I’m looking to set up immich on my server. How do you back up your media? If you get hit by a bus how do you leave instructions and mechanisms to your family to restore the backup? My wife won’t move off of iCloud until I have a great answer for those.

One idea is to attach a USB hard drive and set a nightly job to rsync the Immich folders there. Worst case, if no one's willing to rebuild Immich, they just detach the hard drive, attach to any computer, and copy/paste the whole folder onto iCloud or GDrive. Probably best to format the USB hard drive as FAT32 so that any computer can read it.

I use Restic + Rclone to create an encrypted snapshot to Google Drive. It's easier if you pick an S3 compatible storage though.

That way Google has no ability to read the data and it's only a just in case backup if my NAS goes up in flames.

You could write down a document on exactly how to pull the data off the backup.

I use Mega. They have the cheapest per TB S3 compatible service I can find, and they've actually been very reliable. I use Kopia to perform (and encrypt) the backups, so they never get anything other than the raw data and it's all done on a schedule.

I think I paid $300/year for 20TB, so it's not free, but it's offsite, well encrypted, and I'm pretty sure it will still be there if I need it next week.

I think the low cost reasonable option right now is to self-host a receiving address and then pick the email provider that looks the least trash and forward your stuff to them to actually handle sending/browsing. It gives you the option to go full self-hosted in the future if your mind changes with minimal headaches but costs practically no effort for the short term.

This is what I do. OpenSMTPD to receive mail, Dovecot to handle IMAP and spamassassin for full spam rules control.

I still configure my clients (Thunderbird, K-9, etc.) to send to my mail server, but that just forwards on to the actual email sender (if authenticated). This way I can change email senders without needing to change all my clients. There are still risks though because if you choose the cheaper plan (as I do), then you get grouped onto a sending pool that spammers might use and then you might get periodically affected if that set of IPs take a reputation hit.

My config for sending: With OpenSMTPD, process it with DKIM:

    action "process_dkim" relay host smtp://127.0.0.1:10027
    match from auth for any action "process_dkim"

A local DKIM process then processes and sends back to OpenSMTPD:

    listen    127.0.0.1:10027
    relay     127.0.0.1:10028
    [...] DKIM signing config [...]

Then back to OpenSMTPD to forward to the final email sender:

    listen on lo   port 10028 tag DKIM
    action "process_outbound" relay host smtp+tls://label@... auth <secrets>
    match tag DKIM for any action "process_outbound"

I'm not sure if I even need to sign with DKIM as my email sender does the final DKIM signing, but it seems that in the email world, it's always best to do things as "properly" as possible whenever you can.

I've been doing this for years, and spam and deliverability issues have been minimal and I've dealt with some big names.