All of my photos are in apples cloud storage and I also set the options in the photo app as per the screen shots to make an external drive the system photo library and to download as offline full quality to the same drive. Does this mean in a disaster I can restore all of the content rom the back up drive not losing anything or any quality?
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.1
Yes - absolutely. The more copies of the library the better - but absolute minimum of two, not including iCloud.
I also have an exported copy of all my pictures in a folder, then THAT is backed up, and I store a backup of that away from home to mitigate risk of theft/fire/flood.
Yes - absolutely. The more copies of the library the better - but absolute minimum of two, not including iCloud.
I also have an exported copy of all my pictures in a folder, then THAT is backed up, and I store a backup of that away from home to mitigate risk of theft/fire/flood.
Also bear in mind your external drive also has to be formatted correctly for a photos library:
It must be formatted APFS or MacOS extended (journaled) (preferred for spinning drives) and not case sensitive.
It Must not be (or have been) used for time machine. (A time machine drive can be used if re-formatted)
It must be able to have the 'ignore ownership" checkbox ticked.
It should not be on a memory stick, SD or similar.
It must also not be a network drive (a direct connection is required - eg USB or Thunderbolt). File sharing services such as iCloud Drive, Drop box, Onedrive etc are not compatible with Photos libraries.
See
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201517
Would this be just to keep your system drive on the external drive?
Or are you going to temporarily set your external drive library to your system drive library, download, and then set it back to your normal library?
Either way, bear in mind iCloud is not a backup. If you accidentally delete items (some - or all) then that those items will also be deleted from iCloud and all other synced libraries on all devices.
For disaster recovery, you need a proper backup - such as a time machine backup of a library with originals downloaded.
Hi, I only have half a TB on the Mac disk and I think the photos is approaching 360gb so not really feasible to site on the Mac. Reason I ask is I have been using Time Machine to back up everything to external disk but no Time Machine is broken on Monterey see the thread https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/08/time-machine-initial-backup-error/ and I have the same issue.
Great stuff, just need to check the ownership option and I think that's me. Could I use the app carbon copy cloner to backup a copy of photos to another SSD just as insurance, bit paranoid about family pictures.
Time Machine works fine for me. If Time Machine isn't working there is also SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner.
Im running a trial or carbon copy just now see how that goes
Photos on Mac
