In 2007 I bought a copy of SuperDuper that I used to backup my laptops for a while. I bought the licence for fourteen GBP in 2007 and it is still valid to this day. That’s less than a GBP per year of use. The tool is simple. It allows you to backup your mac’s system disk or other drives and make them bootable when relevant. This means that you can run your laptop or desktop either from your local drive or an external drive.
Superduper
If the internal drive fails you can switch to the backup drive within seconds. Just hold option at boot, select the backup drive, and boot into your external hard drive. Continue working. The same licence now costs 27 CHF but since this is a lifetime licence it’s worth having.
Carbon Copy Cloner
I heard about Carbon Copy Cloner regularly through various podcasts, and work, so I decided to play with that backup solution but it requires you to pay for an upgrade every few years. It’s 50 CHF now, to buy for the current version, and half off for the next version. I stopped using Carbon Copy Cloner around 2017 or so because MacOS changed to APFS and broke backup solutions. At this point we had to switch back to slow and clunky Time Machine.
The issue with apps today is that they’re built on the ‘pay yearly’ and ‘pay monthly’ model, which both makes sense, and makes no sense. It makes sense that in the age of incremental upgrades we would pay constantly to have apps updated but at the same time this constant paying for apps becomes expensive.
Apps are Expensive
For a long time I would download a dozen or more apps per week from the iOS app, to play with, and enjoy. Over time every single app began to cost 27 CHF per year or more. At this point a dozen apps at 27 CHF per year comes to 324 CHF per year. This is too expensive. It’s good for Apple but awful for users. The worst thing about paying per year is that the companies that are charging are not even making enough to survive, so we’re paying for nothing. Apple benefits but we, and developers, just pay through the nose, just to exist.
And Finally
I am grateful to Shirt Pocket, the company behind SuperDuper for updating the app and allowing us to use it for over a decade without having to pay a yearly upgrade fee. Paradoxically they thanked me too, in their aknowledgements too. If you’re looking for an affordable bootable system disk backup solution then I would still recommend them today.
Around a week ago I setup the Nextcloud desktop client to keep an eye on four folders. It synched three out of four folders with ease and struggled with the fourth so I removed it from the sync. Now I have three folders that sync permanently, and when I mean permanently I mean that within seconds of creating two screenshots they were backed up by Nextcloud.
Wireless Backup
By using Nextcloud to backup specific folders I don’t need to have the laptop plugged in to a drive. As soon as a file is created it syncs to the cloud, available on the mobile phone or other devices. You don’t need much storage for this to work. An SD card with 128gb is enough. This isn’t meant to be a secure backup. It’s meant as an iCloud and Google Cloud alternative.
When files are synched as soon as they are created we have the advantage that if the laptop suddenly crashes or fails we have the synched version available within seconds, rather than when we run time machine when the drive is plugged in.
Self-Hosted
Because the device running Nextcloud is self-hosted, either at home or offsight this means that you can backup and recover from anywhere but it also means that if you need a fast recovery you can unplug the drive from the Pi device and backup directly, in an emergency situation. If you have more time then synching from Nextcloud locally will work well.
Audiobookshelf Synchronisation
If you have a collection of Audible or other books that you own and that you want to make available to read via Audiobookshelf you can. You could use OpenAudible to make them DRM free, and from then on get Nextcloud to move them from your personal computer to the server for indexing. This workflow is of interest because it takes time to convert books from one format to another.
I am converting books that I own, as a backup in case Amazon, Audible or other suddenly goes bankrupt and I lose access to books that I own. I use Audiobookshelf because it has good metrics but also because it provided me with hands on experience of setting such a server instance up, and then using it.
And Finally
Once Nextcloud is setup it runs in the background and you don’t need to think about it. It’s easy to install, especially if you use snap install nextcloud. The one thing I would like is to have a simplified method of changing the drive from being local to the system disk to using an external disk.
As I write this I am waiting for my Apple Laptop to complete two tasks. The first task is to convert all my audible books from AAX to MP3 format. This is taking days to complete because I have over 500 books and my mac book pro is slow, due to it being from 2016.
Very Slow Time Machine
I’m also waiting for my mac book pro to backup to a one terabyte external HD, before repurposing a one terabyte SSD. It’s a waste to have an SSD working as a time machine backup when it could be used for more interesting tasks.
