[Lord-Jobo]

Its actually damn near impossible to retrieve all of your photos/videos from icloud for a backup if you are using a windows machine to do so. It will constantly fail to sync fully, duplicate files, takes eons to download even on a fast connection, and there are bizarre file format conflicts with certain types of images. Very infuriating, and its been an issues for at least 5 years. 'Buy a mac if you want to actually adhere to proper backup standards' i guess this is the apple stance on the issue.

[GloriousKoji]

I've been using icloudpd to get photos off of icloud. It took a while the first time but after that I set it up to only download the latest 500 photos (total number downloaded is usually way under) and run it every few months.

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

[aksss]

A workaround is to use OneDrive with Camera Upload feature turned on, and then sync this back down to your PC. You can choose how to sort (e.g. folders by year and month).

[WWLink]

TBH, the Photos app on Macs is just as bad at this. Especially if you have a LARGE album.

I'll give you exactly the use case, and exactly why that is:

I decided I didn't want to pay for the family 1tb icloud plan anymore because 90% of it was being used up by my brother taking silly pictures and videos all the time. So I had him get an external SSD and set him up with the Photos app to download to it.

~900gb of images and videos. It took OVER. A. MONTH. to download. The whole time the photos app was being very cagey about when it would bother to download. To an M1 iMac. With an 500mbit fiber connection and connected via ethernet.

I think they do that on purpose to discourage people from quitting icloud. They want to keep you dependent on their cloud storage and they REALLY don't want you taking your files back.

I fucking hate icloud. I hate the way apple uses dark patterns and is so naggy about having an icloud membership when using an iPhone. I hate their crappy cloud syncing software too.

I ended up back on icloud later because, well, reasons... but I moved my own photo/video syncing over to onedrive. Now let's not get ahead of ourselves - one drive is a piece of crap too. But at least it's consistent on all platforms. And it's cheap as fuck.

[jdminhbg]

> I think they do that on purpose to discourage people from quitting icloud.

I think they just haven't updated the CPU/bandwidth-saving provisions that have been in the products for years. The same issues happen if you are staying on iCloud and syncing to new devices. I know that I have a gigabit ethernet connection to a machine that is not doing anything else, but the app doesn't have a way to tell it that.

[BanjoBass]

Yup. iCloud is just my most recent photos. Once my 200gb starts getting full, I go back and delete photos and videos year by year until i'm down to the last year or two. My entire library is still backed up to a NAS which has offsite backup as well as google photos.

[physicles]

Agreed on the dark patterns. I’m pretty adamant about staying on the free 5GB plan. So once a year or so my backup fails and I have to spend half an hour fighting with their intentionally terrible UI to reduce its size.