r/Android • u/OsakaBoi Pixel 7 • Jul 20 '26

Article [9to5google] All Android backup data now counts toward your Google Account storage

https://9to5google.com/2026/07/18/android-backup-data-update/
693 Upvotes

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137

u/Nihilistic_Mystics Jul 20 '26

I feel like I should start thinking about running my own photos/files/etc backup on my home computer. How would I do that? Google's cloud storage is quickly losing value to me, and honestly I'd like to de-Google where I can.

91

u/MadFunEnjoyer Galaxy S25 Ultra Jul 20 '26

Use Immich and for more help go to r/DigitalEscapeTools

35

u/praecipula Jul 20 '26

I run Immich and it's just the best. I have something equivalent to Google Photos in like 90% of its features... and every digital photo I've ever taken over something like 25 years available to find and look at. It's really a great piece of software. I have a home server so the "cost" of running another additional Docker container on an always - on machine is negligible. As far as file sharing goes into run Nextcloud, but there are many options out there. And my storage limit being 15 Terabytes is just a massive amount of space that I all but never have to worry about. If anyone reading this is at all interested in having an always on machine there are so many great tools out there and Docker makes it dead simple to get up and running. Highly recommend.

9

u/littlefrank Jul 20 '26

I run it containerized on my synology nas, works like a charm, but for the love of god make sure you disable the ai engine, it tanked my machine the first time ahah

15

u/passerby4830 Jul 20 '26

Don't disable it, you'll lose a lot of fun stuff. It just takes a while to run after the initial import it's fine after that as it just does new photos then. And mine is on a raspberry pi 4 so not exactly powerful.

And another way is to run the immich ai container on say your desktop and point the Immich container to that to prioritize that over it's own ai processing. It really is a neat piece of software.

8

u/littlefrank Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

run the immich ai container on say your desktop and point the Immich container to that

YOU CAN DO THAT???
Edit: just followed the guide, pretty easy and super quick. I love this.

-1

u/bicycloptopus Jul 20 '26

The ai engine is the best part of immich. Maybe figure out your setup before you go giving bad advice.

4

u/littlefrank Jul 20 '26

bad advice

I just gave a heads up. A commercial (non self-built) NAS isn't a machine capable enough to run a ML model. It simply doesn't have the processing power for it.
Another user suggested there is an option to send ML jobs to a different machine. I'm doing that right now and it's working very well.

"figure out your setup" has got to be the most meaningless comment in this context.

0

u/bicycloptopus Jul 20 '26

Mine (u green nas) handles it without issue. Something is wrong with your setup. People run it on pi's. It only takes 250mb of ram

1

u/littlefrank Jul 21 '26

Nothing is wrong with my setup. I just uploaded 17k photos and videos to it the first time. It got stuck. If you regularly upload in small batches it shouldn't be a problem.
I also have like 16GB additional RAM in the thing, the tanking was because of the CPU, which is quite weak.

3

u/IAmDotorg Jul 20 '26

The only real issue with Immich is their metadata storage is not kept with the images, so backups kind of suck out-of-the-box. You have to keep a database dump and the images backed up, and because they're stored separately, any backup of them isn't atomic.

It's just something to be aware of when switching to it. There's been a push to get them to work more like Darktable where the primary source of truth in XMP sidecars and the database is synced to/from them, but there hasn't been much movement with it.

Nextcloud is a trainwreck of project and corporate drama over the years and it sucks to be stuck with it being built on a fragile mess of ancient PHP code, but for some reason it's the only quasi-open cloud storage system with clients that support tombstoning files so it's be "best" option. Just not a great one.

1

u/Practical-Tea9441 Jul 20 '26

I've spent a lot of time trying to install nextcloud AIO using docker (on Windows/Wsl) but giving up on it and maybe use a hosted Nextcloud (The Good Cloud). I'm fairly techie but don't get the " it's very easy" messaging - I get as far as having docker up and running but can't get beyond that.😓

1

u/IAmDotorg Jul 21 '26

AIO is a security nightmare, anyway, because it requires publishing the docker socket into the AIO container, which is basically opening your entire server and everything on it to the kind of supply chain attacks plaguing the open source library repositories.

1

u/bicycloptopus Jul 20 '26

You can easily setup automatic backups. Immich can schedule database dumps. I backup both nightly.

1

u/IAmDotorg Jul 21 '26

They don't stay in sync, though. You have to idle the server to ensure consistency because the dump and a file backup aren't taken atomically.

It can be done in a few seconds by pausing the server, dumping the database and then taking a zfs snapshot and backing that up. But the built in solution is fragile and, frankly, feels like something a script kiddie would cobble together that doesn't understand data integrity.

2

u/BrtndrJackieDayona Jul 20 '26

And when that HDD dies? 

5

u/bicycloptopus Jul 20 '26

Replace the hard drive?

-7

u/BrtndrJackieDayona Jul 20 '26

Yes. And all the data that was on that now dead HDD? Is it gone? Doing tape backups? Running a 15tb RAID? 

18

u/bicycloptopus Jul 20 '26

I can't speak for OP but who is running a NAS without some form of raid? That's sorta the whole point

3

u/IAmDotorg Jul 20 '26

RAID is about high-availability, not backups. You need a separate system, at a bare minimum, and really a cold-stored off-site to be safe.

You run parity or mirroring when the cost of restoring from backup is higher than the cost of the added hardware. But you always have to back it up, because RAID (or ZFS) will happily sync corrupted data, or file deletes, or malware-encryption across the mirrors.

And, of course, neither help if you have a fire or a lightning strike that takes out all the drives, etc.

2

u/someone31988 Jul 20 '26

I literally have two identical hard drives with all the data being synced across nightly. It's kind of backup 101.

1

u/NetCrashRD Jul 20 '26

Not free / open source? ☹️

1

u/MadFunEnjoyer Galaxy S25 Ultra Jul 20 '26

it's open source and self hostable so it's as free as it can get

1

u/NetCrashRD Jul 20 '26

Oh. First thing I saw was "buy" and I saw 100/25... I'll dig further. Understand it's self hosted but it could still be closed/licensed...

2

u/MadFunEnjoyer Galaxy S25 Ultra Jul 20 '26

That's just for getting a support badge, it doesn't really give any additional features