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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

I just want the auto-sync experience of iCloud photos to my own NAS. Paying Apple $2.99/mo forever just so I can have an offsite backup of my photos is so obnoxious.

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Take a look at icloudpd. I’ve been running it as a container for couple of years now and it’s been sync’ing photos down from my iphone to my NAS.

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

I tried that but the downloads time out for me a few hundred in, and the nature of the script is such that it doesn’t auto restart or crash but it hangs and needs manual interactive intervention.

I'm running it in a container. So I haven't noticed any such issues. Other than having to re-authenticate every few weeks. The container itself is configured to auto restart on failures. But I'll keep an eye on it. Maybe it is failing and I just never noticed it. But I do see that my NAS has the latest images and videos downloaded. So at least as a container, its working as advertised.

https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... works great for me to do this.

I'll give this a shot, thank you!

I use photo sync for this, which was a one off payment. Of course you have to trigger it manually every few days because only Apple apps can actually work on iOS

Sorry this isn't a helpful answer but over in Android-land, Syncthing does exactly this for me right now. I paired Syncthing with a script that pushes any new photos to a self-hosted gallery. It's as fast if not faster than Google Photos and totally independent of any Google ecosystem. Add another offsite Syncthing machine and now you have a magical offsite backup.

This is something I really want, but I've never been quite sure how to set it up properly. Ideally I'd want to run it in the cloud so I don't have to be on my home network (and don't have to expose my home network in that way). I have a VPS that I use for a variety of things, but it doesn't have enough space for my photos. Syncthing doesn't seem to support S3 as storage.

I suppose I could put it on a machine at home, and expose it to the internet (perhaps using Wireguard), but I have very limited upload bandwidth (25Mbps), and would still want to sync the files to S3 (say with a script that runs nightly). I guess the initial sync would take forever, and then new photos would be relatively quick.

I guess I could also put it on my VPS and use something like Amazon's NFS service as the backing store. But I expect that would be quite a bit more expensive than the lower-cost S3/Glacier tiers I'd prefer to use.

With that kind of upload speed, I can see why you'd want cloud hosting. I'm paranoid enough to want a local copy so my first instinct is to still sync to home with an inotify script to trickle-push everything to S3 (quicker to start than a nightly script).

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