Photos Backup Recommended Solutions

[grey090909]

Hi,

I have a really huge iCloud photo library. My phone has "optimise iPhone storage" on, so I'm not storing full copies on my phone, but up until this point I have been storing the full copies on my Mac and periodically manually backing up (ie copying files) to an external hard drive. However, I'm now running out of space on my mac's hard drive.

I could optimise storage on my Mac, and have the full res copies only on iCloud, but then how would I go about backing up? I could no longer copy and paste from my Mac hard drive to the external hard drive, so I need an alternative solution. I'm hesitant to experiment in case I somehow end up losing my full res images. Any suggestions as to the best solution to backup the full res copies of my photos?

Thanks in advance!

 

[DanL]

Sounds like you just need to back up more often, and clear out space on your Mac internal drive. If these photos are important, I'd have a second backup hard drive. I do rather little archiving on iCloud.

 

[grey090909]

Thanks for the reply. The bit I'm confused about is that until now, I have just backed up files from my hard drive to my external disk. But, if I were to select the Mac equivalent to "Optimise iPhone storage" in Photos, it will no longer store full copies on my Mac (I'm assuming it will still store a very low res version on my Mac and then download from iCloud when opening), only on iCloud, so I won't be able to back up those files from my internal hard drive to my external drive anymore.

So presumably, I will then need to backup directly from iCloud to the external hard drive. How do I go about doing that?

 

[Gullspira]

Hi,

I have a really huge iCloud photo library. My phone has "optimise iPhone storage" on, so I'm not storing full copies on my phone, but up until this point I have been storing the full copies on my Mac and periodically manually backing up (ie copying files) to an external hard drive. However, I'm now running out of space on my mac's hard drive.

I could optimise storage on my Mac, and have the full res copies only on iCloud, but then how would I go about backing up? I could no longer copy and paste from my Mac hard drive to the external hard drive, so I need an alternative solution. I'm hesitant to experiment in case I somehow end up losing my full res images. Any suggestions as to the best solution to backup the full res copies of my photos?

Thanks in advance!

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