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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Privacy Guides
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I appreciate the privacy-first model, but I don't think I can ever go back to paid subscriptions for my photo and video storage. Not only does it cost a fortune over time, but when the company eventually folds or changes their policy for the worst, it's a nightmare to get your photos and videos to another platform.
Self-hosting is what I prefer, although, I can appreciate that it's not an option for everyone.
In the case of ente, they have gone above and beyond to give full control to their users of their backing up process and backed up media:
To me, it really shows they care about the users and do their best to avoid vendor lock-in.
And I personally feel much more confident in a company when their business model is a paid one. I'm a very happy customer, I have also convinced multiple people who seem happy too.
I don't mean to talk negatively at all, and their product looks amazing (especially with the added context you've provided).
For me, based on my own experience and the huge amount of storage needed to keep my photos/videos safe, it's not cost-effective for me personally. If the choice was any of the other paid services or Ente, I think Ente would be the clear winner from the sound of it.
I didn't take it as a critique of Ente, not to worry! I'm not affiliated in any way, I just wanted to provide some context to people who may be concerned about the vendor locking aspect specifically.
Of course how you manage your media, your needs and your finances are all a very personal matter, I also self-host my photo backup, but I use ente in a complementary fashion, and I don't backup everything to it. It just makes it convenient to collect, share and aggregate media between ente members and non-members.
Cheers!
Ente is self-hostable.
Is it?? They don't make that evident anywhere on their website. All I see is a pricing page with no hint that it can be self-hosted.
https://help.ente.io/self-hosting/
Thank you. Any reason why they wouldn't make it more apparent from their homepage? I'm always interested in self-hosted solutions, and even I ducked out of there after seeing only subscription plans being offered.
...why would they? Self-hosting loses them business.
Has that killed Bitwarden yet? There are many self-hosted projects that also have paid options.
I'd be happy with a paid (one-time fee) license for a self-hosted option with any software. Subscriptions should only be paying for data/storage, and if that's offloaded to the customer's local hardware, there's no need to keep them on a subscription.
Especially for a product that's privacy-first, that really should include a self-hosted option (paid or otherwise).
I didn't say anything about "killing".
You implied that it would hurt business, and that really doesn't seem to be the case for other projects using a self-hosted/subscription business model.
If you meant something else, then I guess I misunderstood. No harm, no foul.
Hurting /= killing
Fair enough. I still don't think that being open about their self-hosted option would hurt them.
Maybe not. That's my best guess as to why they wouldn't advertise it on the homepage.
A software's website and docs are very telling, aren't they? It's like a cultural thing from the creators, some open source software will always be more business oriented, others are more helpful towards homelab /self-hosting users.
See their github for self-hosting.
~~Ente is self-hostable~~
Edit: nvm, somebody already pointed that out
Have you tried/are you using Immich?
I may have tried the demo at some point (along with other Self-hosted solutions for photo backup), but Synology Photos does what I want without any real setup.
For search, I use a paid software called Excire Foto (German origin) that uses local-AI. I point it to my network folder, and it creates its own database away from my originals. Expensive software, but it's been worth it. Synology photos also has searching by subject, but Excire is far more contextual and easily beats out anything that Google Photos offered.
That's why "portability" is important. Ente matches this bar for me.
But yeah, when it comes to one-off products like this you need 1 subscriptions for photos, one subscription for files, one subscription for docs, etc. Honestly that's the reason I use Proton.
Does proton have a photos solution?
Yes and no. It's super rudimentary. Android-only auto-backup through the app. It puts them into their own partition. You can't manually upload anything.
Not a good one, so no.
their service is very cheap, though. but yeah if you can selfhost it, and expose it to family that's good
Like with all other online services, it's cheap until your collection grows. I basically outpaced Google Drive (at the time), and it would have been significantly more expensive to continue with their paid plans. So, I invested in hardware. LOL
But realistically, if you have a smaller photo/video collection, then I think it would be just as easy to spend $5-10 a month and forget about it. I was working with decades worth of images, so I would quickly outgrow any 1, 2, 3TB plans.
How do you back up your media?
My Synology NAS is set up as RAID, so there's redundancy built in.
Then I have daily backups to an external drive (automatic, so there's no intervention).
In addition to (automatic) daily encrypted cloud backup (which I'm looking for an alternative due to rising costs). Ideally, I'd love to set up a second, smaller NAS somewhere else to offset the cloud backup costs.
Then I have a monthly backup on physical media kept secured outside of my home.
But my NAS handles way more than just photos and video, so this low effort is really covering all kinds of data.
I made the switch to self-hosting in part to reduce subscription costs of various services, and I'm sure that by now my setup has paid for itself.