I 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

I’m suggesting you do both One Drive and Google!

Also, to be clear, I’m saying to install One Drive and Google Photos on your iPhone.

My approach to this is based around having the least amount of things to manage.

In my scenario, I’m looking for the most simple out of the box systems to backing up that don’t require any self hosted solutions or NAS management and so on.

Just throw money at it!

Hence my suggestion to get a Mac, say a Mac Mini, with a decent sized drive and just sync everything to it.

Fully sync so it downloads the lot and need off loads.

The backup the internal drive with Backblaze.

I appreciate this advice isn’t for everyone, and it may not be the best solution.

But it’s a way to a least have some ultimate disaster recovery in place!

It may not be the cheapest, and cheapest doesn’t mean best. It may not be the best by some other measure of features, but it works and requires zero knowledge and additional hardware.

At least with some kind of backup, everything is not lost!

You don’t have to manage it or think about it. The services will sync for years without intervention until you upgrade your devices. For most people, that’s the important factor in having multi backups of their photos and documents!

Backblaze 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.

> It’s less than $2 a month for 2TB.

What would be the egress fee to get your data back in case of disaster?

The 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.

You can request an archive of all your data (including photos and drive) in 25gb chunks.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102208

I recently rebuilt my home server as an unraid machine. Currently it’s mainly torrents and a Minecraft server but it’s got 10tb of locally redundant storage with a sightline to scale that to around 24tb, so it would be a logical place to store a full gphotos copy.

Thanks, 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.

10TB external harddrives are relatively affordable.

Thanks. 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.

Yeah 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.

It runs on your own hardware. There is nobody else who has access to unencrypted data.

Why 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.