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I built an app to backup Live Photos from iPhone to external hard drives
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Where is the link? How can iPhone backup directly to an external hard drive?
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Plug it in to the USB port on the phone. iPhone Pro can transfer at up to 20 Gbps but the non-pro models are much slower.

The iPhone camera can also shoot directly to an attached SSD.

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> iPhone Pro can transfer at up to 20 Gbps

Citation/proof strongly needed on 20 Gbps

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Right you are. I was going off my (bad) memory. It’s a 10 Gbps port.
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I have bad news for you, that's not a real iPhone
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This is a real feature of iPhones since the iPhone 15 Pro model. https://support.apple.com/en-in/109041
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>home NAS setups aren't realistic for most users

Citation needed. Get a Synology NAS and use their Photos app which backups Live photos on both iDevices and Androids. Buy it for life.

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Let's be real, that's already far less approachable to 90% of consumers I know.

The simples hurdle just being knowledge.

The existence of NAS is probably an unknown unkown to a large part of the population.

Compare that to "there's an app for that" & plug USB.

Drastically simpler.

No skin in the game either way, but I can very much understand OPs reasoning and would reach the same conclusion.

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I've been doing this for many years and am pretty happy with it. I can sync from my Android and my wife's iPhone. The Photos app is nice and smooth. Backups happen automatically in the background. It can even de-dupe and clean up old photos that have been backed up. All in all, quite pleased with it.
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You’re looking at £300ish for an entry level Synology and the storage. That isn’t a realistic expense for many users.
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Over time it saves money. I got a home server and a tiny remote backup server 8 years ago and it runs quite a few services saving me hundreds each month and costing in electricity and hardware (over time) about 15EUR/mo. The longer it runs, the cheaper it is. Most of the updates are automatic so no babysitting required.
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Synology is still my go to with the model I already purchased. But I'm not sure I'll be buying them again after this:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requ...

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A Synology NAS doesn’t last for life.
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And isn't protection against fire, flood, theft or other disasters.
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I have a Synology NAS. I don't remember what I paid for the device it itself, but let's call it $300 on the cheap side + nearly $600 for the drives + $280/year to back it up (about $23/month).

That's a nearly $1,000 investment with a $23/month ongoing cost for backups, not to mention the added administrative (time) costs... and the eventual need for new drives and hardware (more money).... along with with migration costs (more time).

I'm also an iCloud Photos user. I pay $2.99/month for extra storage to backup all my photos/videos to the cloud and never think about it or manage my on-device storage.

The initial sunk cost of investing in the NAS could pay for 27 years of iCloud drive space (at the current price I pay), and the ongoing cost of my NAS backup is over 7x the price of what I pay for iCloud on an ongoing basis.

If it's a question of money at all, it makes 0 financial sense to buy a NAS to solve a simple photo management issue on a cell phone.

Then there is the technical requirements. Step 1 is getting someone to understand what a NAS is, which is where you will already lose 80% of users.

I have no delusions that I will keep this Synology solution for life. At some point I will need to migrate, which means solving the current problems it solves again. The big question is if I will be doing it proactively or reactively. If it's reactive, I will very likely end up forced into another Synology product due to vendor lock-in, unless I take active steps to mitigate that risk. Most users don't want to think or care about any of this; I don't even want to think about this stuff, but it's often on my mind.

The big risk I'm taking right now with iCloud Photos is that I have no idea how redundant the solution on Apple's side is. I hope they are good stewards of the data, but I really don't know. It would be a PR nightmare if they lost a bunch of people's photos. I have been thinking about looking into creating a copy of my photos/videos stored in iCloud on my NAS, but that is more time, and will likely require some kind of ongoing maintenance. It will likely also push me over a threshold for my NAS backup, and require that price to go up. I'm not excited about any of those prospects, so I've been trusting Apple for now (and for the last several years).

These aren't thoughts of "most users", and I envy them.

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There are many cases of lost photos in iCloud, and Apple usually cannot recover these photos completely. If you use iCloud, it is recommended that you keep a copy locally.
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I wouldn't use it personally, but I could see it being useful for my parents or family.

ifuse and rsync works fine for me.

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I understand completely. We recognize that not every user is a tech enthusiast, so providing excellent usability for non-technical users is really important to us.
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I would love this if it allowed me to backup all photos taken with the iPhone to an external drive. Currently, Apple dumps all pictures (from the Camera, from iMessage, WhatsApp, etc.) into folder makes it difficult to backup just my pictures.
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Absolutely, you can select specific albums to back up!
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Thank you for including a non subscription “lifetime” payment option.
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Hope you like it.
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I wrote a guide on copying photos from an iPhone onto a Linux host: https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2024/12/22/exporting-photos-fr...
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I am using PhotoSync to backup photos from iPhone to a self-hosted Photoprism via WebDAV (accessible from everywhere via tailscale).
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It’s more like PhotoSync as it only does photos
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I loved the idea until I saw that it's only available as a subscription.
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Lifetime option available.
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Would immich work for this? You can run it locally in docker container
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Will it work with large (huge) photos libraries? Eg. 150k photos/videos - most of them in iCloud. Does it preserve album/folder structure?
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Yes, it can handle very large photo and video libraries! Users have reported successfully backing up over 20k photos and videos without issues. I don't have 150k photos and videos for testing.

Currently, direct backup of photos and videos stored only in iCloud is not supported. I will consider adding iCloud integration in a future update.

The original album and photo information will be preserved. Photos and videos will be organized into backup folders by Device Model/Year/Month.

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Can you add a feature to upload to a ftp server?
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I will consider it. The current version can backup to a smb file share, is that sufficient for your needs?
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Btw, there is also LocalSend. Pretty nifty app
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Isn't that to transfer wirelessly to devices?
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Is this a native IOS app?
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How much does it cost?
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In-App Purchases

BackiGo Pro Yearly (1 Year) $6.99

BackiGo Pro Monthly (1 Month) $0.99

BackiGo Pro Lifetime $14.99

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Thanks for sharing!
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I just use rsync, works great
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Would you explain how you are using rsync to backup photos on an iPhone ?

I'm not aware of an iOS app named "rsync" and ... presumably you don't have a shell ... ?

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Don't know if still works, but this is how I did it back in the days I had an iPhone:

https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/01/access-and-recover-files-fr...

Nowadays I'd use immich or ente.io, which has and e2e encryption cloud as well as self-hosted setup

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You can load the IPhone’s pictures on Linux using the folders namespace and then rsync from the loaded namespace to /local…
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But does it work for Live Photos which is the main premise of this app?
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I use a usb cable and a Linux laptop to copy to a couple of external hard drives (which I store separately). It’s all manual but not too orrenous although i ought backup more often. The biggest hassle is accessing the new heic format on pretty much everything.

Could it all be made into a sd card image for a pi zero perhaps? Even with a web ui accessible over Wi-Fi? A basic cheap sync-cable-appliance that non-techies can easily use?

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I think I heard that the latest 'rclone' now, finally, support iCloud ... but I think there is an issue there because you can't sync full quality / RAW photos to icloud, can you ?
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rclone has support for iCloud Drive, but it sounds like you are talking about iCloud Photos, which is a different service.

This project lets you download from the latter: https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

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