A lot of people talking about encryption in the comment section, thought I would share my setup. I have been running Immich for family and friends on a Hetzner auction server for about 1.5 years now.
Hetzner community provides official full-disk encryption documentation:
https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-debian-with-...
Letsencrypt gives free reliable SSL. You can easily hide Immich behind Nginx proxy that handles SSL for you.
Add cron based automated backup of the entire Immich data to a local encrypted NAS and there you go. Reliable, end-to-end, encrypted at rest setup. So far, it required exactly 0 maintenance.
It’s also more secure because I just drop traffic from all but 3 geographies at the IP level. And you can also add a WAP on the Nginx proxy.
It is also more more secure than Google/iCloude because the „employee of the company“ attack vector is much smaller. It’s documented that Google looks at your photos and is perfectly happy to file false police reports:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-...
By comparison, yes it is theoretically possible for Hetzner employees to access my server physically and extract the encryption key from RAM, or setup a fake SSH server to try to steal the key, but that is far more complicated attack and hasn’t been documented yet. And it risks detection.
Hetzner community provides official full-disk encryption documentation:
https://community.hetzner.com/tutorials/install-debian-with-...
Letsencrypt gives free reliable SSL. You can easily hide Immich behind Nginx proxy that handles SSL for you.
Add cron based automated backup of the entire Immich data to a local encrypted NAS and there you go. Reliable, end-to-end, encrypted at rest setup. So far, it required exactly 0 maintenance.
It’s also more secure because I just drop traffic from all but 3 geographies at the IP level. And you can also add a WAP on the Nginx proxy.
It is also more more secure than Google/iCloude because the „employee of the company“ attack vector is much smaller. It’s documented that Google looks at your photos and is perfectly happy to file false police reports: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-...
By comparison, yes it is theoretically possible for Hetzner employees to access my server physically and extract the encryption key from RAM, or setup a fake SSH server to try to steal the key, but that is far more complicated attack and hasn’t been documented yet. And it risks detection.