Any downside in having restic always mounting a certain repo as read only to be used by an app?
I’m looking into picture gallery self hosted solutions and my setup currently goes like this:
RAID5 PC holding my pics in “raw” mode (As in, folders etc), performs a manual, periodical backup to a restic repo via sftp to a HDD attached to a raspberry pi, up 24x7 (The RAID5 PC is only up “when needed” as it’s a home multimedia server)
My idea was to have the rpi repo mounted as read only so I can add the solution (I was thinking photoprism) and point it to the mountpoint, so it can see and do whatever it needs: there’s a “RO” mode so, in the app side, it’s OK.
I know restic is not intended to be a sort of “container” to be mounted in a permanent manner, but I wanted to ask the downsides to this.
As the syncs are completely manual, I’m stopping photoprism and unmounting the repo before running another sync.
What do you guys think?
What’s the use case? Why do you want this app to be able to read files from your backups at any time? What is the problem you are trying to solve?
This app is like a self-hosted google photos system: It crawls your pictures and videos storage and keep an internal database with the data so you can browse it via a web UI.
Given the fact that I keep a copy of my pictures and videos in a restic repo on a device that’s powered up 24x7, I was wondering if keeping a restic repo mounted 24x7 would be any kind of issue, given that this is not its intended usage.
Cheers!
It would keep a lock, which means you won’t be able to do maintenance actions like “forget” or “prune” while it’s mounted. Which implies repository would get slower by time if there are more snapshots coming in.
I can live with that: Snapshots are made manually. It’s the family pictures repository.
From time to time, I collect all the pics and send them to restic repo. That’s like a couple of minutes every month or so, in which I can just unmount the repo, do the thing, and mount it back again.
Better would be to set up a nextcloud server and put your pictures there, then back up the nextcloud server.
Photoprism seems to have more features.
I’m not looking for picture storage and sync but for a gallery app.
So, I assume, as long as I don’t want to perform anything else, restic can stay mounted as RO.
Even still, I would suggest copying your pictures to the Photoprism storage directory and then backing up this directory and the Photoprism database with restic. Using restic as your underlying storage is going to limit the features available to you in Photoprism (no moving or deleting files, for example).
Restic would be a good tool to back up your Photoprism data, though.
How’s you go with this ? I’m looking into deploying something similar