I’ve been using PhotoPrism for the past couple of days and have really liked it.

I was considering Immich, but the rapid development cycle turned me off of it for now. I don’t want to have to deal with keeping up with patch notes and potential breaking changes. Immich also seems more focused on photo backups from your phone, which isn’t quite what I wanted. PhotoPrism just let me upload all my existing photos on the web ui.

I’d say give both a try. Both provide a docker-compose file, so you should be able to bring them up fairly quick.

I think the snapshot exists but is not mounted as a btrfs subvolume.

Is it not listed when you try running btrfs subvolume list .? You might need to change the . to a path that is on the array.

from the research I did, the @docker folder at the volume root holds all the volumes, images, subvolumes, etc. and I did copy that over.

Copying over the files wouldn’t be enough. You would actually need to create the subvolumes, e.g. btrfs subvolume create subvolume_name.

Do you happen to know if I find the snapshot folder and download it, will there be anything recoverable? Or would it just be like, hashes and unintelligble stuff?

Unfortunately, I am not familiar enough with how Synology does things, but a btrfs snapshot will just appear as normal directory with the files/directories in it. If Synology isn’t using btrfs for the snapshoting, I’m not sure what you’ll find.

I’ll preface this by saying I am not familiar with Synology, but I am using Docker and BTRFS (which I am assuming is being used on your Synology NAS).

Do you have SSH access or the ability to get a shell on the NAS? If you do, you can try running btrfs subvolume list . to see what subvolumes/snapshots are on your system. That will hopefully let you figure out where your data is. Once you narrow down where it is, you can try downloading it using an sftp client.

As an aside, the reason Docker threw a fit whenever you tried to update an image is that Docker was probably automatically using the BTRFS driver, which creates a new subvolume/snapshot for every image/layer. When you remove images, it would just remove all the subvolumes/snapshots. When you copied your files over, you probably didn’t remake the subvolumes. That would have caused issues when trying to remove images, or create new images/containers.

How are you passing the drives to the TrueNAS VM?

It’s your private key, but yes, you would need to keep it secret just like you would an SSH key.

The benefits of a VPN are that you don’t need to open ports up to the internet and rely on your individual services to be secure. Your VPN would authenticate users and ensure that the communication over the tunnel is encrypted (useful if you don’t want to set up SSL/https). They can also hide what services you are hosting or even hide the fact that you are even running a VPN.

Private keys are going to be far more secure than passwords since you really can’t brute force them in the same way you can passwords. Getting ahold of someone’s private key is probably going to be far more difficult than guessing their password. Even if an attacker were to get ahold of your private key, they would still need to contend with the security of your service, e.g. logging into it, which would be no worse than not having a VPN.