Ask HN: How do you back up Google Photos?

1 point·skybrian··2 comments

Threat model: loss of Google account. I'd like to make sure I have an up-to-date copy of my photos if I ever lost my account.

Ideally this would be an ongoing, incremental backup to another online service, where I could occasionally look at my photos and be satisfied that they are all there.

Any recommendations?

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Note that Google Photos is not really a viable backup if you care about quality at all: photos and videos are recompressed into a blurry mess, and your metadata will be likely missing.

That said, there are several approaches to downloading what you can from Google:

1. Schedule periodic Google Takeouts (this requires you to download them, though)

2. Set up rclone (https://rclone.org/) or timeliner (https://github.com/mholt/timeliner) to use the Photos API. Note that _many_ tags may be missing, scrambled, or wrong. GPS will be completely missing.

A much better approach is to set up a server (either at home with just an RPi hooked up to an external drive, or a cheap VPS), and then use SyncThing or Resilio Sync to get your original files off your phone and some place that you control.

And then set up automated backups for this server, of course.

Thanks for the tips! I’m wondering where to sync to, though. It doesn’t look like rclone syncs to other photo services, and it’s not clear which one would be best to use.

I’m not particularly interested in running my own server for this.

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