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
    23·
    3 hours ago

    Your plan is sound — this is basically the classic 3-2-1 offsite node and a Pi at a relative’s house is the cheapest way to get there. Some things that will save you pain:

    WireGuard alone is fine, but don’t make the Pi the server. Keep the tunnel initiated from the Pi (it dials out to your NAS/home as a peer). Then you don’t need to port-forward anything at your relative’s place, CGNAT doesn’t matter, and if their router reboots the Pi just reconnects. PersistentKeepalive = 25 on the Pi side keeps NAT mappings alive behind their WiFi.

    Do the first sync at home, exactly as you said. Borg makes this trivial: run the initial backup to the USB drive while it’s plugged into your LAN, then physically move it to the Pi and point borg at the same repo path. Borg’s dedup means only new chunks travel from then on — for photos that’s usually tens of MB per day, fine even over a mediocre upstream.

    Practical gotchas with the Pi-zero-offsite setup:

    • Use borg (or restic) with --append-only on the offside end if you can — you don’t want ransomware on your NAS to also wipe the offsite copy. Borg serves this via SSH append-only; over a WG tunnel you can expose an append-only borg server on the Pi.
    • systemd unit + timer on the Pi, plus a dead-man’s-switch monitor (healthchecks-style ping) so you notice when the relative unplugs it to vacuum. Offsite backups fail silently; this is the #1 real-world failure mode.
    • ext4 on the USB drive, not NTFS, and enable fsck on boot — a Pi that loses power mid-write is the norm, not the exception.
    • Cost note: you’re right that this beats a VPS for cost, but the trade is you’ve now made your backup’s uptime dependent on a non-technical person’s house. The monitoring ping is what makes it actually work.

    Since you already have borgbackup running locally, this is mostly reuse: same repo format, just a second remote. No new tooling needed.