Storage and back up advice please

The iCloud Photo Library is not an off computer storage option. It's only a syncing feature between your Mac and any other devices you may have running Photos.

Your best option is to obtain another external HD, format it OS X Extended (journaled) with Ownership set to be ignored and connected by cable, USB or Thunderbolt, to your MBP and run your libraries from it.

If the budget permits an excellent drive for that would be an SSD drive from MacSales.com with USB 3.0. Thunderbolt is just too expensive. I'm running a couple of SSDs connected by USB 3 and they work beautifully. Otherwise one of MacSales external HHDs would be my next choice.

The iCloud Photo Library is not an off Mac storage system. It is a syncing system and any deletion from it or any library connected to it will be mirrored in all such libraries.

There are no online storage/backup systems that are compatible with the complex eco structure of a Photos library with all of its links and file permissions.

Personally I have a 6 TB OWC rotational HD as my Time Machine drive and three 1 TB SSDs as my external HDs. Two of them are housed in an OWC USB 3 drive dock

and the 3rd SSD connected via this "portable" USB 3.0 SATA III Hard Drive Adapter Cable for 2.5 Inch SSD & HDD with Support UASP-20cm:

This setup, with a SSD drive, is particularly good for using with a laptop.

The chances of both one of the external HDs and the Time Machine drive crashing at the same time is so very low that I'm not worried about using a rotational drive for the TM.

On the iTunes side, I've used iTunes Match for some years and found the subscription really worthwhile, as it lets you store any music off-machine, even if it's not available on iTunes.

With a large library it can take a while to upload, which may be an issue if you're on a slow or limited internet connection. I've never found streaming an issue.

It's also a bit disconcerting to start with that you no longer have 'physical' copies of your music, and of course you do need an internet connection to stream.

It may not be right for you, but as I say, I've found it really helpful, especially when my previous internal SSD was starting to get full.

Cheers,

H

Thank you for both responses.

It was actually my post via my son's account as I've been unable to start new posts to the community when I select to which device I'm referring (Apple currently investigating).

I've moved my thinking forward now such that I've discounted moving iTunes from my MBP as I have bespoke music which Apple will not be able to "match".

So I need a solution for my photos.

The approach that Old Toad explains is what I had in mind (and is similar to what I do currently) but, longer term, I want to move away from external hard drives as they tend to fail eventually. I therefore might also test iCloud Photo Library and then, if it does not work how I want, revert to a previous saved version of my library.

Three questions:

a) What are users experiences of iCloud Photo Library - am I right to be nervous about migrating (cost aside)? I have hundreds of albums and have edited data, titles, dates, etc which, in my experience of previous migrations, usually causes problems.

b) Is Google Photos a realistic alternative? What are the pros and cons?

c) Which cloud service can best store my root Apple Photos file for backup (.photoslibrary)? I currently use the external hard drive solution but can that root file be stored on cloud solutions such as Google Photos, Dropbox or iCloud Drive? (to be clear, I'm not looking to access the photos in that scenario, just back up the root .photoslibrary file in case I need to recover it)

Thank you

Thank you for your response.

The external hard drives I use to back up my photos is an SSD, so I am getting the benefits fo faster transfer etc

What is a "rotational" HD?

On the "off storage" solution, why would iCloud Photo Library not be classed as such? If I've understood it correctly, it stores the photos elsewhere (in the cloud) and, although it leaves smaller copies on the Mac, it optimises the storage on my Mac - hence, the outcome is what I want, i.e. create space on my Mac.

Does anybody have any experience of using ICPL? My library is 200GB so I'm interested in what the smallest that could be "optimised" on my Mac.

One specific question is could iCloud (not the Photo Library version) be used as a back-up storage solution for Photos (or iTunes)? In other words, store a back up of the source file in my iCloud storage plan).

You can copy any file to iCloud Drive, as long as it is not larger than 50GB or is not a library package. iCloud sync would damage a library. So you could export the original image files to a folder on iCloud Drive for off-site storage, but you cannot store a photo library there, unless you compress it and the compressed file is smaller than 50GB.

One problem with storing files on iCloud Drive is, that the iCloud Drive files are mirrored in a hidden folder in your user library. They will take up storage on your system drive as well. To prevent this, you would to have use the optimize storage option for iCloud Drive, but an optimized iCloud Drive can be very inconvenient and it is hard to back up.

I have uploaded up my 177GB Photos library to iCloud Photos (took three days).

I have optimised my Mac and my spare capacity has increased from 12GB to 153GB, which is good.

The .photoslibrary is still 170GB - shouldn't that now be a lot less?

I will also back-up the file - where you say that it's hard to back-up, what do you mean?

Thank you

A rotational HDD is a disk drive that has rotating magnetic platters which hold the data, the old school kind.