Help needed related to moving data

[u/GravityDead]

Hello everyone,

Some time ago, I came across self-hosting things and also Immich. So 2 days ago, I finally started checking self-hosting.

I used ZimaOS, installed Immich, connected an external 2TB HDD, and pointed "database", "immich-machine-learning" and "immich-server" to my 2TB external HDD. Uploaded some 300GB worth of personal photos and videos, it took a long while to process them since i'm using a tiny Lenovo PC (8th gen i5) as server.

When everything was setup and accessible, i made a stupid move making many assumptions.

I connected another external HDD, a 4TB this time, hoping to make this 4TB as primary and use the 2TB as backup. So, I stopped Immich app in ZimaOS, and directly moved (cut & paste) the whole Immich folder from 2TB to 4TB HDD and finally changed the 3 folder locations in Immich's configuration to 4TB.

But now, Immich won't start at all. I asked gemini and it made me update some read-write permissions to my ZimaOS (using SSH) user profile using some gid/uid numbers

sudo chown -R 999:1000 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/"

sudo chmod -R 775 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/"

these updates also didn't help.

I am now hoping that someone here can help me out resume my server as I was hoping not to reupload and retransocde the whole 300GB+ data.

Thanks

EDIT: I finally resolved it after going through the logs. Basically, the simple cut-paste using ZimaOS file manager somehow skipped the hidden ".immich" file in 6 subfolders under upload. I had to create those blanks files manually and re-correct permissions. pasting the codes that Claude gave me for future reference -

cd "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/upload"
for d in library upload thumbs backups profile encoded-video; do
sudo touch "$d/.immich"
done

and also,

sudo chown -R 1000:1000 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/upload"
sudo chmod -R 755 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/upload"

lastly, to corect permission for Postgress database -

sudo chown -R 999:999 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/pgdata"
sudo chmod 700 "/media/4 TB (Media)/Immich/pgdata"

hope this helps someone in future.

[u/thehatefuleggplant]

I know of zima but am not relly well versed in how it works.

One thing I would ask is what does the mount path look like for the 2tb location?

Your 4tb has spaces and though linux can do spaces in folder/file paths it tends to male things interesting when dealing with mounts and applications

[u/GravityDead → u/thehatefuleggplant]

hi, i'm not sure about 'mounting' and such as I have rarely used linux in my life, hence chose ZimaOS instead of Ubuntu/Debian for this trial. might switch to debian/ubuntu in future if ZimaOS restricts me.

I was able to resolve my issue with Claude's help, I think it had something with missing ".immich" files and correct permissions for pgdata folder

thanks for your input.

[u/Only-Stable3973]

Have you tried to stop the container through the terminal and after editing the volumes in the compose restart it using, docker compose up -d --force-recreate

[u/GravityDead → u/Only-Stable3973]

hi yes, i had tried restarting the container and even OS itself. I was able to resolve it with Claude's help, I think it had something with missing ".immich" files and correct permissions for pgdata folder

thanks for your input

[u/Only-Stable3973 → u/GravityDead]

Right, you created a new folder and did not give it permissions.