I am taking my 6s in today to get the $29 battery replacement. I went to backup my phone to my wife's computer last night and realized it hasn't been backed up in about a year. I am most concerned about loosing my photos. Most pictures are of my 5 and 2 year old so I would like to hang on to these. Just curious what everyone's workflow is to back up their photos from their phone. If you download them to a computer, what is your backup from there? I would like to make this as set it and forget it as possible while remaining cost effective.
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Other iPhone Photos backup workflow
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I have iCloud make backups on it's schedule. But I only backup stuff that not having will inconvenience me, not all of it.
When I am going to do something with the phone such as upgrading or taking to an Apple store I make a backup on iTunes. Other than that it's iCloud.
However, I don't keep anything on my phone long-term that I cannot afford to lose. Photos back up to Dropbox automatically. So, those are not included in my iCloud backups. And 99% of the pics in my camera roll are screen caps or pictures of things on store shelves so I can send them to my wife (so she can tell me what to bring home). So losing all the pics in my camera roll would probably benefit me by cleaning it out.
I don't use text messages for sensitive things so that doesn't get backed up either. Any pictures in any conversation I want to keep are saved to the camera roll - and then hey, Dropbox backs them up.
All of my email is IMAP so it is the same no matter what device I view it on. Thus, no reason to include it in an iCloud or iTunes backup.
I don't use my iPhone for lots of apps and any app that needs account information will have that stuff stored offline anyway. So, no real need to include apps in my backups.
My entire iTunes library is on Google Play Music. I stream it to my phone. So no need to include it in a backup because it's not even ON my phone.
Video? Anything I care about is saved to a computer. I've got 50GB of Honeymooner's episodes on my iPhone. I also have them stored on a hard drive. If I lost those, no big deal. I don't watch videos on my iPhone much at all. So, no need to include that in a backup.
In short, I could lose everything on my iPhone right now and all that would cause me is a big inconvenience. Everything on my phone is either backed up elsewhere or is not important enough.
People seem to like to use their devices as some sort of repository for their stuff and they never pull things off. Then they get in trouble when their device is damaged or needs repair. If you get in the habit of pulling important things off in a timely manner and backing them up to alternative places you don't really have anything to worry about.
But most people seem not to consider that it seems.
When I am going to do something with the phone such as upgrading or taking to an Apple store I make a backup on iTunes. Other than that it's iCloud.
However, I don't keep anything on my phone long-term that I cannot afford to lose. Photos back up to Dropbox automatically. So, those are not included in my iCloud backups. And 99% of the pics in my camera roll are screen caps or pictures of things on store shelves so I can send them to my wife (so she can tell me what to bring home). So losing all the pics in my camera roll would probably benefit me by cleaning it out.
I don't use text messages for sensitive things so that doesn't get backed up either. Any pictures in any conversation I want to keep are saved to the camera roll - and then hey, Dropbox backs them up.
All of my email is IMAP so it is the same no matter what device I view it on. Thus, no reason to include it in an iCloud or iTunes backup.
I don't use my iPhone for lots of apps and any app that needs account information will have that stuff stored offline anyway. So, no real need to include apps in my backups.
My entire iTunes library is on Google Play Music. I stream it to my phone. So no need to include it in a backup because it's not even ON my phone.
Video? Anything I care about is saved to a computer. I've got 50GB of Honeymooner's episodes on my iPhone. I also have them stored on a hard drive. If I lost those, no big deal. I don't watch videos on my iPhone much at all. So, no need to include that in a backup.
In short, I could lose everything on my iPhone right now and all that would cause me is a big inconvenience. Everything on my phone is either backed up elsewhere or is not important enough.
People seem to like to use their devices as some sort of repository for their stuff and they never pull things off. Then they get in trouble when their device is damaged or needs repair. If you get in the habit of pulling important things off in a timely manner and backing them up to alternative places you don't really have anything to worry about.
But most people seem not to consider that it seems.
I use iCloud and Google Photos to backup my photos.
You should be able to copy all your images to your computer. I, too, have so many images that I do not use the cloud. iTunes will do what you need!
I do not use google for anything if I can help it.
I do not use google for anything if I can help it.
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Are most of you paying for additional iCloud storage to support your iCloud Photos in additional to having a secondary cloud backup (free) with Google Photos (high quality image quality) ?
I’ve been paying for 200G iCloud storage, also have Google Photos and just starting downloading the originals to my iMac with external storage. Now that I have multiple clouds and a single HDD strategy, i would love to find a way to not be paying for iCloud storage (if possible).
