It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized storage on the primary system.
Time Machine's job is to back up my data, it's not strictly to make a 1:1 copy of local storage. It should back up my cloud data too.
I’ve found unreasonable value in being able to search through hundreds of thousands of photos from my phone, so I went all-in on Photos.app. Though one enabling factor is that my photography workflow has drastic simplified in recent years to doing very little post (except for astrophotography, which I try and keep wip out of Photos.app anyway).
IIRC Photos.app will not even open if the default library you are pointing at is not there (i.e drive was unplugged). Are you able to just open up the library file directly and it will work as expected?
I also recall when changing Photos.app back to the HDD Library it did a ~2h 'rebuild' session before it even started downloading the new photos, but maybe thats acceptable with the 'every so often' approach.
"I actually bought a Mac Studio"... "I don't understand why Apple don't " ... wait a minute
I have hit this too many times.
I migrated to Linux + Pika Backup. For photos I use Ente Photos with their managed cloud storage plus a continuous export to my NAS.
Ente is surprisingly well integrated with iOS, you really don’t need to use Apple’s solution. It automatically backs up photos I take in the background.
10 minutes is great, and my changes wouldn’t seem as extensive as yours. I need to dig deeper.
I also use a modified version of this script[0] to identify everything that changed in the most recent Time Machine backup. This is hugely helpful and lets me find unimportant things that are the source of lots of unimportant changes which I can then exclude with `tmux addexclusion -p <PATH>`. For example I exclude 'node_modules' folders for anything that gets regularly updated. This removes ~10k files that would otherwise be wastefully backed up. Speeding it up is much more about reducing file count than total size.
[0] https://github.com/nlfiedler/timedog (though its woefully out of date, and I had to make some hacky patches to it to get it working)
I haven't looked into the implementation details, but Photos lets you adjust the section of the video that is played back in slow motion. I thought if you share a slow-mo video, it gets re-encoded to bake this in (i.e., one second at 240fps gets exported as four seconds at 60fps).
For edits, I don't care too much about just baking them in since it's unlikely I'm going back to old photos and want to undo the crop.
I’m not ready to pay $60/month, but I do like iCloud’s memories and other photo features. My compromise is simple:
- I use docker-icloudpd to download our iCloud Photos to local storage over time. It’s been the most practical way I’ve found to back up multiple accounts into one place, though it does require occasional re-auth every so often. - I keep only the last ~2 years of media in iCloud and delete older ones after they’re archived locally. - For browsing and searching the older archive, I use Immich, which has been a great self-hosted personal photo cloud experience with a modern app feel.
For storage, I’ve found fast local disk matters a lot once you’re digging up photos from 5+ years ago. Something like an OWC 4M2 with M.2 drives keeps the experience snappy; a typical HDD-based NAS can feel sluggish when you just want to quickly pull up an old memory.
Immich is great if you want to be able to delete things from your phone to save space and still have access to all your content served from Immich on your server though.
Product idea: Apple should offer a paid service to restore the "old backups" of photos that are no longer accessible via iCloud UI/API, which were soft-removed for missing the subscription quota or whatever, if Apple happens to have that data tucked away in cold storage somewhere.
Case in point, I had some c. 2016 era photos in iMessages that I thought I handled right to not lose from iCloud, but they are apparently nowhere to be found in iCloud API based on recent checks. More than mildly irritating.
I should have used an iCloud photos backup tool like this much sooner.
Print what you want to keep onto archival paper with archival dyes. Everything else will atrophy.
I wrote a webapp to try to solve that for myself (https://github.com/yhling/go-web-image-gallery)
If you configure a password for your backup it will backup more (confidential) data than if you don't encrypt your local backup.
Turn your phone? /ducks
It's macOS-only and intentionally minimal — the goal is just to download originals from iCloud Photos to disk without syncing everything into Photos.app first.
To be clear on limitations: it doesn't preserve albums or other metadata yet, and it's not meant to replace more full-featured tools. It’s mainly for the "I just want my photos off iCloud for backup" case.
Reading the comments here, it sounds like metadata preservation is a big pain point for many people — I'd be curious whether that's the first thing folks would want added, or if simple bulk export already covers most needs.