u/NewspaperNovel139

Three years ago I had a perfect storm of shit absolutely ruin my life. I lost my job, lost my marriage of 20 years, and lost my community of friends all in one go. I didn't do anything wrong, but it was just one thing after another where things fell apart. My job was something I put a ton of my identity in (think doctor or teacher) and when it was gone I felt like a piece of myself was also gone (same w my marriage). In the span of a few months I went from a married man with a great career in a city I had built a home in, to a solo divorced guy with no real job prospects, and I was sick of the city we were in because all it reminded me of was the life I had lost.

I felt totally and utterly alone, with no understanding of what my life would hold moving forward and everything society was telling me was that my life was pretty much over.

But BOY was I wrong. And I have seen so many people on this sub (in their 20's mostly) talking about how their life is over, how their one love of their life is gone, how they messed up at their job, how they ruined everything and they're gonna be alone and sad forever, and I wanted to chime in and say NO. You're wrong. I was wrong! I was 41 when my life fell apart, I had significantly more obstacle and significantly less time than any of y'all young dudes have and I turned it around in 4 years. I have a new city with new friends and experiences, new relationships, a partner I could never have imagined loving so much, a career that is so much more fulfilling. And I did it all from rock bottom, one day at a time.

So I decided to write this in the hopes some of you young dudes out there read it and know there is light at the end of the tunnel. So here is what I learned:

1) You ALWAYS have a choice you can make. No matter how bad it gets, no matter how desperate you are, you ALWAYS have a choice you can make in the moment. Whether it's to do one kind thing for yourself or to check off one item on your to-do list, every day you have many many choices you get to make. Just take each day on its own. Eating your boy dinner instead of skipping because you lost your appetite is a great choice. Calling a friend is a great choice. Going for a walk is a great choice. Deciding to spend 10 minutes feeling grateful about one thing in your life is a great choice. And soon, after you make enough choices, you will find that everything you do, including how you feel, is in many ways a choice you are making. You will realize that you stay where you are because you CHOOSE to. You feel how you feel because you choose to. Victor Frankl talks about this in "Man's Search For Meaning," using his lived experience as a Holocaust survivor. It's a powerful book, great for anyone who is going through something awful and feels like they have no power or choice. Even the Holocaust survivors had choices they could make, and sometimes those choices were the only thing keeping them alive. You have choices too. You always do.

2) You do not know what you are capable of. You think you do but you don't. This is for my younger friends. You think you have a ceiling. You think you've done something as well as you can. You can't do any better. You're wrong. Many times in life you hit that ceiling. It could be personal, professional, whatever. You think that you are at the apex of your abilities. Or that no woman will love you because of how you look or how you act. When you hit those ceilings, just keep going, keep working, trust the process, learn from failure, and you'll push through. I didn't think I was capable of any of this 4 years ago. Not just dating, but a new city, new career, new friends, a whole new life. I didn't think I was capable of that kind of reinvention. But here I am. And I got there by ignoring all the excuses, by ignoring all the limitations I imposed on myself before, and just setting my goals and working every day to reach them.

3) Keep your heart warm and open, and surrender to the rest of it. This is the most important piece of advice I can give. Every day I choose to be warm and open. Every day I choose happiness over despair, positivity over negativity, to embrace the opportunity I had been given instead of clinging to the things I had lost. It's not an easy choice to make every day, some days it's really fucking hard, but it's a choice I actively make. Do I recoil in fear and close my heart to protect myself? Or do I react from a place of love and openness, and keep my heart open to receive whatever the universe wants to give me? This sounds very woo, but it's wild how this simple perspective shift can change you. I can't control what bullshit the universe is giving me. I can only control how I react to it, and once I've made the choice to be open, the rest is just whatever the universe wants to throw at me, and I'm open to it. New city? Sure. New job? Great, let's try it. New hobby? I never thought I'd like that hobby, but maybe I will. New relationship? All things are possible if I welcome them in.

Time goes on regardless of everything. The earth still spins and the sun comes up every morning and days and weeks and months and years will pass. If you are 25 and you think your life is ruined, remember you will one day be 30. And then 35. And then 40. With any luck you'll be here a long time. What are you going to do with that time? Even if we accept that you are truly cooked, so what? You still have to pass the time. Are you just gonna sit there, cooked? You still have days to fill. You might as well make the best of it.

Good luck out there, gents. If I can do it so can you. And if you have any other advice for people suffering in this here subreddit, post it in the comments. Let those of us on the other side help others cross over to where we are, because things are pretty great over here. I even make my own pizza!

So a while back I set up Immich on my Mac Mini and moved it out of Google Photos. I used immich-go to upload everything from Google Takeout and it was super smooth and easy, boom done. No problem. Love Immich, love how it works.

A few months later I decide to go all in on a dedicated server in my basement running TrueNAS. It runs great, all the drives work, I got Jellyfin working flawlessly, time for Immich. Got it installed and set up correctly, it seems to work as a server. I created a dataset for the library/uploads and another for postgres. I used this video to set it up and it seems to be functioning normally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zTgrPP4CoU&t

But it WILL. NOT. MIGRATE MY OLD PHOTOS from the old Immich server.

Here is what I have tried -

1. Per Immich's documentation, I spent like 10 hours copying my uploads etc to the new server via SMB and then restoring from a database backup of the old server (it errored, entered maintenance mode and wouldn't let me leave it so I had to delete the entire instance and start fresh)

2. Per Immich-go's documentation, I used immich-go to try to migrate from one immich server to the other. Got my 2 API keys, one for each server, got it all set up in the command line, and...immediate error.

3. OK fine, I decided I'll redo what I did the first time, use immich-go and my old Takeout zips which I still have plus I can manually catch up on the stuff since then, so I set that up exactly as I did before, it reads the takeout zips and then once it's time to actually start uploading - nothing. Error in the asset uploading phase. Bad Request 400 I think I saw? I don't know how to access the immich-go logs (I'm not computer illiterate, but I'm not a CLI wizard)

It feels like it has something to do with the permissions on my new server, like no one is allowed to remotely add stuff to it via the API key, even though my API key does have admin and everything selected. TrueNAS is pretty security-focused, but maybe this is too secure? I really don't want to have to start with a whole new server, it took forever to copy the Jellyfin stuff and everything else is working fine.

I just want to duplicate what I had on the old server, running on Docker for Mac, into my new server, running on this TrueNAS. Whatever it takes. Did I do something wrong in the first attempt? Is there a switch I can flip on TrueNAS to let Immich be more lax?

Manually dragging and dropping photos into Immich seems to work but the dates are all messed up and I have a decade and a half of photos to go through. Please help me find a way to keep it organized!

Thanks in advance.