I just have a script that checks my IP every few minutes and changes the DNS record as necessary

I’m not looking to become a sysadmin

And that’s fine and understandable. But I don’t think that Immich is for you. It’s not consumer-grade software. It’s a piece of Linux server software that requires occasional maintenance and administration. We haven’t seen a breaking update in a while but Immich does occasionally release updates where things will break if you don’t dig in to the config files and reconfigure it.

If you’re self hosting then you could just copy all the files from your server onto an external drive. I have to say that’s not a great backup solution though, and you should learn more about administration of Linux servers so that when things break you can fix them. I wouldn’t rely on it as a safe solution to your photos otherwise.

Are you paying for Immich somewhere? Then you’d have to trust the administrator to back your data up. I had assumed you were self hosting and by managed services I meant like Google Photos, or indeed someone else’s Immich setup.

You should have a backup solution for your server that should cover this, without that you should probably stick with managed photo backup services.

Well yeah you could go on the site and select whatever photos and hit download I suppose.

If anyone’s interested, here’s my Immich backup script. You setup rclone to use an S3 storage service like BackBlaze which is quite cheap. I also use a crypt which means RClone will encrypt and decrypt all files to/from the server. S3 configuration and crypt setup.

Then set this up as a cron job. With the “BACKUP_DIR” option when you delete a photo it will get moved to the “deleted” folder. You can go into your S3 provider’s lifecycle settings and have these get deleted after a number of days. I do 10 days. Or you can skip that and they’ll be gone forever.

#!/bin/bash
SRC_PATH="/path/to/immich/library"
DEST_REMOTE="b2crypt:immich-photos/backup"
BACKUP_DIR="b2crypt:immich-photos/deleted"
RCLONE_OPTIONS="--copy-links --update --delete-during --backup-dir=$BACKUP_DIR --suffix `TZ='America/New_York' date +%Y-%m-%d`.bak --verbose"
rclone sync $SRC_PATH $DEST_REMOTE $RCLONE_OPTIONS