I have been backing up the photos folder for my immich. Something weird happened with one of my hard drives so i had to restore. It has a folder for each year and inside there is a folder for each day. immich doesnt support the ability to drag and drop the year folder into the UI. What’s the best way to get all my media back into immich?

  • MorethanevilEnglish
    13•7 months ago

    A proper backup of immich contains 3 folders (library, upload and profile) and the database! It is linked to its database. Every software with a database should have a backup of the database too (Paperless-ngx for example)

    If you just saved the library folder, you will need to recreate all albums again and upload it again. Maybe the CLI can help you with this.

    For the next time, please read the docs about backup and restore

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      5•7 months ago

      Thanks. Database would error on backing up. Because I did not do that backup command in the link. I just used rsync to off site.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•7 months ago

        For future reference, if you use docker compose you can setup up this as well for each application that has a postgres database

        Give it the same user name and password for the database that the application uses. Give it a mounted volume then you backup the docker files and the folder where these backups are made at the same time

        https://github.com/prodrigestivill/docker-postgres-backup-local

        If you ever have a problem you will have several proper database dumps to work with

        I have one of these for every docker app that runs postgres.

        I believe there is a similar thing you can setup for mariadb and sqlite

  • @[email protected]English
    3•7 months ago

    Add the existing base folder as an external library, and use a new folder as the main immich folder for uploads.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      2•7 months ago

      Is there a trick to this? I have attempted several times. It always says the path is wrong… I’ve opened terminal for the container and CD into the directory and LS to see all my photos. Copy the path name and put it into the external library and it still says bad path.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•7 months ago

        Permissions issue maybe? Although being able to see the files in the containers terminal seems like that wouldn’t be the case.