Flickr Backup
I recently downloaded all of my photos from flickr. I want to consolidate my photos from iPhoto, now Photos, with Picasa photos, Now also Photos (but by Google), as well as by flickr, which is still just flickr. I checked and PhotoPrism is written so that it can get metadata from Flickr export files and populate PhotoPrism.
Unzipping
At some point I need to spend several hours unzipping over one hundred and fourty files. I want to use a Linux system because with Linux images are unzipped into a single folder structure, whereas with MacOS each zip file becomes an individual folder, and when you have 140 zips you don’t want to go through 140 folders to reconcile all the files into the structure they should be in.
This is important, because exported image files are organised by folders, but their creation date and modified date correspond to when the zip was created, rather than the files. This means that I need Photoprism to see the photo files and find the JSON data that goes with them. I wanted to reorganise my files manually, by date, but I can’t.
PhotoPrism Duplicate Detection
there is a silver lining. PhotoPrism is designed not only so that it can see the photos and read the json files with exif information but it can also detect duplicates. I was going to do it manually because I thought it would be faster, but it isn’t faster, and could become very messy later, if I mess around with photo files. JSON files will no longer have the right information to go with the photo files.
Replacing Time Machine and Google Backup with NextCloud
In theory I don’t need to wait for Time Machine to backup to an external hard drive because I could setup Nextcloud to take care of backing up for me. I will do that, once this backup is over.
Ubuntu From Target Drive
In the past I have run Linux on a mac using the Target Drive mode but the issue is that you need to shut down the machine if you want to move it. With an SSD I could theoretically move the computer whilst it’s hibernating or sleeping. It would give me the flexibility of having a Linux system, without having to wipe MacOS.
I want to wipe MacOS from that drive anyway, but first I want to ensure that Ubuntu or another version of Linux runs well before taking the plunge.
And Finally
Time Machine
Time Machine is demonstrating why it makes sense to replace it with a self-hosted instance of Next Cloud. It shouldn’t take a day and a half or more to backup a laptop. With Next Cloud I will have an always on backup of files from the laptop.
AudioBookShelf
Yesterday I moved audiobooks and podcasts from the Pi SD card to an external hard drive and it worked flawlessly so I know that this migration is easy, as long as I update the docker-compose file.
PhotoPrism
At the moment I have a photoprism library, that I will need to reconcile with my flickr and local versions of photos. I know that some duplicates remain so the question is whether to place flickr in one folder within import, and the local versions of photos in another folder, and import both at once, or should I import local files first, and then move the flickr files?
Time Consuming
I have been collecting files for at least two decades. By experimenting with self hosted versions of PhotoPrism, Nextcloud and more I was pushed to clear the chaos in my drive collection. It has taken a lot of time but the result is that I will soon have a few drives free to re-use for smaller projects.
A Good Feeling
It takes hours to move files from smaller drives to larger drives, and to detect and remove duplicates. It can feel overwhelming and tedious but in the end you get something worthwhile. I now have all my photos in one place organised chronologically, all my videos across two drives, organised chronologically and soon all my audiobooks and favourite podcasts organised.
When all your files are across several drives you lose track of where things are. Now, I might spend hours waiting for files to move from drive to drive, and for photoprism or openaudible to convert files but the result is that I regain access to files that were lost in a chaos of drives and duplicates.
I also regain several terabytes of space on hard drives, providing space to store and work on new projects.
When you take photos on an iphone or other such device it’s easy to take photos and never organise them, unless you share specific photos with specific people. Images are automatically organised by time, date, month, location and people by photo apps but this is just an illusion of organisation.
By playing with Photoprism, Nextcloud, OneCloud, MyCloud (the Swisscom one), Immich and others I have often come across the same problem. When you’re synching thousands of images at a time devices time out after a few minutes, and you need to start from scratch over, and over, and over again. I’ve encountered this issue with almost all backup solutions.
If I had created an album for each month, week, or even event I would now save a lot of time. It’s not that it makes synching painless, but rather that it makes it easier to backup individual albums rather than 19,000 images at a time. With an album you select it and 300 images are uploaded from one album, and 12 from another, and 230 from yet another.
To use an analogy, imagine that a photo album is a head of hair, at the barber’s. You could cut an individual’s hair in five to ten minutes, and move on to the next and get through 72 hair cuts, or you could cut 72 people’s hair simultaneously but everyone would need to remain in place for eight hours. This is the nightmare I’m putting iphone photo backup apps through with my experimentation.
