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Self Hosting a Personal Photo/Video Storage System

2026-02-16

I’ve started setting up a service to manage the storage of Photos/Videos for my family. Currently we are using Amazon Photos which gets us unlimited photos (we have 40 GB worth) and 100 GB of Video (we are using 100 GB) for 20$ per year. I could upgrade to get more video storage but it would cost 60$ per year for 1 TB of video. In addition to cost I also don’t have as much control over my photos/videos and makes me reliant on a system that could be shutdown at any time.

To give myself better control over these videos and help my learn more on system management I’m moving to using a self hosted option where I will use my Ubuntu based server with a 2 TB drive to store photos and videos with a backup to the could somewhere for long term storage. Monetary cost is not worth the time it requires to manage your own system so if you are considering I recommend you identify more reasons than cost to move to this model. Also you will want to have an off-site backup somewhere in case your local drives fail for some reason. I evaluated two options for cloud storage:

  1. S3 - Glacier Deep Archive for long term storage.
  2. Backblaze - Backup Solution that has cheaper retrieval costs than pure S3.

Basic Parts

I used Immich running on an Ubuntu Machine to handle the uploading and access of the images. An IOS and Android App is provided which makes it easy to upload photos and videos from your phone. I bought an external hard drive and mounted it using the .env file to set the upload location for photos and videos to the USB drive.

Every week a cron job will be run to upload the new images/videos to S3 via a created script. This repo is where those scripts will live.

Setup

Immich

  1. First you will need docker so follow the instructions on docker’s docs page to get it installed on your Ubuntu machine. I recommend the apt-get path so you can update in the future as needed. I needed to start the service after install with sudo service docker start.

I first downloaded the repo on my Ubuntu machine then followed the instructions here for install as well as upgrading.

S3 Backup Process

The readme explains how to deploy the infrastructure/permissions needed to execute the backup script. Then you just need a

The cron job:

If you haven’t created any cron jobs yet on your Ubuntu machine you can do so by running: crontab -e which will create a file to put your cron job config in, one line for each job.

There is good documentation created but here the line for my weekly job, script says daily but it can be run at any interval you like.:

0 9 * * 0 /home/user_one/scripts/daily-photo-video-backup-s3.sh

Problems Encountered

  1. At first couldn’t get the IPhone app to work correctly because I didn’t put my local ip address in exactly as required. You need to put in the entire http://numbers:port in order for it to access correctly.

  2. A backup in case local storage fails. I’m only using a 2 TB drive hooked to my server which could fail. I need redundancy and will for now probably look to the cloud to provide.

  3. If your machine is ever restarted and then you have trouble getting the clusters to start back up and connect to your devices there are a few things you can try:

    • First try updating your server by running: docker compose pull && docker compose up --force-recreate
    • If you are using a different location than the default you may need to re mount the USB drive where your photos/videos are stored you can do a command like sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usb to remount it.

Cloud Backup Cost Analysis

Backblaze costs ~ 6 dollars per month for a Terabyte of storage. This is more expensive than general AWS S3 storage but the closer you get to 1TB the closer the costs come to evening out.

This is based on my current library of photos and videos. My rate of growth is probably less than 1,000 new videos and 100 new photos every year and costs as you will see do not increase greatly. I can also explore Tiered S3 access or Glacier in the future if I want to save on costs.

Data Summary

Photos: 21,000 files totaling 46 GB
Videos: 1,900 files totaling 139 GB
Total storage: 185 GB
Region: us-east-2

Storage Cost

Put Request for Initial Backup

Retrieval Costs

This gets a bit pricier but is not too bad:

Get Request Costs

Data Transfer Out Costs

Data Processing Costs

Total Cost: $16.93 and that is only if I need to pull the photos back out of S3.

Due to the fact that I expect to very rarely thaw/access my photos I’m going to go with S3 for storage and if my access patterns change will re-evaluate.