Mac Mini M2 RAM requirements for photo backups

[boyturtle]

I'm looking to get a Mac Mini M2 for my son as our 13 (or so) years old iMac has stopped playing nice and is longer able to backup photos off of his and his mum's iPhones in a reliable and timely fashion - it seems to take a long time to do and often requires multiple attempts. There are approximately 40,000 images taking up about 130GB of space on the 2 phones. How much RAM would I need for the backup to work smoothly on this device with this amount of files, would 8GB be enough or would I need to go for the 16GB unit? Please bear in mind that this unit is unlikely to be used for any other purpose other than backing up the phones.

 

[magicMac]

I'm looking to get a Mac Mini M2 for my son as our 13 (or so) years old iMac has stopped playing nice and is longer able to backup photos off of his and his mum's iPhones in a reliable and timely fashion - it seems to take a long time to do and often requires multiple attempts. There are approximately 40,000 images taking up about 130GB of space on the 2 phones. How much RAM would I need for the backup to work smoothly on this device with this amount of files, would 8GB be enough or would I need to go for the 16GB unit? Please bear in mind that this unit is unlikely to be used for any other purpose other than backing up the phones.

8GB will work, but it will probably thrash the SSD to do it, decreasing the life of the storage. Not by a great deal though mind. I'm also curious on other answers to this.

Are you looking at a base model M2 (8GB, 256GB Storage)? Keep in mind the 512GB model has approx. double the write speed so might be worth the extra £200.

 

[boyturtle]

He's upped his game from our original conversation that brought me here in the first place and now is after the 1TB model. Apart from backing up the photos described above, he apparently also needs to do full backups of his and his mum's phones, his iPad and his grandparents' devices too (older iPads and iPhones).
I've suggested backup software to backup to his PC, but that won't be the same and he needs the Apple solution.

 

[magicMac]

He's upped his game from our original conversation that brought me here in the first place and now is after the 1TB model. Apart from backing up the photos described above, he apparently also needs to do full backups of his and his mum's phones, his iPad and his grandparents' devices too (older iPads and iPhones).
I've suggested backup software to backup to his PC, but that won't be the same and he needs the Apple solution.

Since you are looking at a mac mini, you can avoid the more expensive 1TB storage from apple and get 4TB for the same price increase , there are 3 ways to do it:

-change the backup location to an external drive (most built in apps like Music, Photos and TV, let you chose the library location if you launch the app holding the alt key)
-set the home folder to an external drive (done in system settings under the user configuration->advanced)
-completely install the whole system on an external drive and set it as the boot drive (requires a little bit of knowhow to create a bootable macOS install on the external drive, from within the default OS install on the internal drive).

 

[boyturtle]

-change the backup location to an external drive
-set the home folder to an external drive (done in system settings under the user configuration->advanced)
-completely install the whole system on an external drive and set it as the boot drive (requires a little bit of knowhow to create a bootable macOS install from within the default OS install on the internal drive)

Hmm. That's very interesting, although the 3rd option might be too difficult for him to tackle (and I really don't want to get that involved with it at this time). Can the home folder or the backup location be set to a network share (SMB) rather than an external drive?

 

[magicMac]

Hmm. That's very interesting, although the 3rd option might be too difficult for him to tackle (and I really don't want to get that involved with it at this time). Can the home folder or the backup location be set to a network share (SMB) rather than an external drive?

option 1 (library on external drive) can be set as a network share safely, if the app can't find the location it will simply pop up saying "try again" or "chose different location", although personally I use a SATA SSD in a USB-C caddy. Option 2 (home folder) must be an attached storage (internal or external) - technically there is a workaround by creating a local mount point referring to a network drive, but this requires some unix-like commands and I wouldn't recommend this, and performance can be poor.

I have an Intel Mac Mini from 2018, currently I am using option 1 for my Music, Photo and TV library, I have used option 2 in the past also with good success. I am considering getting an M2 Mac Mini and skipping option 1 and option 2 this time and going straight to option 3 myself.

I agree option 3 might be more than required here. One of the benefits of option 3 however, is you can disconnect the external volume and connect it to a different mac mini of the same type and everything remains identical with no loss of data, which is very useful for warranty/repairs/failures. Option 3 does however require an additional USB-C port for the external drive, and the base M2 only has 2 of these plugs whereas the M2 Pro has 4.

 

[slythfox]

I don't see why you need more ram to perform photo backups unless the backup software in use is not well created. Ram is useful for *viewing*, say, a very large photo uncompressed from the file on storage. But if you're just relocating files stored from one place to another I wouldn't be concerned at all about ram.

 

[boyturtle]

Thanks for both of your inputs, he has now ordered the 8GB unit