I finally got my 170GB photos library on my iPhone. iTunes didn’t like transferring that much to my phone. Sad to say it crashed quite a few times. But finally everything is on my phone. Now I just back up my phone to an external drive and on my Mac I keep the photos database current with my phone.
I had to stop syncing iTunes photos because it took 40 mins every time I wanted to backup iTunes. So I turned off iTunes Photo sync choosing to keep photos on phone and just open photos on my Mac and plug in phone and download lates photos now and then.
I still use Google Photos but only as a secondary backup and easy share because it compresses the images. iCloud photos is turned off because if I turn it on my 80,000+ images and videos will be removed from my phone.
Originally was going to put them in iCloud but calculated it would take months to upload. Just went with local. Much faster and I don’t have to pay for it.
So to answer op question - my mac has a 171 GB photos database that is Carbon Copy Cloner to three hard drives, one at work and time machined to another drive. I do an iTunes backup to one of those drives too using ln command to remap iTunes backup folder.
I had to stop syncing iTunes photos because it took 40 mins every time I wanted to backup iTunes. So I turned off iTunes Photo sync choosing to keep photos on phone and just open photos on my Mac and plug in phone and download lates photos now and then.
I still use Google Photos but only as a secondary backup and easy share because it compresses the images. iCloud photos is turned off because if I turn it on my 80,000+ images and videos will be removed from my phone.
Originally was going to put them in iCloud but calculated it would take months to upload. Just went with local. Much faster and I don’t have to pay for it.
So to answer op question - my mac has a 171 GB photos database that is Carbon Copy Cloner to three hard drives, one at work and time machined to another drive. I do an iTunes backup to one of those drives too using ln command to remap iTunes backup folder.
Yes, I use both. I don't mind paying for iCloud storage because the cost is not prohibitive, and apple now allows a shared bucket, so the whole family uses it.
I pay $9.99 for 2TB for my entire family to use. It is really nice.
How big is your iCloud photo library?
@Randiesel75 --- That's what I did, I had my 140GB+ library on Google, earlier this year, I spent 2 days downloading it all with the Take Out feature (worked REALLY well). Then I merged it into a Mac OS Photos database. This took some doing because the way Google Photos worked with their auto correct - there were a lot of duplicate images. Shared albums were also counted as duplicate images. But once I got that fixed up, I then imported my phone's photos (30+GB of 1.5 years of photos) to the Photo database. Then, I made an album of the photos not on iPhone and synced them to the iPhone.
I still want to give iCloud a try but the thought of syncing 140GB up to iCloud then back down to the iPhone seems like it is going to be a mess and very time consuming. I do miss that instant iCloud backup I got of every picture I took.
Dropbox and Google Photos have an app for iOS that has the option to automatically back up photos right after you take them. They default to WiFi but you can set them to use cellular data so it backs up right after you take the picture.
i know that google photos is free but is a lower quality whats store for free, does google photo have a paid subscription to store the image at the quality that it was taken? same for drop box does it have that feature ? im trying a way to back up images but make it easier for wife phone too
Yep, Google Photos app has the option to not use the free unlimited storage (which compresses your image significantly) and to use your available Google Drive space (which can be paid).
I do this too.
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I pay for the 2TB plan.
My album is ~150GB and my wife's is ~250. Kids have an insignificant size usage. Obviously we are on the 2TB plan. I do wish there was something in between 200GB and 2TB...I pay $9.99 for 2TB for my entire family to use. It is really nice.
How big is your iCloud photo library?
@Randiesel75 --- That's what I did, I had my 140GB+ library on Google, earlier this year, I spent 2 days downloading it all with the Take Out feature (worked REALLY well). Then I merged it into a Mac OS Photos database. This took some doing because the way Google Photos worked with their auto correct - there were a lot of duplicate images. Shared albums were also counted as duplicate images. But once I got that fixed up, I then imported my phone's photos (30+GB of 1.5 years of photos) to the Photo database. Then, I made an album of the photos not on iPhone and synced them to the iPhone.
I still want to give iCloud a try but the thought of syncing 140GB up to iCloud then back down to the iPhone seems like it is going to be a mess and very time consuming. I do miss that instant iCloud backup I got of every picture I took.
As far as Google, they are currently my ISP, and that comes with 1TB of free storage. I don't have to use the compressed option. I don't really love the idea of giving them a timeline of my life, but I'm guessing they already have a lot of that info anyway.
I use "optimize" for the photos on my phone and like the way it works. It usually just takes a few hours to sync up when I get a new phone. (But I DO have gigabit wireless service, which is why I let Google into my house in the first place!)