I’ve blogged that I see the need to move my data off big tech. Let the words follow some action:
Microsoft Onedrive
I’ve used Onedrive as:
- file synchronization service from mobile phone, tablet and PCs. Files that I needed to have virtually everywhere we stored there and would be synced. On Linux there’s the superb Onedriver software that would give me a virtual disk, on iOS and Android vendor solutions from Microsoft exist.
- photo backup service: upload the pictures I take, mostly with smartphone, would be synced to Onedrive, too. Onedrive also sent me a daily reminder of pictures of the same day in previous years, which I quite liked. However, I’ve switch smartphones all along, so most of the pictures I had uploaded for backup were actually only there.
There needed to be a replacement for this.
First, I downloaded all the data from Onedrive via the rclone command line utility to my local disk. Backup, check.
Second, I’ve setup the really excellent syncthing to sync directories to all of my devices; you can do this in a peer-to-peer manner, or - as I’ve chosen - with a central service that is always on. I chose to use my already existing wireguard based Tailscale VPN to allow direct connections between all participating devices, so I do not need to allow relay services (though they’d be fine to use as all traffic is end-to-end encrypted and unreadable for anyone, except me).
The software’s written in Go and exists in slighly different packaging on Linux, iOS and Android. On iOS, I’ve purchased a license for Moebius Sync.
Third, I setup Immich - an application specifically for synchronizing photos from your mobile to a centralized server running Immich. This really checks all boxes of the big tech solutions being it from Microsoft, Apple or Google. It extracts EXIF metadata from the pictures for dates, GPS data, creates thumbnails, and even does machine learning based face detection, if you like - but offline, without anyone getting that data!
Immich is set up via Docker compose and exposed to the internet via traefik. It gets its TLS certificate from Let’s Encrypt.
