I view my photos using immich, historically I used photo prism with photosync to back them up.

My photos are stored on my nas (omv), immich is on my android and I access it through wireguard.

My nas is raidz1 with 4 drives, so it is relatively resilient. The photos are backed up to a separate external hard drive too using borgbackup.

What i’d like to do is the following: Back up my photos externally - at a family members house with a pi zero connected to a hard drive, which would be connected to their WiFi or via an ethernet cable to the router.

Ideally, the first backup should be done at home before, I don’t want to backup 100’s GB over the internet.

Would a simple wireguard tunnel be ok here? Should a different method be used?

Has anyone done such a thing? I read a lot about vps, but I don’t what the ongoing commitment in cost when I have a free option.

One of my worries is that I don’t want a compromised device on the family member’s network to compromise mine, would the wireguard tunnel be enough to secure it? Would WiFi be more secure than ethernet cable?

  • miaowoo_lw@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    3 hours ago

    One thing worth adding about the first-sync concern: do the seed backup at home as planned (borg chunks are resumable, so a USB hand-off doesn’t waste anything), and after that the incremental over the tunnel is small — photo deltas plus new shots, usually a few hundred MB a day at most.

    On the Pi Zero side: give it a real USB disk rather than an SD-card-only repo. Borg’s repository format does a lot of random I/O, and SD cards die fast under that pattern. A Pi Zero 2 W with a USB enclosure (or a powered hub) handles repo locks and compaction fine; the original Zero is noticeably slower at borg compact.

    Also lock down repo access: dedicated SSH key restricted in authorized_keys to command="borg serve --restrict-to-path /srv/borg/...", so a compromised key from home can’t be used for anything else on the Pi. WireGuard is the right transport — no port-forwarding of borg/SSH directly, survives the family’s router rebooting, and the Pi can be firewalled to only accept the tunnel.