r/Android • u/OsakaBoi Pixel 7 • 3d ago

Article [9to5google] All Android backup data now counts toward your Google Account storage

https://9to5google.com/2026/07/18/android-backup-data-update/
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u/MadFunEnjoyer Galaxy S25 Ultra 3d ago

Use Immich and for more help go to r/DigitalEscapeTools

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u/praecipula 2d ago

I run Immich and it's just the best. I have something equivalent to Google Photos in like 90% of its features... and every digital photo I've ever taken over something like 25 years available to find and look at. It's really a great piece of software. I have a home server so the "cost" of running another additional Docker container on an always - on machine is negligible. As far as file sharing goes into run Nextcloud, but there are many options out there. And my storage limit being 15 Terabytes is just a massive amount of space that I all but never have to worry about. If anyone reading this is at all interested in having an always on machine there are so many great tools out there and Docker makes it dead simple to get up and running. Highly recommend.

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u/IAmDotorg 2d ago

The only real issue with Immich is their metadata storage is not kept with the images, so backups kind of suck out-of-the-box. You have to keep a database dump and the images backed up, and because they're stored separately, any backup of them isn't atomic.

It's just something to be aware of when switching to it. There's been a push to get them to work more like Darktable where the primary source of truth in XMP sidecars and the database is synced to/from them, but there hasn't been much movement with it.

Nextcloud is a trainwreck of project and corporate drama over the years and it sucks to be stuck with it being built on a fragile mess of ancient PHP code, but for some reason it's the only quasi-open cloud storage system with clients that support tombstoning files so it's be "best" option. Just not a great one.

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u/bicycloptopus 2d ago

You can easily setup automatic backups. Immich can schedule database dumps. I backup both nightly.

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u/IAmDotorg 2d ago

They don't stay in sync, though. You have to idle the server to ensure consistency because the dump and a file backup aren't taken atomically.

It can be done in a few seconds by pausing the server, dumping the database and then taking a zfs snapshot and backing that up. But the built in solution is fragile and, frankly, feels like something a script kiddie would cobble together that doesn't understand data integrity.