I’ve set up a self hosted photo system with immich, and it works doing automatic backups of photos from the filesystem, eg using termux/cron, although it is a bit flakey. Immich also works for backup, but it’s less ideal.
iPhone seems to be a lot harder, backup in immich doesn’t work, it seems that iPhones have a complicated was of handling background tasks which make background backups very difficult.
Does anyone know a way of doing any kind of backup automatically, without plugging in a cable and without using iCloud?


I’m not sure how it does it, but my Synology NAS can act as a Time Machine server and my laptop backs up to it, no cloud involved. So I know it’s possible, but I don’t know what kind of open source solutions are available.
Yes I was trying to find out about time machine related approaches, which could work from my NAS as well (ok it’s actually a rpi). From what I can tell auto backup from a laptop is possible, however the only way apple lets you backup from your phone is if you plug a cable into a computer so iTunes does the backup (and then afterwards goes to the NAS). Direct from phone seems to be blocked