this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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Alternative to Google Photos (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 year ago by CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/foss@beehaw.org
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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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[–] CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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?

[–] eerongal@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] eerongal@ttrpg.network 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] CoachDom@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] eerongal@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 year ago

If that's the case you'll probably be well served with that model you linked above.

As for what your options are, there's a ton of functionality you can add to them through apps and can even practically run whole VMs on them. Probably not a great idea with the above model but the option is there.

Technically you could set it up as a pihole as well, yes, you'd need to install the docker service and load a DNS service and pihole into it, you can probably find some guides online how to do so.

[–] MasterBuilder@lemmy.one 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] twotone@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

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