Aby

I embrace and adopt the principles of self-hosting, and I mainly do it on Nebuchadnezzar, a Virtual Private Server hosted by Contabo, in Duesseldorf, Germany. I am very proud of this, and this is already a very big step towards digital independence. Still, all of what lives in Neb actually is in someone else’s computer, even though I fully control it.

The coolest, most secure, and most sustainable solution is to self-host on a device at home. Therefore, I am experimenting with a Raspberry Pi 5 to configure it as my main photo Storage solution, powered by PhotoPrism. It is currently hosted at my grandma’s, because I am not permanently residing anywhere and my parents’ home network is probably more bloated than hers.

Local network configuration

My grandma has a rather performing TIM Hub router in her living room, so the configuration is adapted to that device and that provider.

• The public IP address of the local network might change for any reason, so the router should be connected with a Dynamic DNS service to link it with a domain name and update the IP automatically if it changes. I used Dynu, because it has good reviews and it’s free—even if it looks terribly old.
• Port forwarding configuration

Raspberry Pi configuration

1. 💾 Mount the NVMe Base on the Raspberry Pi 5
2. So far, Raspberry Pi Debian Images are not available for Raspberry Pi 5, because Currently there is no support to Raspberry Pi 5 as it doesn’t have enough support in upstream Linux. Therefore, I Installed Raspberry Pi OS. I set it to boot from the SSD and not from the Micro SD.
3. OS configurations
   1. Enable experimental PCIe 3 support, for faster transfer speeds
   2. In order to connect to the device via SSH as soon as the device boots, automatic login has to be enabled
   3. It is a good common practice to change the SSH connection port

PhotoPrism installation and configuration

I am friends with the lovely and sweet Theresa and Michael, the current PhotoPrism core team. We met in Berlin a couple of times and they brought me to the wonderful Berlin Botanical Garden.

Therefore, I am quite biased, but the PhotoPrism’s documentation is very complete and exhaustive, so I don’t know what would be useful to write here. I only had a hard time configuring Traefik, but Michael promptly helped me, and I made it.

Backup

I am using restic with rclone to save daily backups on Cubbit.

1. Create a restic repository on Cubbit
2. Perform the backup of the PhotoPrism originals folder: restic -r rclone:Cubbit:aby --verbose backup /home/tommi/photoprism/originals --insecure-no-password (I am using the insecure password option because Cubbit is already encrypted)
3. Set a cron job that runs the command above every night