HACKER Q&A
📣 Zelphyr

Photos Backup Recommendation


I have thousands of photos stored in iCloud and I want to back them up to either a third-party service or physical drive in an easy-to-use way. By easy-to-use I mean I can point it at my iCloud Photos and it will download them and store them to the backup location automatically.

Do you have a product/service recommendation for that?

  👤 fckgw Accepted Answer ✓
If it's a one time thing you can download all your photos in one shot via the privacy takeout tool. https://privacy.apple.com/

If you want an ongoing backup locally you have a couple options.

On Windows you can use iCloud Photos on your PC and point it to the drive of your choice.

You can also use a 3rd party tool called iCloud Photo Downloader. This script will run on Windows, MacOS or Linux. I use this tool in a docker container to download any new files every night.

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

👤 OnACoffeeBreak
I am not an Apple user, so I have not tried this myself, but it looks like Synology NAS is capable of iCloud sync. This solution is not cheap though. An entry level Synology DS223 with two 10-TB drives configured in RAID 1 will run you $250 for the NAS device plus $200 per drive. But you also get all the other features of a local NAS if you want them.