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?
Searching the App store for synchthing didn’t turn up synchthing but it did turn up a bunch of sync type apps like
…etc. Might be worthwhile to try out a few.
Yes thanks. Immich would be fine as well based on the description of what these apps do, but the problem seems to be having it run in background.
All these solutions need regular manual intervention, while a backup system needs to be automatic and reliable. From an iPhone the only backup option I can see is through their cloud unfortunately (or potentially through regularly plugging into a cable)
These work in thei own „folders“ on iOS, they can not be used to do a backup of fotos or other things…
You can. It’s more straightforward in Synctrain than Mobius but both can do what the OP needs.
With Synctrain you can securely synchronize files with other devices that have Syncthing installed. You can choose to synchronize full folders, or choose specific files. With Synctrain you can also stream audio and video files from other devices. When you synchronize files, all changes, including deleting files, also happen on your other devices.
Am I missing something here? If so, spool me up.
If I understand correctly, iOS apps don’t run continuously in the background which doesn’t match OP’s ‘automatic’ requirement. But, I mean…tap the app, sit the phone down for a few minutes, and viola! Now if you are one to take hundreds of pictures daily, and you haven’t backed up in a while, you might want to disable ‘auto-lock’ temporarily so the screen doesn’t time out, or you can keep up with regular backups. iOS doesn’t expose the photo library as a regular file system, so the app uses the system photo picker API to access new pictures, and you have to point Mobius to the DCIM folder iirc.
So, ok not fully automatic, might involve one or two steps depending on the time span between backups, but it would work. I just backed up 131 photos in less than the time it took me to type this comment.
Yep the unreliable background tasks are a major hurdle here
You are right, it can indeed sync fotos. But due to the nature of iOS, it can not do full system backups (but no app from the App Store can do that) If all you want to backup are fotos, then it can do that.
Sure, I get that. Not kicking you in the cods, I just understood OP’s request was related to photos. No worries, all good.
Synctrain runs Syncthing under the hood. I use it with my other Syncthing devices flawlessly.
Möbius Sync is also a Syncthing implementation.
Synctrain is not awful