When I turned my old laptop into a makeshift NAS earlier this year, the idea was simple: turn it into a Plex media server by plugging in a few USB drives loaded with movies and shows.
Around the same time, my wife started getting constant low storage warnings on her Samsung Galaxy S23+. The phone still worked perfectly fine, so it made me wonder if there was a way to free up space without changing how she actually uses it.
Plex was the initial idea, but Immich became the real star of the show
A media server can do a lot more than just stream
I had an old laptop with a broken screen sitting in my closet for years, but I never really had a reason to turn it into anything useful until a few months ago. After seeing my colleagues constantly brag about their home server setups, I figured I could try something similar on a small scale, just to see how it would go.
The initial plan was simple: install Ubuntu Server on the old laptop and turn it into a headless Plex media server. However, the laptop only had 128GB of internal storage, which wasn’t going to get me very far.
To work around that, I plugged in a few spare USB drives and used MergerFS to combine them into a single storage pool. It worked well enough for a small library of shows and movies, but it always felt like a temporary solution—NAS setups are meant to accumulate data, not act as stopgaps.
To move past that limitation, I eventually decided to invest in a Seagate 6TB external hard drive (I also switched to Jellyfin at this stage). Just like that, I had far more storage than I needed for media alone, most of which was sitting unused. So at that point, I started looking into what else people actually do with their home servers.
That’s when I came across Immich.
You can think of it like Google Photos, complete with a mobile app and a web interface, but it runs locally on your own server instead of in the cloud.
Once I installed it and saw how effortless background photo backup was, I quickly realized that I could use it to back up the photos and videos on my wife’s phone. Setting up the mobile app is so straightforward that there’s no need for me to cover it here.
A full phone is a slow phone, even if it still works fine
No phone is pleasant to use when it’s full
There are a few reasons why my wife is holding off on upgrading from her Samsung Galaxy S23+. First, the phone is still a relatively modern flagship with a powerful processor that can handle just about anything you throw at it. The display and camera are very solid, and the device is still receiving regular software updates.
Really, apart from the usual aging battery, the main issue is that the 256GB internal storage has slowly filled up over the years—mostly with photos and long, uncompressed videos.
When you run out of space on a phone, a lot of problems start to appear. Although modern phones are designed to cope with near-full storage thanks to fast UFS storage, they still tend to hit a noticeable performance wall once you pass roughly that 90% threshold (similar to SSDs on computers).
In fact, it can feel even more pronounced on phones because apps and background processes rely heavily on temporary cache files for smooth performance. So even though the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC in her phone is still very fast, the device started to feel sluggish in day-to-day use.
I’ve used the same phone since 2019, but I finally found one worth upgrading for
My old phone lasted longer than several of my friendships.
Immich lets us keep original-quality photos without keeping them on the phone
Offloading originals frees up space without sacrificing memories
You might be wondering why we didn’t just start paying for a Google One subscription to offload the photos from my wife’s phone to the cloud. That would’ve been the simplest option for most people. But where’s the fun in that?
Besides, setting up my own version with Immich is not only cheaper in the long run, but it also gives me full control over where the data lives.
Remote access aside, Immich running on a home server covers most of what people want from Google Photos in day-to-day use. Photos back up automatically in the background, they’re easy to browse and search, and nothing much changes from the user’s perspective. The best part is that everything is stored in original quality, and since local storage is far cheaper than a cloud subscription, it’s an easy trade-off to justify.
So once the photos on her Samsung Galaxy S23+ were fully backed up and synced with Immich, all I had to do was head into the Free Up Space menu in the app, select a cutoff date covering the last few months, and let Immich handle the rest. Just like that, all the backed-up photos were removed from the phone, freeing up tens of gigabytes of storage in the process.
A NAS makes more sense than paying for a bigger phone storage tier
In my case, my wife and I were able to save hundreds of dollars by solving her phone’s storage problem instead of buying a new Samsung Galaxy S26+. Since she had already filled the 256GB of internal storage, she would have had to upgrade to the 512GB model, which costs $200 more.
When you factor in the cost of the 6TB hard drive I bought, it doesn’t even come close to the price difference between those two phone tiers. Now we have plenty of storage for photos for years to come, and when we eventually need more, adding another drive is straightforward. If you’re in a similar situation, it’s worth considering a NAS instead of paying for extra internal phone storage or ongoing cloud subscriptions. There’s a good chance it’s the cheaper option by a wide margin.
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