PhotoPrismUpload
This morning I was experimenting with PhotoPrismUpload. I wanted to experiment with this app because it’s directly paired with PhotoPrism and PhotoPrism looks like a good iCloud and Google Photos alternative. The first flaw that I spotted is that it doesn’t detect that all of the photographs are already backed up to PhotoPrism so I need to spend hours getting it to say “This file is uploaded, this file is also uploaded, and that file is now uploaded.”
This, in and of itself is quite time consuming but to add to the experience it downloads the offline images from iCloud to the phone, uploads them, and then leaves them there. The consequence is that my backup phone with a large hard drive is now low on memory and the sync is blocked.
To the question “Does this matter?” the answer is “nope”. Not for me, because my images are backed up. It’s a question of convenience. If I was to suggest a feature, which I should, later, it would be an option to “Show only un-uploaded images” like we have with e-mail clients for unread messages.
If I had this option then I would upload x number of pictures until the app timed out, select the latest un-uploaded images, upload them, and repeat this until everything is synched. Now that the phone is low on memory I will abort the experiment, but I won’t stop using the app because it is simple and convenient to use.
It clearly shows which images are uploaded, and which still need to be uploaded. When you sync images it’s quick and intuitive. You have two or three ads displayed but they’re not annoying like the awful adverts you get with mobile games. I got ads for Google Ads and for Mediamarkt. For 3 CHF you can do away with ads.
Photosync and WebDav
Photosync is the recommended app, by the developers of Photoprism but I don’t like that it encourages you to pay once for functionality that should be by default and a second time for added features. Despite this I do really like how Webdav works. I setup two webdav accounts. One that is for when I’m on home wifi and the second for when I’m connecting through the VPN when I’m out.
WebDav is an excellent tool because it knows which photos have been uploaded. With the Photosync app photos that are not uploaded yet are highlighted with a red border. You click the red sync button and you can upload “new”, “selected” or “all”. It then gives you the choice between “computer”, “phone/tablet”, “webdav”, “ftp”, “smb”, “files/usb/icloud”, dropbox, onedrive and google drive. I use webdav 2 and within seconds the files are uploaded. If I was out I would use Webdav 3.
The real advantage of the Photosync app is that you can see “new”, “selected” or “all”. If an upload is interrupted for any reason you don’t need to “select all” and upload. You can select just the “new” images, and within seconds you’re synching again.
Photosync information is not automatically synched between two phones so I don’t know how well Webdav works, via this app, when synching the same library from two phones.
And Finally
By organising photos into albums by hand you make online synchronisation more granular. Instead of uploading 19,000 files at once you upload one album, and then another, until everything is uploaded. It’s easier for backup solutions to keep track of their progress, and you don’t need to keep scrolling up and down to keep the screen awake and uploading.
PhotoPrismUpload and Photosync are both interesting solutions for synching to PhotoPrism but PhotoPrismUpload has the advantage of costing 3 CHF not to see ads, whereas Photosync costs 25 CHF for premium features, as well as 6 CHF for other features. If I had seen PhotoPrismUpload before Photosync I would have been happy. PhotoPrismUpload is a dedicated tool that works well within its niche.
Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with [Nextcloudpi](https://nextcloudpi.com/). The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.
Transfer screen
Use Case
It’s easy to take dozens, or even hundreds of pictures in a single day on the mobile phone but it’s a nuissance to download them all locally so you usually use iCloud, Google Photos or some other solution. This is great, for as long as you have enough space on your phone. The moment iOS or Android stops offloading your photos from your device you’re in an annoying situation. Uploading photos to cloud services is painless. Retrieving them is a nightmare, for two reasons. The first reason is that you need to have enough storage locally to download all those files. When you’re on a laptop storage is at a premium.
You could use an external hard drive but it may take days, or even weeks to download all of your files. This means that you need to keep your machine plugged in and downloading for as long as it takes to download those files. That’s where Nextcloud comes in. When it’s working correctly it will download files from your phone, either as you take them, or when you choose to upload them.
What it does
It allows you to store and share photos, including encoding and decoding of video files, as well as preparing preview files, reading RAW image files and more. It allows you to have contexts, calendar, time tracker, apps like GpxPod, Tasks and more. It also provides you with an RSS reader, video player, and audio player.
With the photo app you can use facial recognition and other AI tools. As images are added to the galleries it checks for their location and adds them to a map as you would with Google Photos and iCloud. It also gives you the option of adding an exif reader to get more info from your saved files. With the GpxPod app you can download walks, hikes, runs, bike rides and planned routes and view them on the screen. I have yet to play with it properly.
