Why I built it
I’ve been photographing for more than ten years, and I run a wedding photography business. That adds up to a lot of photos that cannot be lost. I wanted my own place to back them up and manage them, on hardware I control, that keeps working if a drive fails.
The stack
- Ubuntu Linux as the operating system
- Docker to run the services. Each service lives in its own container, so it can be updated, restarted, or rebuilt without touching the rest of the system.
- Immich for photo backup, browsing, and management. It’s an open source, self-hosted alternative to services like Google Photos, so the library stays on my own hardware.
Fault tolerance
The NAS is built to be fault tolerant: losing a single drive should not mean losing photos. For a photo archive, that is the whole point. A NAS that stores everything on one disk is just a slower external drive.