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Wow. This is a cautionary tale. I don't think I'd be as devastated as this poor chap, but as it grew I realize I've allowed my iCloud photo library to become a
by sho 10mo ago
Wow. This is a cautionary tale. I don't think I'd be as devastated as this poor chap, but as it grew I realize I've allowed my iCloud photo library to become a single copy.
How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..
- stackghost 10mo agoI simply manually periodically download everything to disk/software raid. Really important/sentimental stuff like baby photos and videos I have on DVD with par2s.
- ycombinete 10mo agoSync to Dropbox -> Dropbox hourly & monthly backups to my NAS using Bvckup2. (One of these days I’ll setup my NAS to backup offsite fo a #3 backup). I know that others with Macbooks sync their whole library to their Macbook and then Time Machine to a NAS as their copy #2. Is this vulnerable to the problem in TFA?
- mhammerc 10mo agoI run Arq Backup automatically in the background. It copy Photos, iCloud files and my mails once every days to S3 with incremental backups. It requires to have a full copy locally. Works great! It is not hard to configure once, with the proper folders and settings.
- sho 10mo ago> It requires to have a full copy locally. yeah that's the thing. When my iPhotos library exceeded 1TB I lost the ability to store the full local copies. Since then, iCloud itself has been the sole source. Looks like there's some decent, reasonably priced apps to handle this like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?... (no affiliation)
- mh- 10mo agoThanks, I have the same problem and need to do something about it. I wonder if it can calculate (estimate) how big of an external disk I'll need. My wife and I each have 40-50k photos and a few thousand videos in iCloud Photos.
- b112 10mo agoIf you want to truly save your photos, make backups of the locals and put it in your safe deposit box at the bank. Or alternatively, at a trusted friend/relative's house. Even doing this yearly can save the immense sadness of lost memories. And of course, this works for emails, and everything else. If you encrypt it, make sure you use a method not tied to any external service, or the machine you're on. I don't use Apple, yet I suspect that an encrypted external backup might be tied to your Apple ID, or some such, because that's how the world flies today.
- mh- 10mo agoYeah, the plan would be external disk -> offsite storage. I wouldn't bother to encrypt, it's just family photos and I wouldn't want to complicate restores. Especially if it was my wife who eventually needed to use it.
- subscribed 10mo agoTo anyone who reads it: actually A HARD FISK, not a pendrive/SSD
- beala 10mo agoOn my iPhone, I can see the size of my iCloud photo backups. Settings -> Apple Account -> iCloud -> Storage. Weirdly, that number is different than Immich’s estimate of my photo library (95 GB vs 150 GB), but perhaps good enough to get you in the ballpark.
- mh- 10mo ago
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- geekologist 10mo agoimmich is an extremely polished, FOSS alternative to google/apple photos. It's an investment, but a 4 bay NAS running immich should do nicely. Additionally I backup snapshots to Backblaze B2 via restic which runs another $5/TB
- redrove 10mo agoFor me personally Immich is a non-starter because its not end-to-end encrypted.
- InsideOutSanta 10mo agoIt runs on your own hardware. There is nobody else who has access to unencrypted data.
- subscribed 10mo agoStorage vps are cheap. Why would I have to run it in my own house? :)
- snowe2010 10mo agoWhy would you need it to be end to end encrypted anyway? You’re running it. Set it to only upload photos when you’re on your home network and you’re fine. Or fork it and make a PR and make it e2e encrypted.
- redrove 10mo agoYou can’t just “fork it and make a PR and make it e2e encrypted”. All the features run serverside, e2ee is fundamentally impossible because of its design, of which you seem to know fuck all. I’m being dismissed by I run a rather large homelab and I still want my photos iCloud like, where end devices decrypt and run ML. Immich is a Google Photos clone where you give it everything and some server does all the magic.
- 10mo ago
- yardstick 10mo agoI run a Synology NAS with a docker container that periodically downloads new iCloud Photos to a local directory.
- sho 10mo agothis? https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd https://github.com/boredazfcuk/docker-icloudpd seems pretty high touch. A lot of hoop-jumping if you don't have a mac in the middle
- leobg 10mo agoThanks. I had no idea something like that existed. How do we know using such a tool won’t trigger an account lockout? How ironic would that be.
- yardstick 10mo agoNo idea if it’ll trigger a lockout, but if it does at least I have a copy of my photos already. Been running it for a couple years without issue. But yes your milage may vary.
- yardstick 10mo agoYeah that’s the one. I do have a Mac so it didn’t seem difficult to me, but I accept it will be for those that don’t.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Rikudou 10mo agoNot an iCloud user, but I use Immich on my NAS.
- beala 10mo agoI self host an Immich [1] instance to backup photos on my iPhone. It’s OSS and has a level of polish I’ve rarely seen in free software. Really, it’s shockingly good. The iOS app whisks my photo off to my home server several times per day. What I’m not sure about is how to backup things like iMessages, Notes, and my Contacts. Every time I’ve looked, it appears the only options are random GitHub scripts that have reverse engineered the iMessage database. 1. https://immich.app/ https://immich.app/
- snowe2010 10mo agoThe imessage db is literally just a sqlite db. If you have a Mac you can read the entire thing with an applescript. It’s really easy from what I remember from years ago
- css 10mo agoWhat's wrong with `imessage-exporter`? https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter
- unsnap_biceps 10mo agoI run a nextcloud [1] instance and use it for contacts, calendars, and reminders 1. https://nextcloud.com https://nextcloud.com
- arendtio 10mo agoI use Nextcloud for files/contacts/calendar/etc. as well, but for photos I use PhotopPrism [1]. The reason is simple: photos require much more processing and focus on performance. In addition, photos take up much more space, so while my Nextcloud instance runs on an SSD, the photos reside on an HDD, mostly in sleep mode. [1] https://www.photoprism.app https://www.photoprism.app
- n2h4 10mo agoI keep copies of any important stuff i need on my server, and in a few hard drives at my home. i don't use any "cloud".
