[digiKam-users] Best practise for DigiKam backup?

[Jonathan Kamens]

I will share my backup approach as well, but as with Thomas, I doubt the
way I do things is going to be exactly how anyone else wants to do them.
Rather, you may get some inspiration from my description about how you
want to handle things yourself.

I'm a big believer in backups happening automatically. I don't want to
have to periodically copy/paste folders, or manually back up onto a
thumb drive or external drive, or anything like that. I just want the
backups to happen transparently in the background and tell me when
they're not working.

Similarly, I'm a big believer in offsite backups. If your data is only
backed up to devices in your home, then you're not protected against a
disaster that destroys your home, and you're not protected against a
disaster which keeps you out of your home for an extended period of
time, and you're not protected against a burglar breaking into your home
and stealing all your devices.

So:

  * My digiKam database is stored in MariaDB rather than SQLite.
  * My photos are stored on a Synology NAS accessed over CIFS from my
    Linux boxes where I run digiKam.
  * I do nightly backups of the digikam MariaDB database using
    mariabackup, full backups every 45 days and incremental backups
    between the full backups.
  * My home-grown network backup scripts
    <https://github.com/jikamens/jik-backup-utilities> back up my entire
    photo archive and my database backups into Backblaze B2 storage
    every night. (Note that the stuff at that link is partially obsolete
    since I'm now using mariabackup for the database backups rather than
    MySQL backup method described there; I haven't gotten around to
    updating the stuff in Github to reflect my current usage.)
  * Backblaze B2 saves old versions of deleted files, so if one of my
    photos somehow gets corrupted by digiKam or some other tool I can
    restore from an old version.
  * However, I don't want to pay to store those old versions of photos
    forever, so I periodically run "jpeginfo -c" on the current versions
    of all the photos that have old versions saved, and if jpeginfo says
    the current version is OK, I purge the old versions. (Face-tagging
    is the biggest culprit for modifying files and causing old versions
    to be saved, since I have digiKam configured to save all metadata
    into the photo files for maximum interoperability with things like
    Synology Photos.)

By the way, I've only just recently started using digiKam, and may I
just say how grateful I am to the people who have worked on it for
finally creating a photo management tool that runs on Linux that is
robust enough for me to finally stop using my old copy of Picasa. I am
especially grateful for the face recognition features and for the fact
that digiKam supports MariaDB as a backend. Thank you!

jik

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