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?
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Mobius sync is syncthing for iPhone. It works really well.
The photosync app is amazing! I think I paid a onetime fee of 5$ for pro
I can second this. Photosync works very well. Although i had to use an external library on immich so that photosync can directly send files to that folder.
Have you tried keeping immich active for the initial large photo backup so that the background task backup only has the newly taken photos to take care off?
I imagine you’ve checked the Immich faq already:
https://docs.immich.app/FAQ/#why-is-background-backup-on-ios-not-workingWorks just fine for me in iOS 26. Altought sometimes it doesnt do it automatically in bg and I have to open the app
iOS devices are pretty horrible at keeping a background task going unless apple owns it. Probably why they can get great battery life, but also seems pretty anti competitive. Not even google’s photo backup works well unless you manually open the app once in a while.
Yeah, one of the reasons I still prefer android.
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.
Searching the App store for synchthing didn’t turn up synchthing but it did turn up a bunch of sync type apps like
- Synctrain
- Resilio sync
- Goodsync
…etc. Might be worthwhile to try out a few.
These work in their own „folders“ on iOS, they can not be used to do a backup of fotos or other things…
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
