Nothing is saved before it was tried. Test connection proves the details on the screen work; Save and start backup is only possible right after a test passed on exactly those details.
01 · What Test connection does
- Connects with what you typed.
- Makes the folder named after your index, inside the folder or bucket you gave.
- Writes a small test file into it, reads its size back, and removes it.
- Says Connected: a file was written and read back, or Could not connect and the reason the service gave: a wrong password, a bucket that does not exist, a host that does not answer, a folder you may not write into.
Change any field after a test and the Save button greys out again until you test once more.
02 · What Save does
- Keeps the backend on this phone, sealed in the phone's own key store, so a backup can run without asking anyone first.
- Sends it to your Opensolr account, sealed there too, against your index. That is how a new phone finds it. Opensolr reads the credentials only to hand them back to a phone signed in as you, and for the web app while you use it signed in; nothing else at Opensolr connects to your storage.
- If the account cannot be reached at that moment, the backend still works from this phone, and it is sent to the account at the start of the next run.
- Starts the first backup at once, and takes you to the Photo backup screen to watch it.
03 · Where the credentials live
- On every phone that uses them, sealed with a key that never leaves that phone.
- In your Opensolr account, sealed with a key kept on Opensolr's servers outside the web and the database. Signing in as you, on a phone or in the web app, is what unseals them, nothing else.
- Never in your index, never in a file of your storage, never in a log.
Backup and restore
- Backup to your own storage
- Backup settings
- Setting up an AWS S3 bucket
- Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, MinIO
- Setting up a WebDAV folder
- Test connection, Save
- The Photo backup screen
- What is written into your storage
- A new phone: your photos come back
- Photos only in the backend
- Downloading a full file
- Download all originals
- Change, Forget and Clear backend
- What it costs, and what it never does