How to Break Things
– upload 19,000 images at once. It will overheat the device
– reboot the machine. Having a different ip will get nextcloudpi.local to fail.
– ensure that your machine is called nextcloudpi.local
– use “sudo nano /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php” to enter the config file and ensure that the ip address is listed. It needs to see that the current IP is a trusted one.
– Go from one wifi access point to another. I found that if I go from the living room wifi to the bedroom wifi it loses sight of the server and fails.
– Allow the Pi to Overheat. If the Pi reaches above a certain temperature the Pi will begin to fail. You need a fan if you’re playing with Nextcloud on a pi, especially when synchronising tens of thousands of pictures.
Why This Solution is Interesting
The system is new to me so I’m micromanaging it as it tries to get through thousands of files. Once it’s up and running it will be invisible and that’s the beauty of such a system. Once the Pi has its own fan it will no longer overheat and if I provide it with WiFi and Lan it should be accessible locally whether on one wifi network or the other.
With some network storage solutions you have the disks and the LAN interface within the same box, and if one fails you might lose access to the drives. With this solution you can attach an SSD or other hard drive to the Pi. If the Pi fails you just replace it. Once everything is running smoothly I would have two drives. The primary drive would be in constant use, and the second drive would serve as a backup.
It’s also low cost. A raspberry pi is cheap, and so are micro SD cards. Mobile phones are usually 128, 256 or 500 gigabytes. With a single SD card you can backup your phone every time you get home, as it syncs the most recent files.
And Finally
If I was not synchronising a huge backlog of photographs this solution would be up and running. It’s because I’m trying to backup the images that are on my phone that there are teething problems. I edited the config file to recognise nextcloudpi4.local and the two ip addresses the device is currently on. I have it on wifi and lan because I want to see if I can access it from either wifi. If that is the case then I have succeeded and the last step will be to have the Pi in a case with a fan.
A few years ago I bought a 256 gigabyte iphone because I wanted more space and for a long time it was great because it meant that I had plenty of room to grow into. The issue comes when you get to over 200 gigabytes of data stored in iCloud because you go from 3 CHF per month to 10 CHF per month. You go from 36 CHF per year to 120 CHF per year. That is a big increase.
I wouldn’t mind paying this much, if it was easier to retrieve this data. Once data is on iCloud and plenty of services it is a nuissance to retrieve. If you think “I can expand it for a few weeks then you’re right, you can. It’s when you want to recover the data that you will get blocked. iCloud doesn’t allow a photo library to be spread across multiple drives, so either you have everything on a single volume, or you’re trapped paying for decades to come.
Now for the simple solution I hadn’t considered until last night. A lower capacity iPhone. With a 256 gigabyte phone you need ten terabytes of storage to backup the entire phone, but with a 126 gigabyte phone you sneak under the 200 gigabyte limit with ease. The cost of a new phone is relatively high, but consider that you’re saving 81 CHF per year, and several hundred francs on a mobile phone.
Next time you consider an iPhone consider the size of the phone compared to your laptop hard drive, as well as the cost of cloud storage and backup. The bigger the phone, the larger the yearly tax. Keep it to 200 gigabytes and the tax is 39 CHF per year, expand it to two terabytes and it’s 120 CHF per year. Retrieving the data is not straight forward. I will stick to smaller capacity phones, to avoid hitting the 200 gigabyte limit in future.
KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.
With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually. iCloud is not quite as bad but they are still not ideal. You can upload images to their service, but if you do so, your image gallery must be on a drive with enough storage to take the gallery offline. On mobile phones and laptops this is complicated. In effect your images are stuck until you buy a higher capacity laptop or phone. I know an HD would also work but the issue is that when your image gallery is on another drive you have to keep it plugged in, or sync regularly for it to be efficient.
Simple Synchronisation
With KDrive you have a folder that is synched automatically from your device to the cloud, and from the cloud to another device. If you decide to move your images from one device to another you can do so by requesting that the images are downloaded, and eventually they will be synced. This is a key selling point.