- iknowstuff 10mo agoBack in the iPhoto days I used to symlink the library to an external drive.
- firecall 10mo agoOne rather counter intuitive way to “backup” your photos is to install Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone! Google and MS don’t charge as much as Apple for storage, and you probably need you need to pay beyond the free limits, but it’s not a huge expense. Once your installed Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone, just tell the apps to sync all your photos all the time! Now I appreciate that isn’t for everyone. But it works, is reliable, and requires no technical knowledge of running your own service. The other thing to do is setup a Mac that synchs all your iCloud data, One Drive documents and Google Drive. Then back up that device with Backblaze. This gets expensive as a Mac with decent levels of storage isn’t cheap! I live in fear everyday or my primary Apple and Google accounts getting locked! I’ve had accounts since day one of iTools and very shortly after Gmail launched….
- raw_anon_1111 10mo agoThe issue with OneDrive is that it doesn’t store metadata like the photo location, its damn near useless. But I do pay for storage for Google Photos and iCloud. If you take all of your photos from your phone, you don’t need your Mac at all. Google Photos will sync directly. I wouldn’t use BackBlaze (the $7 a month service). It doesn’t support NAS at all and it has to phone home every 30 days or it will erase anything that is stored on external drive. I would use an app that backs up to their B2 service. I personally just use my personal AWS account to back up my Plex media and just use the AWS s3 sync command using the AWS CLI and store everything in S3 Deep Archive. It’s less than $2 a month for 2TB.
- snowe2010 10mo agoBackblaze doesn’t erase after 30 days… I’ve had a computer be offline from it for several months and it still retained all data. And you can use the backblaze docker container to run on a NAS, much much much cheaper than B2. Wasabi is much cheaper than AWS as well. Finally the best solution for backing up your iCloud Photos is definitely Immich. Set it up on your own NAS or a VPS, back up to that, and then back up that server to an S3 storage using rsync or restic. I’ll note that I still backup to Backblaze because its so dang cheap. I spent months trying to find the best setup a few months ago and this is by far the cheapest. But still, this shouldn’t be required for normal people. They should get what they pay for.
- jval43 10mo agoI run a separate Mac Mini that has the full iCloud Photos library on a massive external drive, set to "Download originals". I then rsync that filesystem to a separate Linux box. This works but you must not ever disconnect the external drive. I don't have a solution for iCloud Drive, as there wasn't a keep offline setting last time I checked. So use it only ephemerally.
- 4jck 10mo agoI'm not familiar with the "Photos Library.app", but I have an m4 mini with my photos in a Photo's Library. I'd love to know your script to rsync the photos into a separate drive/directory
- jval43 10mo agoThe Photos library "file" is just a big folder, I just sync the whole thing. #!/bin/sh rsync --iconv=utf-8-mac,utf-8 -avh --delete-after --partial --progress /Volumes/myExternalDrive/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary myuser@mylinuxmachine.local:"/srv/myExternalDriveBackup/" (note: tested with brew rsync, IIRC the default rsync is outdated on macOS) Somewhere in the directory structure is a folder /originals/ which has all the actual files. Note that this is only a last resort backup. Restoring the library as a whole requires a Mac with a compatible OS version. Restoring without a Mac would only get you the originals, so only the out-of-camera files (jpg, heic, raw), with no edits or metadata changes from Apple Photos applied (Apple Photos doesn't touch the EXIF data). You'd probably also lose the video part of all live photos, as the live video files stored as separate files and not part of the .heic files. They're there, but not very usable. An alternative to this workflow is to export all photos (with edits applied) from the Photos app, but honestly I'm not sure if that even works and how long it would take for multi-TB libraries.
- NaOH 10mo agoAt least as of Sequoia, the Settings > iCloud > Drive > Optimize Mac Storage option enables iCloud Drive files to be stored offline. Likewise, right clicking any iCloud Drive files in the Finder includes a Keep Downloaded option. Since I minimally use iCloud Drive, in the past (older OSes) I also had Hazel make copies of iCloud Drive files so they were certain to be in backups.
- JoshTriplett 10mo ago> How are people handling this these days? Syncthing is wonderful, and does a great job of syncing between an Android phone's photos/videos and a laptop. And if you have regular automated backups of the laptop, you'll have backups of the photos/videos too. For an iPhone, perhaps you could use iTunes to sync to a computer and back up that computer.
- 4k93n2 10mo agosushtrain seems like the best option for syncthing at the moment. its a bit more polished than mobius. neither of them sync in the background but i think i remember seeing someone using shortcuts to open the sushitrain app every now and again to wake it up so it would sync
- QuiEgo 10mo agoI'd like to give a special shoutout to the PhotoSync app. It has one killer feature that Immich does not (at least last time I looked): encryption at rest. I think someone breaking into my house and stealing my NAS is a real possibility (unlikely, but I'd give it higher odds that getting locked out of my account like what happened in the article), so this is super important to me. You could put Immich data on a LUKS volume I suppose, but then you have to fiddle with your server every time it reboots. I did PhotoSync for a while, but now I just set up my Mac to download my whole photos library, and do Time Machine backups of my Mac. This gets two copies of the data not tied to my Apple ID (the one on my Mac's local disk, and the one on my NAS on the time machine volume).