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Comment by mimsee | Hacker News Reader

I recently forgot the lockscreen pin to my old iPhone and tried tried to unlock it. However, I had forgotten that I had setup the 10-wrong-entries-and-self-destruct feature and so I lost all of my data. Nothing was ever backed up to iCloud as I don't pay for that feature.

With my new phone the easy way would have been to pay for iCloud but I use an app called PhotoSync[0]. When I put my phone to charge, the app will sync all of my photos to my local NAS over SMB. Sure they aren't encrypted but they are hosted locally.

[0]: https://www.photosync-app.com

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I use PhotoSync on all my devices and all my family members' devices. I've bought it about 10 times and I'm pretty happy with how it works. There are 2 big features:

1. It syncs to my Nextcloud server which I control. No one can take it away from me.

2. It's not subscription based, so buying it for my parents, siblings, etc. is practical since I'm not saddling them with a subscription they don't want or need.

I think a PhotoSync competitor that's more opinionated (ex: Nextcloud only) with a simpler UI could do well. This Photo Vault app isn't it, at least not for me. I'm not going to pay forever (via subscription) to get less control of my data. No thanks.

I've spent hundreds of dollars buying apps for family members, but I won't spend a penny on anything subscription based. For example, I used to buy Enpass for everyone I know. Then they switched to a subscription model and have gotten $0 from me since.

> For example, I used to buy Enpass for everyone I know. Then they switched to a subscription model and have gotten $0 from me since.

Enpass has a one-time Personal lifetime license for ~$70, see https://www.enpass.io/pricing/. This is not subscription based, please explain why you don’t like it?

I don't think it's a $70 product. They increased the price by 10x when they switched to subscriptions and I think the product is actually getting worse. I've had problems with bugs that have been present for years and now that it has a subscription option they need to justify the ongoing cost and that gets done by adding features that I don't need or care about.

I have several pieces of software that are the same. As soon as there's a subscription model introduced the software turns into bloated trash even for the lifetime licenses.

Apple really needs to add SMB support to photos app. Apps like photosync run up against the 3 minute background process limitation in iOS[0].

[0]: > Another common problem may be the fact that an autotransfer is not completing. This has to do with the 3 minute background operation restriction in iOS. PhotoSync can only run - and transfer - in the background for 3 minutes. If the app is still transferring while it is in the background, it sends you a push notification 30 seconds before the background operation time runs out. If you tap on this notification, you bring PhotoSync back to the foreground and it can continue the transfer process. You can even send it to the background again to get another 3 minutes of background operation time.

Thank you for your feedback, you gave us a good idea for the next feature that we can add to our app.

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