I'm writing this partly because I think others might be interested, partly because I want to know what others think of my setup, and partly because I'm going to upgrade my hardware and need to review my setup so that I can re-create it on the newer hardware.
I have an old 2009 iMac at home that wasn't being used anymore, so I installed Ubuntu server 2022.04 LTS. I have two printers, so I installed the CUPS manager, which allows my to print wirelessly from iPad, iPhones and my MacBook Air. For media, I run PlexMediaServer (video) and Navidrome. For content, I run Transmission, which I can manage from a web browser. For e-books, I use calibre which I access via a web browser (on my iPhone or a Kobo). For coding, I've installed Nginx, MariaDB and PHP.
My router has a built-in VPN, but I'd like to install WireGuard on the server. I'd also like to be able to collect and manage my family's photos. For now, I use MacOS Photos, but since we rarely plug our phones into the computer to sync them, they are usually only backed up to iCloud.
What else should I consider?
Yeah, that goes for any data though. The question was more if Immich is really so unstable that it might just shred your images because it had a bad day. And to that I can say: no, it won't. Yet, photos are very important to many people, so they put that warning there.
My practical answer: Nah, it's probably not going to nuke your files.
My software engineer answer: Never trust us to not make a mistake. It doesn't take much to accidentally nuke a directory.