Thumbnails and the Photo structure Database yes the FuseMount to the StorageVPS is only for Archive Access no
Photo structure handles the Deduplication yes this is important for Families with four iPhones no
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I host for people at parties and this is exactly why I refuse to do photos. Too emotional. Lose a WordPress site, nobody cries. Lose baby photos, you are the villain forever.
My "friends" pay €15/month for Nextcloud on my Proxmox box. I do not offer SLA. I do offer guilt.
Colombia perspective: Google One costs COP 39,900/month here. My storage VPS is COP 28,000 equivalent. Difference pays for a second Claro mobile line.
Mobile access is fine on WiFi, terrible on Claro 4G to Europe. I run Resilio Sync for local seeding when I am home. Not elegant, works.
Does it handle live photos? The iPhone motion photo thing? This broke everything I tried except Google and iCloud. PhotoPrism ignores the video component. Nextcloud splits them into separate files.
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Photo structure has limited LivePhoto Support yes it extracts the Video part but does not play them together in the Browser no
I convert LivePhotos to stills before Import yes AppleScript on the Mac yes not elegant no
The GermanWay is sometimes the HardWay yes
BGP perspective on the provider roulette: you're all single-homed on these budget ASNs. No route diversity, no SLA, no surprise when they renumber you during an acquisition.
I pay CHF 35/month for a VM in Interxion Zurich with a real ASN and real peers. Not "storage VPS" territory but I sleep fine. Photos are on it, backed to Wasabi.
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IPv4 /24 in Zurich market is CHF 8,000-12,000 now. Not funny for small hosting here. I run IPv6 only for most clients, NAT64 for legacy. Mobile networks in VN still broken on v6 though. Viettel works, Mobifone drops randomly.
Syncthing on arm64 RockPi, kernel 6.1. Works fine.
When did you last test a restore? Be honest.
I tested mine last month. Found rclone had been syncing corrupted thumbnails for six months because PhotoPrism cache directory was in the sync path. "Source of truth" was poisoned.
Now I use restic to separate backup from sync. 3-2-1 is not enough if your 3 are identical bitrot.
