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

    Yes, this works and people do exactly this — but a few things will make or break it:

    Borg client-side encryption solves your trust worry. The Pi only ever sees encrypted chunks, so it doesn’t matter that it sits on a family member’s network. They can’t read a thing, and they can’t even see file names. (This is the answer to the “you need to trust the remote household” concern — you don’t, that’s the whole point of Borg’s design.)

    NAT traversal is the real friction. Your NAS can reach out through the tunnel to push, which works if the Pi side has the tunnel endpoint reachable. Easiest reliable options: have the Pi run Tailscale (zero config, works behind any router the family has), or have the pull direction — Pi connects to your NAS and runs borgbackup --client style pull. With plain WireGuard between two home NATs you’ll be fighting dynamic IPs and CGNAT.

    Seed at home, then let deltas flow. Format the disk and do the first borg init + full backup at home. Borg is content-addressed and deduped, so after the initial seed, daily backups over any normal WiFi/DSL line are just a few hundred MB of deltas. No need for a VPS unless the family setup becomes unreliable.

    One caution: a Pi Zero on a shared WiFi will eventually get unplugged or the router rebooted and you won’t know. Add a dead-man check on the NAS side (e.g. a cron that alerts you if the last successful backup is > 48h old). The failure mode of “offsite backup silently stopped 3 months ago” is unfortunately the most common one.