[8fingerlouie]

I have recently switched to a M1 Mac Mini, and just have each family member sign in to that using Remote Desktop. It brings the added bonus of working as a content cache for anything iCloud.

My only gripe is that it downloads the shared photo album (new in iOS 16) once for each account, and when your photo library is 1.8TB, that suddenly becomes a lot of wasted space. When it comes to backing it up the backup software deduplicates the data, but not for the initial storage.

I really wish Apple would implement some kind of method for backing up photos stored in the cloud without the need for mirroring them.

Before the M1 I was using iCloud photo downloader ( https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... ) on a Raspberry Pi 4 which also worked well, but in the end I got tired of iCloud credentials expiring every ~90 days, requiring each family member to login again through a console.

Considering the M1 idles at roughly 20% more than a RPi4 (M1 at 4.5W) it was an easy sell. I just got the cheapest model and added a large USB drive. Using a Mac also gives you the possibility of using something like Backblaze Personal with unlimited backup storage, if that’s your thing :-)

I use Healthchecks.IO ( https://healthchecks.io/ ) to keep an “eye” on the backup status (and other more mundane tasks like monitoring the power state of my summerhouse)