Create An Emergency Backup Of Your Photos - Mac

Odds are you use iCloud to backup your photos. That's great! Keep doing that! Today I'm going to teach you how to create an EMERGENCY BACKUP of your entire Photos Library. That way IF (and its a BIG if) anything ever happened to iCloud, you will safely have a local copy that is NOT optimized that you can access.

Anytime you're dealing with moving BIG amounts of data, you want to make sure you can do it relatively quickly. The faster it transfers, the less likely anything interrupts that transfer.

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#photos #backup

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[ralphwoodard]

Thank you David for a well-done video on backing up your photos. I went and got the Fantom drive with the USB 1 TB drive and did a test with a 1TB USB drive and it took a little more than an hour. With the Fantom, the same backup it took less than 10 minutes. Wow.

[manuarias]

I'm afraid of making an outdated library as the default and sync it with iCloud. What if it syncs and deletes newer photos or rescue older photos that I deleted after? Does anybody know what preferences it has the iCloud syncing process?
Anyway, great video, I didn't know why my library was only 3GB when it's supposed to be almost 40GB.

[mrard]

Thanks! Your videos helped me solve years worth of stress regarding my photos library. Using your videos, I was able to efficiently organize 15 years of photos by using your tips. Please take R2D2 out for a treat on my dime. Also, please consider coming to Vegas to work with me.

[michelleadams]

Very timely video. Trying this next year to do a lot of scrapbooking and taking a lot of photos. Life is too short not to record the nicest moments.

[Baby.speedball]

Thank you sooo much for this video! So underrated,

[hedydd]

The beauty of Time Machine is that it copies and retrieves incrementally. Only the last modified file version is held in iCloud and other cloud services and on many external backup apps but with Time Machine you can go back a number of days or even weeks or months to retrieve any or all previous versions of a file.

[BijanIzadi]

Thank you for this! Most results on google have no idea what it means to back up a phot library lol

[ottf]

as a mac user of many years, Local area support tech. time machine should be a must for all users.ans as a third choice for backup i choose backblaze services.

[duringthemeanwhilst]

nice one David, or as we say here in lovely Wales, "tidy" :-)

[ivanmytube]

3:58 “After a few minutes” or after a few hours or days?

[flaviosmedeiros]

I would like to backup but without copying the Photos Library.photoslibrary file. I would like to export the photos by year, month and day. To not depend on Apple's ecosystem.

[sharonsuskin]

How can I copy my Photos library (I don't use iCloud) directly to external drive? I know how to backup the entire system, but only want to do the Photos. Thank you!

[sandeguzman]

A question. When a backup is done with a time machine and I have all my documents in the cloud, does the backup take care of downloading all those documents from the cloud so that they are fully backed up to the hard drive of the time machine? I ask that because I have the "Optimize Mac Storage" option activated, and as it says when activating that option "Older documents will be stored only in iCloud when space is needed", and this is probably my case, since I don't use all the time my documents, but still all of them are stored on the cloud

[RetreatIsNotAnOption]

Any way to do this with out using iCloud?

[manuarias]

What happens if iCloud photos is set to 'optimize' and I backup using Time Machine? Will it back-up only photos already downloaded but no does stored only in iCloud?

[stephenshomo]

Tried this David but when I try to make the copied library the System Library, I get the color wheel. I must force quit Photos. Using a 2023 M2 Mac with Ventura

[WineWorldTV]

I just make sure it's backed up via Time Machine. Plus I have online backups. My library on my main machine is set to keep originals. My MBP and mobile devices are set to optimized. Though I can see this being useful if someone doesn't have either of these set up.

[speckdigital]

WARNING: Those Sandisk Extreme SSD have been failing and there's been lawsuits, etc.. The Samsung T5 is high quality is a much better choice.

[papretchech]

I deleted and empty my trash I need to retrieve some files that was in there help please

[hedydd]

What’s wrong with using Time Machine for backups? My Photos library is held on an external drive and backed up using Time Machine to another external drive. All my drives except Time Machine are backed up to iCloud as well and Photos specifically to Amazon Prime [free] and Google Drive. So there are multiple backups giving absolute security from losing files and photos.