How do you actually back up and save your photos and media off of your Android phone?
I've mostly just relied on Google Photos, and I really like its features. However, I have always been deathly afraid of losing access to my Google photos account and losing all of those, so I need a better way to actually back up my photos. Right now all I do is do a Google Takeout every so often, but that's inefficient as hell.
How do you do it? How do you backup or sync your photos with a PC/local server?
Syncthing, super easy to set up and use on android and linux. It works with everything, not just photos.
To access files stored on my home server from my phone, I use Material Files with sftp set up
Syncthing is awesome. I'm never losing data to a damaged or stolen device again, and it makes accessing data from a computer and sending data to the phone so much easier.
But we have to keep in mind that syncthing doesn't protect by default us from accidental deletion, so it's not a 100% replacement for a backup.
Quote Syncthing! I've also a Nextcloud instance shared with my girlfriend in order to share selected photos.
Just gonna chime in and agree with this guy. Syncthing is great! I use it with Android and Windows for my photos and password manager.
Syncthing is what I use as well. Great for automatically syncing photos to my PC, and backing up my PC files to my phone. Pretty close equivalent to Google photo sync, and your files stay private.
Same here, syncthing is fantastic and I use it for all kinds of stuff - including backing up phone media.
Yes! Immich is incredible. It's a self hosted Google images for anyone that doesn't know, and it's really close to being an exact replica.
I absolutely love it. https://immich.app/
Another +1 for immich, set it up a week ago and have been in love, minor growing pains but already making serious progress
I use syncthing to sync my camera folder on my pixel 6a phone with a folder on my NAS.
Then I have an old moto x with pixel experience rom (the rom has unlimited Google photos backup) and syncthing. This phone turns on once a day at night with a smartplug - the folder on my NAS syncs with a folder on phone. The phone backs up the photos to Google photos at full quality.
I'm still mad that Google took away the photo backup for pixel phones. But this seems to work for now
Same! I overuse Syncthing lol. I've got my photos syncing plus going bidirectional with my screenshots and documents directory and it's so convenient and streamlined. I've got a 1TB in my laptop so it hasn't been an issue and it's nice to know between 2 devices with photos saved offline and Google Photos I'm not sweating.
Personally, I prefer using a cable to transfer photos and videos from my device to my PC. Once they are on my computer, I make sure to back them up onto external hard drives.
Look into getting a USB-C flash drive and transfer the photos to that. You can find a 128gb drive for $15.
USB flash drives are not reliable for long-term storage. Please make sure you have another backup if you keep your photos on one.
Syncthing-fork /sdcard so I don't need to worry about losing my phone. Saved me when my nexus 5x suddenly boot looped
It's much better. For example, if you say "sync only while charging", you can open the app while you're on battery, to check status or settings, instead on main it just kicks you out "you're not charging"
+1 for synching-fork. I have mine sync to my server and every week run rclone copy to B2 using the rclone encryption. 3-2-1
I have a two-pronged approach. I use Google photos as is with their normal compression for searchability and casual browsing of photos, but I also have Nextcloud running on my own server where my photos are all backed up in full quality. Both uploads happen automatically so I don't have to think about it
I really miss when Google let you sync your Photos collection to a PC with the Google drive client. There's third party sync tools now but Google's API limits them to the "High quality" versions instead of original
Right now I'm just using Onedrive, might setup Immich soon
immich is really promising. Works well for the basic stuff (and quickly adding features) but it's still early days.
Plug in to lappy, run shell script that crawls DCIM for dngs, jpgs, mp4s etc and sticks em in folders named by date
For Android, i connect my phone via usb copy things to a temp folder and then have a small scrip that will archive the photos using timestamps in my nas. This is the heart of the script that goes through varios temp folders:
for i in $FROMD1 $FROMD2 $FROMD3
do
cd $WD
exiftool -d "%Y/%m/%d/%y_%m_%d_%H_%M_%S%%-c.%%e" "-Filename<DateTimeOriginal" $i
done
With my Samsung s22+ I can just plug in a usb-c cable to my PC and then browse the files on my phone to back them up.
I also have a flash drive where one side is usb-c and the other is USB A. SanDisk Dual Drive
Another alternative (more technical) could be to to use Solid Explorer which has the ability to setup remote connections to online backup. It also has a built in FTP server you can start on your phone and then from your PC you can connect and get your photos.
I just pay for Google Photos and forget about it, it's the easiest way and worth my money. Most apps are backed up in a server anyway.
I ran out of space on my Google photos 😔 I've converted to Christianity and pray every night to God in heaven that my phone doesn't die.