[8fingerlouie]

Apple uses a mix of Google Cloud and AWS, as well as their own data centers. As for Google and AWS, they are using multi geographic redundancy, and I can only assume they do that for their own data centers as well. The data in the 3rd party data centers is encrypted.

That means, at least for Google and AWS, that your data is being stored with redundancy not only in a single data center, but in multiple data centers, so that if one data center completely vanishes, your data will still be available.

That being said, it's always good to make a local backup. I use a tool called Parachute Backup (https://parachuteapps.com) on my Mac to automatically export photos from Apple Photos to my NAS. It also works on "iCloud optimized storage", so it won't just backup size optimized photos.

I've tested it against Photosync (https://www.photosync-app.com/home) as well as a manual export of unmodified originals, and in a library consisting of 180k photos and videos, I had 300 compare errors, most of which were Live Photos, that are not exported identically.

Both Parachute and Photosync offers the ability to export unmodified originals along with AAE files, so that if you need to rebuild your Apple Photos library, everything including undo history is preserved (AAE files contains edits).

Tools like Synology Photos and Immich (and more) only exports the "latest" version, whatever that may be, meaning if you have edited the photo on your phone, that edited version is exported, and if you later restore from your NAS backup, there is no undo history. In other words, they apply the edits in a destructive way.

For backing up from the NAS to another location I use Arq Backup (https://www.arqbackup.com), which also supports backing up iCloud Drive files that are cloud only.

[al_borland]

Parachute Backup looks very promising, thanks. I’ll have to spend a little more time later checking it out and seeing if that’s the direction I’ll go.

I do have my NAS backed up to Synology’s cloud backup service. I don’t love it, and it seems expensive, but it was easy to setup at the time and gave me some peace of mind for that data. The big issue I see is that I feel like I’d be stuck buying another Synology to restore of my current one fails.

[qmmmur]

I just backup the entire photo library with kopia. Is that as good as what you do?

[8fingerlouie]

It depends.

Do you use iCloud optimized storage, or do you download originals to your machine ? Kopia only backs up what it can see, and in case of iCloud optimized storage, it only backs up size optimized miniatures and not the original files.

Second, I haven’t researched this, but iPhoto used resource forks and extended attributes quite extensively for its library, and if the same is true for Apple Photos, Kopia will not pick up those, but Arq will. That was the very feature that caused me to purchase Arq all those years ago.

[qmmmur]

Interesting. I don’t optimise the storage so that’s not a huge concern but the extended attributes possibly is. Does Arq support s3 apis?

[8fingerlouie]

yes, but before you "panic", look into if it's really a problem. Kopia is a fine tool, and while it's a bit lacking in native integration, it works well, and for some things even better than Arq.

Arq wins on system integration. It supports waking the machine from sleep at backup time, keeping it awake while backing up, materializing cloud only files, and many other "nice to have" things.

Kopia however wins on efficency and speed. The same ~3TB backup (incremental) done with Kopia and Arq here finishes in 3-5 minutes with Kopia, and 45 minutes with Arq, and Kopia supports deduplication across multiple clients, meaning if you backup your family photo library from multiple locations, Kopia will only store it once.

In any case, even Apple doesn't recommend backing up Apple Photos libraries, and instead recommend exporting the photos, which is what i do with Parachute.

https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/arq7/English.lproj/s...

[qmmmur]

Yep. I setup Parachute this morning and now backup that export using a script. Pretty easy.