It's tricky with iOS. Plugging iPhone into a server is stupid. Adding server as a network storage in Files app is smarter, but downloading photos this way does not guarantee deduplication. Would be great if Immmich iOS app had a restore functionality as convenient as existing backup functionality.
The immediately obvious and simple to handle on-disk format for everything I cared about was one of the things that convinced me to give it a try. Well-crafted exporters are great and all, but I really like being confident that I can convert it by hand even if the company ceases to exist.
Backups are easy too: you can very reasonably just rsync the library folder, and it'll be recoverable from that alone (I tried it! Worked great). You'll lose accounts and image-content search and iirc faces (possibly painful), but most of that is trivially rebuilt or not very interesting for single-person scenarios.
It's tricky with iOS. Plugging iPhone into a server is stupid. Adding server as a network storage in Files app is smarter, but downloading photos this way does not guarantee deduplication. Would be great if Immmich iOS app had a restore functionality as convenient as existing backup functionality.
You migrate from the server, not the client. You seem confused about what Immich is.
The immediately obvious and simple to handle on-disk format for everything I cared about was one of the things that convinced me to give it a try. Well-crafted exporters are great and all, but I really like being confident that I can convert it by hand even if the company ceases to exist.
Backups are easy too: you can very reasonably just rsync the library folder, and it'll be recoverable from that alone (I tried it! Worked great). You'll lose accounts and image-content search and iirc faces (possibly painful), but most of that is trivially rebuilt or not very interesting for single-person scenarios.
This is symptoms of a chronically cloud-native brain. What is a file system?