Photos "Optimize Mac Storage" and backups

[boston04and07]

I have a question about the new Photos app and haven't been able to find the answer so far. I use Time Machine to back up my laptop and have always liked the idea that my old iPhoto library was being backed up there too. I now have the new Photos app, and use iCloud Photo Library with it. I had to choose "Optimize Mac Storage" because my photo library was growing so big that the amount of space I had on my hard disk was quickly decreasing. I know my photos are backed up to the cloud, but I'd much prefer to have it backed up on my Time Machine disk as well for redundancy. This seems obvious, but I wanted to ask anyway, just to be 100% sure...now that I use "Optimize Mac Storage," I can no longer say that all of my photos are being backed up to Time Machine, right? It'd just be the ones that happen to have a full-res copy saved to my Mac?

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

 

[PsyOpWarlord]

Correct. Whatever format of photos is physically on your Mac is what will be backed up in Time Machine (not what is in the iCloud storage).

If you have your Mac set to Optimize and your Mac starts compressing the files due to limited available space, then that is all that will be backed up in the Time Machine.

If this is a home desktop machine all I can suggest is to have your library ran from an external drive that is large enough to hold the entire library of original files. Then that would be backed up via Time Machine to the Time Machine drive. But that would not be practical if your doing this from a Macbook (having to have an external drive connected all the time.

 

[boston04and07]

Correct. Whatever format of photos is physically on your Mac is what will be backed up in Time Machine (not what is in the iCloud storage).

If you have your Mac set to Optimize and your Mac starts compressing the files due to limited available space, then that is all that will be backed up in the Time Machine.

If this is a home desktop machine all I can suggest is to have your library ran from an external drive that is large enough to hold the entire library of original files. Then that would be backed up via Time Machine to the Time Machine drive. But that would not be practical if your doing this from a Macbook (having to have an external drive connected all the time.

That's what I thought...thank you so much for your quick response! I was thinking about installing one of those permanent SD storage drives (one of the ones that slides in flush and can't be easily removed) because I don't often use the SD slot), so that might be a solution...

Another question - In digging around my files I realized that in addition to a 60gb Photos library, I also have a 58gb Aperture library still. This makes sense, since I've uploaded roughly 2gb worth of photos since the transition. Do I still need this old Aperture library? I think having the two large photo libraries is what created the shortage in space, as it seems as though the shortage started right around the transition...

Any other thoughts would be appreciated!

 

[PsyOpWarlord]

Another question - In digging around my files I realized that in addition to a 60gb Photos library, I also have a 58gb Aperture library still. This makes sense, since I've uploaded roughly 2gb worth of photos since the transition. Do I still need this old Aperture library? I think having the two large photo libraries is what created the shortage in space, as it seems as though the shortage started right around the transition...

Any other thoughts would be appreciated!

This should answer that last question.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204476

 

[boston04and07]

Ah, that's so weird! So let me see if I have this right - the Photos and Aperture libraries are each separately reporting in the Finder that they take up roughly 60gb on my hard drive, but they're not taking up 120gb together?

I ran Daisy Disk and that did report that together, the two libraries were taking up 120gb on my hard drive. Odd. This is going to be pretty confusing...wish Apple would just have everything under one consolidated library. I hope others aren't deleting their old Aperture libraries thinking they're redundant.

 

[gugy]

Does anybody know if I can direct Photos to have a library on a secondary drive different from the main HD the user library?

My main HD do not have enough space to handle my photos library. My current iPhoto library is located on a secondary drive on my MacPro and I want to make sure it stays there once I migrate it to Photos.
Thanks

 

[PsyOpWarlord]

Does anybody know if I can direct Photos to have a library on a secondary drive different from the main HD the user library?

My main HD do not have enough space to handle my photos library. My current iPhoto library is located on a secondary drive on my MacPro and I want to make sure it stays there once I migrate it to Photos.
Thanks

Yes you can.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204414

 

[gugy]

Yes you can.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204414

Thanks!!!!

 

[boston04and07]

So I've been doing some more digging around, and am genuinely confused as to how this all works. I have 200gb of iCloud storage available, and Photos and Videos are listed as taking up 51.35 GB of that storage. Meanwhile, my Aperture library is apparently taking up 59.6 GB and my Photos library is taking up 18.6 GB. So either iCloud Photo Library isn't backing up all my files or the Finder is really off in measuring the Aperture/Photos library sizes.

Either way, my laptop's SSD is rapidly running out of space, and I'm getting desperate, so I've been considering a semi-permanent solution like a Nifty Minidrive more seriously. Would it be entirely crazy to put my Photos/Aperture library mess just on that, so that at least my internal SSD won't be completely filled? I know SD cards aren't the most reliable, but all the photos would be backed up via Time Machine as well as in the cloud, right? Has anyone tried this?