alt Hacker News$200 hardware only? my main concern with storing photos locally is the need for a NAS. Even at 2-3TB you still need: a NAS device, 2-3 hard drives and the mini pc to run immich + power bill to run them. it will cost more than $180/yr. cost should not be the main factor people store photos locally.
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180/year? That's ~150watt server. That's a very powerful NAS. You'll be paying $200 per month form a cloud provider for such performance. A performant home low power NAS can be build that will consume easily, 30-40W. It won't need to be upgraded for over a decade. Ideally, 5x HDDs with 5 year warranty. The only expense is rolling upgrades of HDDs as storage fills up.
Backup to cloud glacier storage is ~$1.20 per TiB-month
Cost is absolutely a factor. self-hosting can't even be touched. And, the that's just the start of the value proposition.
You don't need a NAS, really. My setup is a second-hand i5-7300U fanless mini-PC I got for $90, 2 x second-hand 4TB HDDs, and 2 x USB 3.5" enclosures. It's messy but it works... I haven't measured power in a bit but I reckon it pulls around 20-30W, which is around $15-20 a year at my current prices.
We back it up daily using restic to an old 2TB NAS that's at my parents place + the occasional manual backup