A photo album is the classic item people say they would save if their house was on fire, but most of us still fail to properly back up our precious photo libraries. Even if you use iCloud to store and sync all your photos, they still aren’t safely backed up.
iCloud Photos Isn’t a Backup Service
Although Apple claims iCloud will “back up” your photos in itssupport page, iCloud Photos isnota backup service.
Sure, if you delete a photo by mistake, Apple gives you 30 days to recover it from the trash, thanks to iCloud hanging onto a copy for you. But if you didn’t notice you deleted a photo within 30 days, you have no hope of recovering it through iCloud. Similarly, if something goes wrong with iCloud’s copy of a photo—if it got corrupted, for instance—you’re completely out of luck. There’s no alternative “backup” copy you can go to.
The problem is that syncing to iCloud Photos means there’s still only one real copy of each of your photos: the one on iCloud. Even when you download copies to your Apple devices, they’ll constantly reference the master copy in iCloud, and if that goes missing or becomes corrupt, your device will copy those errors onto the downloaded photo.
Instead, the solution is todownload your iCloud Photos libraryand create a true backup of everything. That way, it’ll be preserved if anything ever goes catastrophically wrong with iCloud.
Unfortunately, you’re able to’t automate this process, and it can be quite long-winded if you’ve got a lot of photos. Your backup also won’t update whenever you take new photos; you’ll need to periodically update it. But it’s a worthwhile safekeeping measure and one that all of us should really be taking.
It’s possible to do this from an iPhone or iPad, but I really don’t recommend it. Instead, get to your Mac (or find a way to get your hands on one) and use that instead.
The first step is to download all your photos from iCloud to the Mac itself. Open up Photos and go to Photos > Settings from the menu bar. Now click over to the “iCloud” tab and select the option to “Download Originals to this Mac.”
You might need toclear some storage on your Macbefore you may do this. If you get a prompt that you need to do so (or if you know you’ve got more gigabytes of iCloud Photos than you have free space) jump into your Mac’s System Settings and select General > Storage to find ways you can clear space.
If you may’t create enough free storage on your Mac, this is going to be a bit harder. You can still back up your photos, though. Just scroll to the bottom of this post to see an alternate method to follow.
You can check the progress of your Photos downloads by scrolling to the bottom of the library. When they’re all downloaded, it’s time to make a copy of them onto an external drive.
2Make a Copy of Your Photos Library
Open Finder and press Command+Shift+H to go to the Home folder. Inside “Pictures” you’ll find the “Photos Library.photoslibrary” file. This now contains your entire iCloud Photos library. Drag and drop it onto an external hard drive, to make a copy for safekeeping.
That’s all there is to it, you now have a second copy of all your iCloud Photos on your external drive. That means if anything ever goes missing or gets corrupted in iCloud, you may double-click that library to open it in Photos and find anything you’re missing.
You’re free to go back to optimizing your Photos storage in the settings, to remove your downloaded copies and free up space on your Mac again. Doing so won’t affect the copy of everything you just added to your external drive.
The backup copy on your external drive won’t update itself. You’ll need to repeat this process whenever you take more photos you want to protect.
3Back Up Your Copy Using Time Machine
Just because you have a backup copy of your photos on an external drive, doesn’t mean you should stop there. The best practice would be to now include that external drive in your regular backup routine using Time Machine (which will back up your Mac to a separate external drive).
To ensure Time Machine includes a copy of your external Photos drive, you’ll need to make sure it’s connected when you’re backing up. Then go to System Settings > General > Time Machine. Click “Options” to view a list of files and folders excluded from your Time Machine backups.
Apple automatically excludes external drives by default, so just select your drive from this list and click the “–” button, then click “Done.” Having been removed from the exclusions list, your external drive—with all the photos on it—will now be included in all your regular Time Machine backups. Just verify you keep it connected when you’re backing up.
What if I Don’t Have Enough Mac Storage?
If your iCloud Photos library takes up more space than you have on your Mac, you’ll need to download your photos directly to an external drive instead. To do this, we first need to transfer your current photo library to an external drive.
Connect the external drive to your Mac and verify it’s in a Mac compatible format, like APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled). It should go without saying, but you should also make sure it’s big enough to hold your iCloud Photos library.
Now you need to transfer your existing Photos library to that drive. Quit Photos, then open Finder and go to the “Home” folder, which you can reach by pressing Command+Shift+H. Open the “Pictures” folder, then drag-and-drop the “Photos Library.photoslibrary” file onto your external drive.
This will create a copy of the photo library, rather than moving it (which is good). Rename the Photos Library file on your external hard drive as “External Photo Library.photoslibrary” or something like that, so we can tell the two apart. Now we need to temporarily set that to be your Mac’s system library for the Photos app.
Hold Option and open Photos. You’ll see a dialog box appear asking you to choose a library, select the one on your external drive and click “Choose Library.” In the menu bar, go to Photos > Settings. In the “General” tab, choose to “Use as System Photo Library” and confirm it in the following popup.
After doing that, you’re able to go across to the “iCloud” tab to enable “iCloud Photos” and select the option to “Download Originals to this Mac.” This will now download all your photos directly to the library file on your external drive, saving you the need to clear space on your Mac’s internal drive. You’ll be able to follow the process of it at the bottom of your library.
Once the download is complete, you’ll need to change Photos back to the original library again. Quit the app, then hold Option while you reopen it and repeat the steps above but select the original “Photos Library.photoslibrary” file. Finally, be sure to follow the instructions in the previous section to use Time Machine to back up the external drive with your photos on it.
Be sure to repeat all these steps periodically to update your photo library backup so it contains all your newest pictures.
You shouldn’t either. So make sure you grab an external drive and follow these steps every so often to ensure you’ve always got a true backup of your photos in case you ever need it.
