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
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
The photosync app is amazing! I think I paid a onetime fee of 5$ for pro
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Yes thanks. Immich would be fine as well based on the description of what these apps do, but the problem seems to be having it run in background.
All these solutions need regular manual intervention, while a backup system needs to be automatic and reliable. From an iPhone the only backup option I can see is through their cloud unfortunately (or potentially through regularly plugging into a cable)
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.
Yep the unreliable background tasks are a major hurdle here
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.
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
