iPhone users: how do you backup your photos / videos?

[Genetrik]

I personally bought a NAS drive and every once in a while I move them through my PC over and delete them then from the phone.

For those that also do it this way: what is your process? I do it so that I simply copy the different DCIM folders on the iPhone over to the NAS. So folders like 112APPLE or 113APPLE. In most cases the last folder is still not full / in use by the iPhone, so I copy that over as well but write myself a note to delete that latest folder with the next backup and simply start from that folder number again.

It is not a great process but it works. Should I consider a different approach?

 

[rudeboyoslo]

iCloud has never failed me. Seamless and painless.

 

[Flaurehn]

iCloud and OneDrive

 

[Megabreath]

I use ICloud and usually back things up from there onto a hdd and my computer

 

[turbobrick]

Not an iphone user, but I use ios devices. I transfer everything to my computer, and photos are in dated folders. Mostly a habit of being into digital photography for almost 2 decades, so I treat my phone pictures like I do digital camera photos. My picture folder is also backed up on a second hard drive.

 

[sirap]

Backup via Photos and upload them to Google Drive

 

[Ryu bogard]

i use one drive

 

[Zushin]

OneDrive

 

[Joker Code]

iCloud always works for me.

 

[uncleniccius]

icloud is inexpensive and works really well. If you get a family plan it is even better.

 

[dglavimans]

I get using services like a NAS etc or Onedrive. But for me if you are using an iPhone the easy iCloud has cannot be beaten.. I never thought about backups ever and always when I buy a new iPhone all my stuff is just there

 

[leder]

I just do the same thing as you OP, I hardly take pictures or videos though (that I want to keep) so I only need to do this like once every year or two.

 

[John Caboose]

I really like the Photos iCloud integration and I've even begun moving digitized family photos into my Photos library on the mac, tagging dates/locations/faces along the way. Really fun to have it in one place, easily searchable and sorted etc.

It isn't strictly backup per-se, but close enough.

 

[Azerare]

Eventually I'll pay for the bigger iCloud storage. Currently I just move files onto my NAS every now and then. And only really photos I would truly care about

 

[Nightfall]

OneDrive since it's the best value for money with the 356 package

 

[dglavimans]

OneDrive since it's the best value for money with the 356 package

Click to shrink...

Does it work automatically like iCloud? When I had a Windows Phone I also stored everything on OneDrive because you got a lot of GB for free with office

 

[Ninjadom]

iCloud.

I used an iMac for 10 years. Every photo and video I took/received that I wanted to keep was kept in 'Photos' app on my iMac. This was then also backed up to an external hard drive using 'Time Machine'. 13,000 photos and videos from over the last 15 years.

Then I realised that these machines won't last for much longer. My iMac was getting very old and I upgraded to an M1 Mac mini. I transferred all photos & videos to iCloud and I haven't looked back.

The convenience and piece of mind of knowing everything is automatically and safely backed up without you doing anything is so much better than manually importing photos from phone to computer.

 

[Pulp]

iCloud works wonders

 

[RayFoxII]

iCloud as well, it's reasonably priced and convenient for those of us in the Apple ecosystem. If not then I'd probably use OneDrive though since I get 1TB free with my Office subscription.

 

[timshundo]

I share 2TB of iCloud space with my family (6 people total) for $10/month. We've filled 40% of it since family sharing was invented. I love not having to coach my parents into backing up their photos or helping them make space on their phones anymore. I also love not having to offload my videos to physical storage and deleting them from my phone cuz it's out of space. They finally fixed all the kinks in their low res local storage cache upload-while-u-sleep system thing.

As a photographer I do the same with Adobe and their cloud offering. 1TB of .RAWs in the cloud, don't have to worry about failing storage. Peace of mind :)

 

[thisismadness]

I'm using Onedrive since I have a 365 subscription that provides 1TB of storage.

I stick to the "rule of 3", so I have Onedrive automatically uploads the cameraroll to the cloud, my desktop downloads the photos as they are uploaded, and then I have a midnight cron+rsync from my desktop to my linux server.

 

[Nihilistic Monk]

• iCloud Photo Library (Digital photos from 2003 > Today. 30,000+ Photos. 800 videos).
• Have the entire library set to "Download Originals To Mac" on one Mac (Requires you to have the full storage capacity for the library available locally)
• Back that library up to a NAS
• I would like to get a copy of the full library backed up to a 3rd party cloud backup, but I haven't got around to that yet. Hassle as my internet is slow.

Remember, iCloud is cloud storage and lets you recover deleted photos for 30 days, but it is NOT A BACKUP Service.
If something happens to that account, unlikely as it is for a large company like Apple, your photos would be lost. They're not stored twice or anything. If you're hacked and someone deletes your photos and empties the 30 day history...then that's that. They're gone.

I wish apple would let you do a cloud <> cloud backup to another service to keep a separate copy, but they don't yet. So the easiest bypass is to have a copy somewhere on a Mac or HDD connected to a Mac as a full copy and back that up...

 

[Genetrik]

Eventually I'll pay for the bigger iCloud storage. Currently I just move files onto my NAS every now and then. And only really photos I would truly care about

Click to shrink...

• iCloud Photo Library (Digital photos from 2003 > Today. 30,000+ Photos. 800 videos).
• Have the entire library set to "Download Originals To Mac" on one Mac (Requires you to have the full storage capacity for the library available locally)
• Back that library up to a NAS
• I would like to get a copy of the full library backed up to a 3rd party cloud backup, but I haven't got around to that yet. Hassle as my internet is slow.

