Summary
Remember when buying a new phone meant sliding in a microSD card with all of your data on it, just ready to go? High capacity microSD cards meant that buying a phone with tons of storage simply wasn’t a requirement. All of your photos, music, and videos were stored on a little bit of plastic that you could move from one phone to another. But no more. Today, expandable storage is a thing of the past, especially on premium Android phones. Apple’s iPhones never supported such a thing, and now we’re all left to pay monthly cloud storage fees to offload our data. But if you have a Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device, there’s another, better option to hand. The local storage problem There’s never enough The storage issue is a real one right now. Sure, you can buy a phone with 256GB, 512GB, and even a terabyte or two of storage. But you’ll also pay through the nose for one of those things. Nobody wants to do that, and even if they do, how much storage is enough? Phones come with bigger and bigger camera sensors which create ever larger photo and video files. Apps themselves are bigger than ever, and console-quality games can take up tens of gigabytes each. Choosing a phone with the right amount of storage just isn’t as easy as it used to be — when you only had a couple of options to choose from and files were small. That’s why having a way to offload these files to some other storage is vital. That used to be a microSD card, nowadays it tends to be cloud-based storage. But you can also use your own NAS instead, and you might be surprised how seamless the experience can be. Automatic background backup Let Immich handle everything Immich is a high-performance, self-hosted photo and video backup solution designed to replace the ever-popular, ever-costly Google Photos. Setting up an Immich server takes just a few minutes, whether that’s on a home server or right on the NAS itself if it supports Docker containerization. By setting up an Immich server on your local network, you can take full control of your photo library for the first time. You’ll know that every photo you snap and video you capture will be safe and sound on a storage device under your own control. And the key is making the whole system work as seamlessly as possible. Thankfully, the Immich server software is just part of the equation. There’s also an Immich phone app which acts as the conduit for all of your photos and videos as they make their way to your server. The Immich phone app allows you to select specific local folders and albums to hook into its automatic background syncing service. Once set up, every photo and every video will be automatically saved to your Immich server without any loss of quality. And, importantly, without any input required from you. You can even customize how and when the process works to optimize battery and data usage as well. Taking your NAS on the road Remote access to the rescue One of the cool things about having a large capacity microSD card in your phone was that it was always there, always ready to be used. Cloud services can also achieve this, albeit with their own array of caveats — performance, privacy, etc. But you can take your NAS on the road, too. Figuratively, at least. While you can have Immich automatically begin backing up your media when you return home, the more elegant solution is to enable remote access for when you’re on the road. There are a couple of ways to do just that. One is to use the VPN feature that is likely built right into your router. By connecting to that VPN when you’re away from home, the Immich app will continue to work from anywhere in the world. As far as Immich is concerned, you might as well be sitting on your sofa at home. The favored approach among Immich users is to go the Tailscale route. Tailscale creates a virtual network between your chosen devices, no matter where they are. It’s based on the WireGuard protocol, just like many VPNs, so you know that it’s safe and secure. It’s also easy to get set up and use, which is a bonus. You can take your NAS on the road, too. With Tailscale installed and running, your phone will continue to silently upload your media in the background just as if you never left home. The humble NAS may be the solution you’ve been waiting for The loss of microSD-based expansion is something that the smartphone world is still coming to terms with. But it doesn’t have to mean surrendering control of your photo library to a cloud server, or risking losing valuable photos because they aren’t backed up. With a little setting up and some configuration, you can task your NAS with taking care of everything. It can be your own, private media backup pipeline that keeps your entire photo and video library at your fingertips. No matter where you happen to be.