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bastos71 Author

Level 1

8 points

Best way to restore photo (cloud to Time Machine) ?

Hello, after a reinstallation from scratch of my iMax 27 in 11.3.1 I have a question regarding photo/iCloud.

My objective : All my originals are on my iMac but share via iCloud with my other MBP, iPhone, iPad.

The photo db reach about 300G and it take ages to download them form iCloud to my iMac. I would like to perform a classical restore from my Time Machine then synchronize iCloud.

If I perform a restore of my 300G photos library, from my Time Machine backups, then reconnect the iCloud, I have 2 questions :

1) Will all my photos be uploaded to iCloud ? Or iCloud recognize that the photos/vidéos on the Mac and iCloud are the same. Then the processus will only take few minutes/hours to resync the db but not all the contents.

2) Is there a risk that all picture will be duplicated in iCloud ?

Many thanks for your answers.

Best regards

Posted on May 27, 2021 12:02 PM

Top-ranking reply

TonyCollinet

Level 7

23,972 points

Posted on May 28, 2021 12:46 AM

By far the safest way will be to create a new empty library, and let photos download everything from iCloud into that. Yes, it will take a long time - possibly up to 2 weeks 24/7 for 300GB. Leave your mac on, connected to power with a good internet connection full time.

Importing from time machine won't be quicker in any case, because photos will need to compare every image in your mac library with every image in your iCloud library to work out what needs to sync. To do that, it will need to download everything, or upload everything (even slower for most internet connections) first.

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Best way to restore photo (cloud to Time Machine) ?

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