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Comment by 8ytecoder | Hacker News Reader

This is why I panicked when they announced they won't sync Google Photos with Google Drive anymore. With the sync, I can setup one of my computers to constantly download the photos and then copy it onto a local backup and an online backup. If my Google Account gets locked - I'll just copy the photos into something else and move on with my life. They removed that saying it's confusing to users - all the while it was an option users had to go explicitly enable.

I switched to iCloud which supports the download feature.

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FWIW, I use syncthing for this exact use case.

SyncThing is fantastic, it's really solid and always just works.

Where did they announce that? I still have that setting enabled, and I'm using it for backing up exactly the same way you described, so I really hope this doesn't just get magically turned off someday.

Google Photos will stop syncing to Drive on July 10, 2019 https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/06/google-photos-d...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166131

Would you mind elaborating on your iCloud setup to handle this please?

The most common way to do this is to have the Photos app on MacOS set to "download originals," then use whatever backup solution you like best. I highly recommend setting this up. Last month through some sort of iCloud glitch my fiancé lost almost all of her photos from before the beginning of this year. We've escalated it to their highest tiers of support but the photos are gone. Redundancy is important, and even the best providers aren't foolproof. It was devastating to lose all of those memories.

Thanks. Currently I do this:

Phone -> Dropbox + Google Photos (automatically)

Card-based cameras -> Plug in card, Dropbox + Google Photos pick up new photos

Backup 'server': Local synced Dropbox folder -> Local + Cloud backups

I couldn't see how to add iCloud to my existing syncs / backups. When I looked at it, I couldn't be sure it would keep photos on my phone long enough to allow Dropbox and Google Photos to pick them up. It's good that it's possible to get the originals over at a MacOS machine. Might be worth exploring then.

This is how I do it too, then backups are done through Arq and Amazon. I consider Google Photos as a “share / social” area. I would never entrust masters with Google.

I should go and backup my photos asap then...

In case you own an iPhone, it's given to you the option to backup your photos to your iCloud account (Apple service bundled into the phone).

How is your solution different from uploading to Google Drive?

Editing, search, organization, sharing and viewing tools. Google Photos is a fantastic UI for that - provided, the pictures actually live in my Drive.

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