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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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-workingYes I’ve tried following the FAQ, I’m trying to help family members to use it so we can collect photos together, and these hands-on tricks are a bit harder to convince people to do. An automatic background backup would be much easier
The only thing I can think of then is to get your family members to start curating the photos into different albums using the Immich app. That way the sync gets to work and you get the usage statistics of the app up higher allowing the background task to run. If you create some shared albums and ask them to contribute photos to them f.e.
Or simply telling them about your shared album and getting them to check it out using the app.
Works just fine for me in iOS 26. Altought sometimes it doesnt do it automatically in bg and I have to open the app
Are you opening it manually? Unfortunately I need to get it working set and forget if possible. And I’m trying to avoid icloud
Why set&forget? You never open your gallery?
It’s kind of necessary for family members who still need it to be backing up and may take a bit of time to get used to using it. If it’s not backing up pics then it won’t be useful when they do open it
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.
They do work, but Apple has a shitty system of ranking apps based on usage for background keep alive.
The more you open the app. the higher it’ll rank in priority and background upload will work.
That is very much the problem here, I would like to set up a set-and-forget system for family members so we can collect photos together easily. But that goes against how apple systems work
Aahhh i see, in that case, replave for them the default gallery app icon with immich; they won’t notice :D
… Interesting idea. But immich doesn’t work as a drop in, the default images collection includes a lot of rubbish so for it to be useful you have to manually tag photos to include with immich
Yeah, one of the reasons I still prefer android.
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 it yourself? Does it work hands-off in a set and forget way, or do you have to open it for the background tasks to run?
Yeah, I use it every day and have synced over 80k photos and videos to my servers with it. I absolutely love it. I know of no other option and I do not trust Immich or Nextcloud sync. I have never ever had an issue with photosync and if there is ever a rare error it tells me why.
I have it set to rsync to my local server. I open the app. It has already selected the recent media that is unsynced to said location. I then press sync and it does it in the background.
I believe the paid level above pro has some sort of auto sync based on location but I chose to not get that because I didn’t need it.
Super, super recommend!
Do you need to remember to open it regularly? Or is it sending you notifications? You mention that you open it and then it does a sync, how often do you need to do this?
Mobius sync is syncthing for iPhone. It works really well.
Have you tried using it yourself? One of the troubles I’ve found is apps saying they will do something but it doesn’t happen because the OS has obscure ways of controlling background tasks. And it prioritises apps that get opened manually, which doesn’t work for a backup that is meant to be set and forget
You’re doing the biggest ad against iPhones. I was planning to get one but man it would suck if I can’t even have a background task of my own choosing
The more I have to deal with them the less interesting they become… they work best for people who want to just do what apple tell them
iPhone isn’t a phone for doing things of your own choosing. The whole concept of iphone is you slot into the apple way. Apple knows best 👍
It’s on my mother in law’s iPhone, and connects to my server running syncthing. It’s very reliable. Been running for around 6 months with no issues. I have 4 mobile devices connecting to my server with syncthing, 3 android 1 iPhone
Do you need to interact with it regularly for it to work in the background?
No, not at all as far as I am aware. It runs itself periodically.
My cousin uses synology drive to back up her iPhone to my personal NAS.
Interesting, is that through a particular app, or from cable-based syncing?
The app is called “Synology Drive” and no cable needed, though you can set it so it will only back up on wifi.
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
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…
You can. It’s more straightforward in Synctrain than Mobius but both can do what the OP needs.
Synctrain
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.
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.
it can not do full system backups
Sure, I get that. Not kicking you in the cods, I just understood OP’s request was related to photos. No worries, all good.
Yep the unreliable background tasks are a major hurdle here
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