Google One
With Google One you have two terabytes, which are shared between photos, file folders, e-mail and more. They are however, separated. You can access all of the files that you uploaded as files, but you cannot access all of your photos and download them easily. In the past I tried to download images from Google Drive and I found that I was blocked by how many hours it takes to download zip file after zip file for days at a time. This is not a good solution despite being cheaper than iCloud.
iCloud and Price
Aside from the size of the HD you need on your mac laptop or iOS device to download your galleries you also need to pay 120 CHF per year, in perpetuity. With Apple device you pay a premium for the phone, for the laptop but then you pay a premium for the apps, for the services and more. Apple wants 120 CHF per year to keep your data safe, when drives of that capacity are going down in price every single year. I object to paying a tax of sorts, every year, when I have already payed a premium for the products.
KDrive
KDrive, by Infomaniak, based in Switzerland has a number of advantages. The first is that the company is local, so it feels good to support a local effort rather than the giants. The second reason is that their price point is half as much as their competition, especially if you commit to two or three years. The third selling point is that all the files are accessible as if they were already on your local machine. This means that within a short period of time you can recover the files you want to recover, or backup the files that you want to backup.
Features
In the settings you have photo backup, and within this you can enable automatic backup but what makes this one different is that you can choose where to save the images, including which folder. It also creates directory by month and year. This makes it easy for you to find images when you are looking for them.. I like that you can select to upload photos, videos, screenshots and even delete photos once they are backed up, although this is in beta.
I like these features because I don’t want to backup videos because they’re heavy and take time to load, but also because they are not relevant to my photos. I prefer to take care of them separately. No other service offers the option to exclude videos.
Another great feature is that you can choose whether to sync your photos from “now” or all. That is useful. If you’re on a trip and you just want to backup recent pictures then that’s a useful feature. If you have all the time in the world, and enough battery life, then you can sync your entire image library. The fact that you can exclude video initially speeds up the process considerably.
Google Drive and iCloud complicate rather than simplify your life, when you are dealing with photos. KDrive simplifies it. If you can migrate your photos away from Google Drive and iCloud to a solution that is more user friendly then you can also reduce the amount of space you need on your devices, as you have offloaded them to the cloud, but then the files that were offloaded to the cloud can be synced your local machine seamlessly. As a media asset manager I greatly appreciate this.
KDrive is now a speedy and efficient solution for the sharing of files, with some intelligent features for the backing up of your phones’ photo galleries. I am in the process of doing that now. I hesitated with other services in the past, but to me this is a clear winner.
Recently I was using a one terabyte drive to backup a half terabyte drive and it would take four and a half hours to backup and I think I may have figured out why the software was taking so long. It’s because it was never designed to be used as I am using it.
Time Machine is designed to work with a hard drive that is smaller or as big as the system it’s backing up. When you get a one terabyte disk to backup a half terabyte hard drive it has the opportunity to save many more files than are on the system and this is fine initially but over time the number of files that it has to check gets larger and larger until finally it takes hours, rather than minutes to backup.
We need a new feature in Time Machine so that it becomes archival software, rather than backup and version software. It should keep at least two log files. The first log file should be of all the changes on an hourly, weekly and monthly basis on both the system drive and the backup drive.
The purpose of these log files would be to be a quick place for Time Machine or other backup software to see what has changed between the most recent backup and the current file situation.
It should check what files have been changed since the last backup and sync those, but not bother with older files unless the directory says that something has been deleted. This feature could be added to spotlight as it is already indexing all the files.
The purpose would be to check one or two master log files, synchronise and then complete the task within minutes, whether the backup software has been run minutes or weeks ago.
For now I think that time machine checks every single file on the system, and then every file of every backup for however many months you have been backing up. In theory this comes to millions of files, so millions of checks.
The data that Time Machine had to backup was regularly ten or twenty gigabytes but it was taking four hours per backup, which is far too long, for something that is meant to take minutes. It would take that long on a daily basis.
In related news my 2007 licence for Superduper is still valid today, so I can use that to backup, now that my experimentation is coming to a close. With Superduper it keeps a current clone of the system disk so that if and when a drive fails you can switch to the backup drive within 30 seconds of a drive failure.
Now that I know what the issue is, I can act accordingly.
Over the last two days, I have been playing with Infomaniak K Drive, Swisscom MyCloud, Apple iCloud and Google Drive. I settled for Swisscom Mycloud because backing up pictures is free with my current contract and it’s cheaper than two terabytes with Apple iCloud. It’s free.
Infomaniak K drive is interesting because you can back up images automatically but when you have over ten thousand images on your phone like I do it cannot work through the backlog without timing out. The only way for me to update would be to keep the app alive for several hours as it uploads images and videos.
