Hello everyone,
Since my daughter was born I am searching for a solution to share pictures of our child with my wife and create a copy of each smartphones photos and other files (documents). At first I tried nextcloud, but there is a lot of overhead and the administration feels kind of complex for what I need.
Anyone else having some input on which software to use?
So my main goal is:
Software running on raspberry pi (preferable docker). Has abilities like shared folder where pictures and documents get uploaded from multiple users and can be viewed (collaboration editing is not needed). Automatically copy files from smartphone (android) to raspberry from selected folder for a simple redundancy.
I have found synching to be very useful for making copies of files across devices. I have it setup to mirror photos from my phone, photos from my wife’s phone, and various other things (to-do lists for todo.txt, notes and shopping lists for obsidian… stuff like that) back to my desktop and my NAS. You can set it to do one-way sync (which is more like a backup) or two way sync (where changes anywhere are propagated to everywhere else).
As others have said, it’s not really a true backup solution, but handy to have immediately accessible copies of what’s on your phone in case of phone loss or damage.
For photo viewing and sharing, I am more or less pointing the photo sharing app on my NAS to the photos I sync from phone. They all get dropped into an “inbox” when first synced and then can be organized from there.
You may also want an actual backup solution. There are quite a few and that’s a different topic. The reason I bring it up, though, is that simply mirroring what’s currently on device is not considered a real backup by most people, and for good reason.