After moving away from iCloud and avoiding Google products at any cost, I’ve decided to set up my own media server. I implemented Nextcloud for a Dropbox-like cloud service, which, although functional, falls short in photo management. Immich is introduced as an excellent alternative to Google Photos. I utilize Immich for photo backups, as detailed here: https://github.com/immich-app/immich. I followed instructions from https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-immich/ to install it on a Raspberry Pi 4. To manage storage, I’ve connected two external hard drives and set up a nightly mirroring process using rsync, without opting for a complex RAID configuration. The guide at https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-mount-usb-drive/ helped me automate the mounting of these drives. I employ cron jobs to orchestrate the mirroring of the hard disks.

user@raspberrypi$ crontab -l

# Edit this file to introduce tasks to be run by cron.
#
# Each task to run has to be defined through a single line
# indicating with different fields when the task will be run
# and what command to run for the task
#
# To define the time you can provide concrete values for
# minute (m), hour (h), day of month (dom), month (mon),
# and day of week (dow) or use '*' in these fields (for 'any').
#
# Notice that tasks will be started based on the cron's system
# daemon's notion of time and timezones.
#
# Output of the crontab jobs (including errors) is sent through
# email to the user the crontab file belongs to (unless redirected).
#
# For example, you can run a backup of all your user accounts
# at 5 a.m every week with:
# 0 5 * * 1 tar -zcf /var/backups/home.tgz /home/
#
# For more information see the manual pages of crontab(5) and cron(8)
#
# m h  dom mon dow   command
0 3 * * * rsync -av --delete /media/storage/shared/ /media/storage_mirror/shared --log-file=/home/mahyar/log/rsync_data.log

Immich is constantly being updated, here is the steps to update immich:

user@raspberrypi$ cd ~/immich
user@raspberrypi$ docker compose stop
user@raspberrypi$ rm docker-compose.yml
user@raspberrypi$ wget -O docker-compose.yml https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/latest/download/docker-compose.yml
user@raspberrypi$ docker compose pull
user@raspberrypi$ docker compose up -d

Also check for possible changes in .env file.