move data questions

[blublub]

Question

Hi
due to many users having the same images storage requirement are quite high.

My workaround was to use ZFS with dedup. Tests so far have shown a reduction of 75% in storage space - so it is worth it.

As mentioned symlinks do not work, I somehow missed the project page in the first test run...argh...

In the "how to" it is only described to move library or upload - is there any problem with moving everything in "common"? So also DB etc..

The advantage would be that all my installation data (imags and DB) would reside in a separate vhdx file (running hyperV here) which can be easily backed up later without using the CLI.
In case of problems I can attach this vhdx to a new immich installation/VM - so basically a "complete" backup, or would that be problematic due to the DB password as the new immich installation would use a new pwd - could the pwd for the new installation be changed?

thx

[nsg]

From the point of view of snapd, I think it should work to mount an external storage and/or bind mount to /var/snap/immich-distribution/common/, I have never tried it and I'm not sure how future proof it is. /var/snap is actually a ZFS dataset on my personal laptop.

Possible problems that I can imagine:

• A new installation will fail because /var/snap/immich-distribution/ is not empty. Workaround: install it normally and then move the folder.
• Removal will probably fail, because snapd can't remove common
• It's possible that any future snapd will do something that do not play nice with the mount

It would probably be safer to mount to /var/snap/immich-distribution or even better /var/snap if possible.

Talking about the databases, postgresql och redis I believe that both will play nice. Redis is just a cache for Immich, but remember that you will most likely backup an incomplete state if you just backup the files from a database like postgres.

You can get/set the database password with snap get immich-distribution database-password.

To summarize

Yes, I think this should work. But it may break or need manual tweaks in the future.

My take

I run Immich inside a system container (more or less identical to a VM), the entire system (/) is a ZFS dataset. I just snapshot the entire thing. The OS is tiny compared to all images and videos. Just a little bit extra data.