Storage management in Immich?

[shrey]

What's the optimum way to manage the data (app code + uploaded files) and backups (of the app code)?

Currently, i've set the app to use an external Volume as the primary 'Data Directory'.

But, as the Data Directory also includes the uploaded files (which could be hundreds of GBs), it does seem prudent to have the uploaded files stored in a non-regular-backup location.
Initially, I did try mounting a volume and configuring the immich.json, but that didn't seem to work.

immich.json ->

{
"UPLOAD_LOCATION":"/media/<volume name>/data/immich_files",
"THUMB_LOCATION":"/media/<volume name>/data/thumbs",
"ENCODED_VIDEO_LOCATION":"/media/<volume name>/data/encoded-video",
"PROFILE_LOCATION":"/media/<volume name>/data/profile"
}

Error log ->

WARN [Api:DuplicateService] Unknown keys found: { "UPLOAD_LOCATION": "/media/<volume name>/data/immich_files", "THUMB_LOCATION": "/media/<volume name>/data/thumbs", "ENCODED_VIDEO_LOCATION": "/media/<volume name>/data/encoded-video", "PROFILE_LOCATION": "/media/<volume name>/data/profile" }

---

Immich references ->
https://immich.app/docs/guides/custom-locations
https://immich.app/docs/install/docker-compose#step-2---populate-the-env-file-with-custom-values

[nebulon]

Instead of setting up immich for external volume as storage, I would instead move the app as such to the volume: https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/#data-directory

[shrey]

@nebulon
That would imply: backups would include everything, no?

Which isn't really feasible, multiple backups a day, of potentially hundreds of GB of data.

[shrey]

@shrey said in Storage management in Immich?:

Currently, i've set the app to use an external Volume as the primary 'Data Directory'.

But, as the Data Directory also includes the uploaded files (which could be hundreds of GBs), it does seem prudent to have the uploaded files stored in a non-regular-backup location.

@nebulon

[nebulon]

This is true with the backups, however I wonder in this case what the benefit of backups is if not for the pictures itself. I am not sure what the app will do in case the file storage and database gets out-of-sync.

[girish]

@shrey I think it might be better to just set the data directory and just disable backups for immich instead. As you know, it's still in active development and moving around files will cause things to go out of sync with the database. This will just cause unnecessary headaches if we make this configurable. It is similar to nextcloud in this aspect (whose data directory can also not be configured in Cloudron package)