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Comment by mnemnc | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I have a fairly solid backup system for all of my important files. They are protected against elementary disasters and cyber attacks alike.

However the only thing I struggle with are my phone photos. I recently caved in and started using iCloud Photos due to the convenience of having all my phone photos alwas available, searchable and tagged, even if the library size exceeds my phone‘s capacity.

Does anyone know a reliable and automatable way to back up this iCloud photo library on a self hosted server?

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icloud-photo-downloader: https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

I've used this to great success! As far as I could tell, it grabbed every photo and video at the highest quality. Very happy.

Brilliant! Thank you.

I'm also interested in this. I have iCloud for Windows installed on a VM with lots of attached storage, but it doesn't seem to persistently/reliably download photos unattended.

I suppose another way to do it would be with a Mac and then periodically backing up the local Photo Library, but that still leaves the photos tied up in Apple's proprietary library format. Plus you need a spare Mac just laying around and always on.

I spent extensive time evaluating this problem, and tried a whole bunch of different things:

Nextcloud, Resilio, iCloud, etc etc etc.

Honestly? Just using Google Photos is probably the best bet for most folks, whether you’re on iOS or something else. I personally picked OneDrive for my use case since it is both more performant for large data sync and 6 TB + Office 365 for a family plan beat out the alternatives on pricing.

Eh... I'd definitely do a Google Takeout to verify everything's OK before you delete your originals.

You may think the downsampled image is sufficient for lossy backups, but older images stored in "high quality" in my personal GP library were almost wholly stripped of metadata, including when the photo was taken.

(Many of my users have suffered from this as well, which is why I built tag value inference into PhotoStructure to try to help spackle over these metadata holes).

That’s good advice for those that care, and I should have mentioned it, especially for HN crowd. I definitely noticed this problem when I did Google Takeout on my photos dating back to the Picasa days.

I still think that for most people (and on HN, where we care more about fighting data entropy, there might be significantly lower overlap with the majority), Google Photos is the best option.

> whether you’re on iOS or something else

Android doesn't know it, but their killer app is Syncthing.

I do this with Syncthing (not just photos, but all phone files), a very customizeable file sync tool, it can do trash bin and versioning similar to cloud storage providers. As I heard sadly it doesn't work so well in iOS due to its restrictions though.

I don't know how it works on iPhones, but on Android Nextcloud does this just fine.

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