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What is best way to back up Photo library, besides ICLOUD, on M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro? Easiest hard drive to use? I know it may be easy question for many but I once bought external hard drive and it was so complicated that I just quit figuring it out. Help. Thank you.
Time machine with a large hard drive - ideally 3 times bigger than the size of the system(s) you are wanting to backup. Best and easiest. One of the few "It just works" you still get with Apple 🙂.
Get an external USB3 hard drive with sufficient capacity. It will be more or less plug and play. Note - the drive will probably be wiped as part of the setup, so don't have any important files on it before you start.
Leave it connected to your mac all the time (or if a laptop - whenever it is home)
See:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201250
By the way:
"iCloud is not a backup"
The problem with iCloud for photos is it makes all the libraries across all the devices the same. While it does protect you from a drive failure - it doesn't protect you from accidental deletion. If you delete photos on your phone, they are deleted on your mac, and from iCloud - same if you delete on your mac - they'll be deleted on your phone. There have been rare cases of system failure also causing deletions (or just user error). There are also numerous examples of library corruption making it very difficult to access photos.
Every few days we get someone here saying "I deleted photos - how can I get them back". If it was more than 30 days ago, and there is no other backup, the answer is "you can't"
Time machine with a large hard drive - ideally 3 times bigger than the size of the system(s) you are wanting to backup. Best and easiest. One of the few "It just works" you still get with Apple 🙂.
Get an external USB3 hard drive with sufficient capacity. It will be more or less plug and play. Note - the drive will probably be wiped as part of the setup, so don't have any important files on it before you start.
Leave it connected to your mac all the time (or if a laptop - whenever it is home)
See:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201250
By the way:
"iCloud is not a backup"
The problem with iCloud for photos is it makes all the libraries across all the devices the same. While it does protect you from a drive failure - it doesn't protect you from accidental deletion. If you delete photos on your phone, they are deleted on your mac, and from iCloud - same if you delete on your mac - they'll be deleted on your phone. There have been rare cases of system failure also causing deletions (or just user error). There are also numerous examples of library corruption making it very difficult to access photos.
Every few days we get someone here saying "I deleted photos - how can I get them back". If it was more than 30 days ago, and there is no other backup, the answer is "you can't"
Get an external HD that's formatted as shown in this screenshot:
I've found the OWC drives (MacSales.com) to be excellent choices, very reliable, great customer support and warranties. Unless you're going to take the TM drive on the road with your laptop the rotational OWC drives, OWC Mercury Elite Pro, are more than adequate.
Yes, Time Machine will want to back up to either a network drive or a hard drive plugged into your USB port.
You can't back up Time Machine to your laptop otherwise if the laptop fails then you lose your backups also.
If you have a hard drive, format it as AFPS and then plug it. As Tony says, it then just works.
Well yes - that is the external drive it needs to back up to. The large USB drive I said you needed to have.
It is all explained in the article I linked.
(if you have already used time machine in the past it might be asking you to connect the drive used at the time. If so, you'll need to go into settings and tell it to use a different one)
But when I open time machine it asking me to connect external hard drive
Back up photos