Swisscom Mycloud has the same issue but I invested yesterday getting all the images to upload from my phone. With patience, I might be able to upload all the videos but this may take several weeks. Both services have the flaw that when the app goes to sleep they stop uploading, and as video files are large it takes more time to determine which files still need to upload than to start uploading again.
Flickr also has this issue but as Flickr raises their yearly fees every year, and makes downloading files a messy and painful experience I am happy to find alternatives.
Both iCloud and Google Photos do not have this issue either because I’ve been synching as I go along or because they have the right privileges to work through the backlog.
Infomaniak K Drive is around 65 CHF per year, Google Drive and iCloud are around 100 to 120 CHF per year.
With Swisscom Mycloud I have “free” unlimited storage for photos and videos as well as 250 gigabytes for online backup of other files. I can then look at these photos via Swisscom TV, not that I do.
Swisscom Mycloud could be made more interesting by adding duplicate detection as well as the ability to upload from two or three devices at once.
Features I would like
Duplicate detection, so that I could upload images from several sources at once
Multidevice support, so that I can upload from the desktop, the phone, and other devices.
Background uploading, when on WiFi. Video files are heavy and the app times out on iOS devices before the upload is complete.
Select by day, because pictures from one day may be of a specific event. When you have more than five images selecting images individually takes too much time.
360 image and video support. Content on my phone is of spherical images and videos
Features I like
Placing images on a map. It’s fun to look for images by location. As you zoom in you can see everywhere you’ve taken pictures. This uses Exif data rather than location information based on where your phone has been, as with Google Maps.
Unlimited free storage of images and video. Since mobile phones aggregate pictures and videos from 360 devices, cameras, and other gadgets it’s nice to have as much data as we need for the storage of these images. It gives us an offsite backup in case we lose or break our phones.
It’s fast. Uploading new images is fast. Within seconds of taking a picture, it is backed up. Accessing images is also fast.
Smooth Integration With Swisscom TV. As soon as images are uploaded to Mycloud they can be viewed via Swisscom TV on the screen of your choice. This is interesting for videos and images that are worth seeing on a big screen.
Easy sharing of images and image folders. I like how easy it is to share images and folders and to allow other people to add images. What I would like to see on top of this is the ability to allow specific people to see the content. It would be nice to restrict access to chosen phone numbers, e-mail addresses and more. I would also like to password protect folders as I am not comfortable sharing certain images openly.
Select All and download, Should you desire to download all images at once this is possible. Select one image, then choose “select all”, press “download” and theoretically, you will be able to download all images at once. I say theoretically because I selected over 10,000 files which included videos and photographs. Google Drive is limited to 500 images per zip file and when I tried downloading from Flickr I found the process clunky and messy. Flickr strips all EXIF data so you’re left with a mess of images. (A media asset manager’s nightmare because of the volume of work, but a dream, because of the hours of work) 😉
Why The Interest?
iPhones, iPads and Android devices now have 120 or more gigabytes of storage each and with this amount of data, it is easy to reach the 200-gigabyte wall beyond which you pay ten CHF per month for storage. A “free” option like Swisscom MyCloud Standard is interesting for those on the right contracts because it’s free. This means that no matter how much storage their phone has their images are backed up. It also means that as time advances and they gather more and more images it can expand.
Apple and iPhoto want you to believe that they are the best integrated, slickest option. When you’re in a situation like this they say “You have 30 days to download your photos in the photo app”. There is no “select all and download” option. There also seems to be a limit of how much bandwidth you can use in a single day.
And Finally
The reason for which MyCloud, Google Photos, and other solutions are so interesting is that we have moved to a laptop-based workflow and as a result, the hard drive on our laptop is as big as the one on our phone so backing images up locally requires an external hard drive.
I had Firewire 400, 800 USB 2, 3 and USB C drives. Apple loves to de-standardise ports and so hard drives that were once convenient to use become problematic. With increasing bandwidth and online storage solutions we can stop worrying about external hard drives on a daily basis and use them when we need to “desaturate our drives”. I apologise for the diving term.
With online storage, we’re backing up when we’re hiking, cycling, climbing, doing via Ferrata, traveling and more. We don’t need to worry about our box of cables, adaptors, or which drive what material is stored. As a media asset manager, I can help you consolidate your media assets into a single location, along with backup solutions.
I hope that this blog post helps you understand this topic and provides you with solutions.
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