Remember, iCloud is cloud storage and lets you recover deleted photos for 30 days, but it is NOT A BACKUP Service.
If something happens to that account, unlikely as it is for a large company like Apple, your photos would be lost. They're not stored twice or anything. If you're hacked and someone deletes your photos and empties the 30 day history...then that's that. They're gone.

I wish apple would let you do a cloud <> cloud backup to another service to keep a separate copy, but they don't yet. So the easiest bypass is to have a copy somewhere on a Mac or HDD connected to a Mac as a full copy and back that up...

Click to shrink...

since you are both using a NAS system as well, what do you think of my process that I explained? Do you do the same or do you have a better approach?

 

[Nihilistic Monk]

since you are both using a NAS system as well, what do you think of my process that I explained? Do you do the same or do you have a better approach?

Click to shrink...

It's a lot easier for me reading your process because I have a Mac not a PC. That means my phone and the Mac libraries are always in sync. Phone in the cloud, and the Mac in the cloud but also with a complete offline copy of all my photos. I use that as my anchor point then for backing up my photos to other services.

Thanks to having a native copy of the photo library stored on a Mac, I then use Carbon Copy Cloner to back that over to the NAS when I mount a share on my Mac (It just starts automatically on share mount).

 

[Genetrik]

It's a lot easier for me reading your process because I have a Mac not a PC. That means my phone and the Mac libraries are always in sync. Phone in the cloud, and the Mac in the cloud but also with a complete offline copy of all my photos. I use that as my anchor point then for backing up my photos to other services.

Thanks to having a native copy of the photo library stored on a Mac, I then use Carbon Copy Cloner to back that over to the NAS when I mount a share on my Mac (It just starts automatically on share mount).

Click to shrink...

That sounds like a much better experience than for me... dang

 

[Tavernade]

I use two different cloud services and also download a big chunk of them to my computer and an external drive. And also I bought the chonkiest iPhone I could find so they're all physically downloaded there (I laugh at the tip to save space by using just iCloud).

 

[THEVOID]

iCloud and One Drive.

 

[con-ca-te-nate]

Google drive

 

[Michael F. Assbender]

iCloud. I never even have to think about my photo and video storage. It's all just there and accessible in the Photos app whenever I want it.

 

[nekkid]

Mine back up to OneDrive.

 

[Snarfington]

i used Google Photos on Android for years and so anything from my Apple devices also gets sent there. I think I have that thing enabled where iCloud saves the last 30 days of photos to share across devices, which is a nice complement.

 

[Palette Swap]

iCloud only, as part of my Apple One family plan, it's pretty transparent. I haven't backed anything on a PC for years because honestly, I don't have much use for a personal computer.

If anything, if I had to buy a new computer, that would make switch to Mac tbh.

 

[LazyLain]

I store my photos on a hard drive which I keep mirrored to another drive for backup, and I periodically burn them to optical discs as an extra backup.

 

[Blackpuppy]

I am old school and I am still using Photo Stream which sends any photo automatically to my Mac and I have access to the last 1000 photos on all my devices.

My Mac is backed up with Backblaze.

The only issue is my wife's photos and all my videos which I have to load manually... like an animal. But I much prefer to triage my wife's photos since she loves downloading memes and taking a million screenshots.

 

[Faceless_Caesar]

iCloud and Google Photos. I use both because sometimes I forget to launch the Google Photos app every once in a while and don't want to lose anything.

 

[PeakPointMatrix]

I'm just curious as to why you prefer your method over something like icloud where you just set it and forget it?

 

[Deleted member 2172]

I pay Apple 59p a month for a shit ton of cloud storage that I will likely never exceed. Easy.

 

[Nassudan]

iCloud just works.

 

[RisingStar]

iCloud. I'd get Dropbox again but the system is just a lot more seamless especially as I own a Mac and iPad as well.

 

[Vanillalite]

Currently play for 200GB iCloud which I'll up to the next tier when my family needs it.

 

[WillyFive]

Google Photos.

Every once in a while I would also plug in my iPhone to my PC and copy photos into a hard drive too.

 

[grmlin]

iCloud. Pay for additional storage and everything my family does is safe.

 

[Lkr]

iCloud and Google Photos
was using Google Photos primarily until I finally had to upgrade to the next tier of iCloud storage, and now I have newer stuff backing up to it

 

[Camoxide]

Google photos and the occasional local backup with Photos app.

 

[Genetrik]

I'm just curious as to why you prefer your method over something like icloud where you just set it and forget it?

Click to shrink...

Because I hate monthly costs and I have a huge collection of family videos and photos.

 

[TarpitCarnivore]

Because I hate monthly costs and I have a huge collection of family videos and photos.

Click to shrink...

It costs 2.99/month for the first tier of data and it has never been an issue for my wife and I who share the storage via family. To manually connect your phone and copy over is, imo, unnecessarily tedious. iCloud makes it so simple to just have them be there and not need to worry about re-syncing.

Have you checked to see if there's a way to just sync direct to your NAS? Synology has a photo app for this but i found it's pretty bad at background handling with it.

 

[Deleted member 9241]

I currently have almost 8,000 photos on my iPhone. This thread is a great reminder that I need to move them to my HD sooner rather than later.

 

[-Pyromaniac-]

iCloud is great for me

 

[DekuBleep]

Since I got the Apple One subscription then I have been backing up to iCloud. I also have a free unlimited Google account, and I also back up my photos to Google Photo's at full quality.

 

[Midnight Lunch]

I have the 2TB family sub for myself, partner and kids that backs everything up but I also manually copy all of my photos to an external HDD that also backs up to a separate cloud service.

Since I got the Apple One subscription then I have been backing up to iCloud. I also have a free unlimited Google account, and I also back up my photos to Google Photo's at full quality.

Click to shrink...

Isn't this going away soon?