A Move from Self-Hosting on a Pi5 8gb to a Pi5 4gb

Yesterday I started moving from a Pi5 8gb to a Pi5 4gb to self-host Audiobookshelf, Photoprism and Immich. I want to move from Ubuntu Desktop to ubuntu server to lower the head room required. When I checked I was using 3.9gb out of 8gb of ram. On the Pi5 4gb running the various services I was using 1gb of ram, but that’s without photos, videos and various audio files.

Learning Outcome

The desired learning outcome from this experiment is to migrate the services from one machine to another. The easiest solution would be to swap the card from one Pi to the other but I want to learn how too move Immich, Photoprism and Audiobookshelf from one system to another. In theory I know how to do this. In practice I need to streamline the process.

This time I have organised things better. Audiobookshelf, Immich and Photoprism are in their respective folders but I have placed them into an Apps folder on my own system.

Organised, as I want it to be

When you follow tutorials they usually tell you to put App A in location A, app B and C in location B. Snap likes to put things in yet another location. The point, as I tidy things up is to use the apps folder logic, to keep things tidy, or at least tidy as I have learned from 20 years of Apple. This is slightly tongue in cheek.

Simplified Future Moves

The advantage of organising everything properly is that if and when I want to backup, or migrate from one machine to another, it will be simplified. I can migrate one or two folders rather a chaotic mess of files.

Learning by Repetition

I have instantiated Pi instances dozens of times, and each time I re-install the self-hosted solutions. That part is habit. Now the challenge is to get the same data migrated from instance to instance with an increasing level of ease.

A hot Pi

I really enjoyed using the Pi5 as a desktop/laptop replacement but by adding the AI Kit the Pi has increased in temperature. The issue is that the heat sink lies diretly underneath the heat sink so heat from the CPU rises onto the AI Kit, increasing the temperature of the Pi and the AI kit. I don’t want both to be fatigued faster than normal by excessive use, especially when used as a simple desktop.

That’s the rational for migrating my self-hosted server to the Pi5 with RaspberryPi Server rather than Ubuntu Desktop. I could then free my other Pi5 8GB to be my desktop replacement.

I don’t expect it to take much longer to get things setup.