[sho]

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..

[beala]

I 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/

[snowe2010]

The 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

[unsnap_biceps]

I run a nextcloud [1] instance and use it for contacts, calendars, and reminders

1. https://nextcloud.com

[css]

What's wrong with `imessage-exporter`?

https://github.com/ReagentX/imessage-exporter

[firecall]

One 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]

The 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.

[jval43]

I 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.

[NaOH]

At 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.

[unsnap_biceps]

Arq [1] has an option to "materialize" dataless files, basically forcing them to be locally available. The only issue is if it's a large file and it gets pushed off device often, you can burn a lot of bandwidth re-downloading it over and over again.

1. https://www.arqbackup.com

[wrxd]

For iCloud Drive have a look at rclone. You can run it straight from your Linux machine

[QuiEgo]

Time Machine backups to a samba share on the Linux box would get you both the Photos library database and the iCloud Drive stuff. It also means you don't need to bother with the external drive.

There is a keep all files offline setting for iCloud Drive (turn off "Optimize Mac Storage" in Systems Settings).

[4jck]

I'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

[mhammerc]

I 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]

> 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?... (no affiliation)

[yardstick]

I run a Synology NAS with a docker container that periodically downloads new iCloud Photos to a local directory.

[sho]

this? 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

[QuiEgo]

I'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).

[geekologist]

immich 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]

For me personally Immich is a non-starter because its not end-to-end encrypted.

[stackghost]

I simply manually periodically download everything to disk/software raid. Really important/sentimental stuff like baby photos and videos I have on DVD with par2s.

[JoshTriplett]

> 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]

sushtrain 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

[ycombinete]

Sync 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?

[n2h4]

I 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]

Back in the iPhoto days I used to symlink the library to an external drive.

[Rikudou]

Not an iCloud user, but I use Immich on my NAS.