Photos Library Process for Backup

To archive my photos I am also exporting them. On export I sm using the export setting “Subfolder: moment name”, so the photos will be grouped by folders named by the location and the capture date. I changed the date format to yyyy-mm-dd, that makes it easier to sort the exported folders by the date, and I group these folders by the year. These archive copies are on an external drive and I keep a copy of them on iCloud Drive for a second Apple ID, so they will not sync to my mobile devices. My Photos Library is backed up by Time Machine, as I keep the size small enough to avoid Optimize Storage. once a year I export a partial library with all new photos from the year.

You can divide the library up. You should do this on an external dirve

Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

I'd duplicate the library, then rename the duplicate. Make a smart album with Date Capture--is after--12/31/2009. Then select all those pictures and command-delete them. (Don't worry--it's a duplicate.) Now you've got a library with only pictures before 2010 (and also the original library, which you haven't messed with.) Then make another duplicate of the original and do "is before 1/1/2010.

Of course, you can pick your own divisions rather than 2010, and make several of them, not just 2.

There are other reasonable divisons. I am working on mine to make sure I have favorites marked of each event/album. Then I plan to but the favorites in one library and the not-so-favorites on a separate library. I already have a bunch of libraries. I keep these on a hard drive and I also have a backup of that. Since they're all in one place, I can load them each as operating systems change.

I use PowerPhotos to manage the multiple libraries.

When we changed from iPhotos to Photos I exported copies of all the pictures, event. It was a lot of work. I haven't really used that since.

jjfromco wrote:

Should I be concerned that Photos Libraries are Apple specific and we may loose accessibility as operating systems change? Or that we may have an issue with a corrupted Library?

Sure. So I save all the pictures from my cameras (over the years) in folders right off their SD cards. Since my phone and iPad don't use SD cards, I periodically (after I think, "oh oh, I haven't done this, since when?") export all the new pictures since the last time, using Unmodified Originals (which is way faster.) I don't attempt to keep the album structure, so that saves lots of time.

So this is deep backup in case a nuclear holocaust destroys all Apple programs but somehow leaves me with a computer that can read digital image files. This is all original files, so edits and comments are only saved in Photos Libraries. I also use Time Machine for backups, and I have hard drives with static copies of old Libraries. (Originals are, by the way, with difficulty, available as individual image files from within the Photos Libraries, but should only be accessed in case of Armageddon.)

I have many, mostly portable, hard drives. I have CDs and DVDs with copies of original images going back to the early 2000s, that I've copied to the hard drives. Some of those CD-ROMs have copies of files from floppy disks from even earlier. Some of those files are totally un-readable because I used programs that no longer exist on computer systems that no longer exist (the sort of thing that you are concerned about.) Some of the image files are corrupted because CDs and DVDs aren't nearly as robust as we were lead to believe.

Anyway, you do what you have time to do.

Should I be concerned that Photos Libraries are Apple specific and we may loose accessibility as operating systems change? Or that we may have an issue with a corrupted Library?

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The good news is that 'priceless' documents CAN OFTEN be retrieved for a price. There are companies that specialize in rescuing, retrieving, and converting corrupted, outdated, and abandoned media formats for you, if you REALLY REALLY need it and are willing and able to pay whatever it costs.

As a digital packrat, after I made the transition away from Windows PC's to Mac in 2007, I've created multiple backups, archives, and virtual Windows machines using Parallels for Mac. So I have about 40 years of digital archives/clutter (depending upon your perspective), spread across multiple Macs with 50 TB of hard drives, clones, RAID-1 archives, backups, and cloud storage, in multiple locations. I recently retrieved Word 97 and Excel 97 documents and photos I had authored on a Windows 97 PC years ago, to provide historical perspective for my church as we embrace new initiatives.

Take time to review things before re-organizing and re-importing!

After encountering a Photos 7 issue with duplicate 'Live' photo imports (both 3-second .mov and .jpeg files are now displayed) from iOS 16.2 iPhones, I recently exported nearly 80,000 digital and scanned images I've taken since 2003. Examining my exports, I purged nearly 10,000 low-resolution copies, out-of-focus, duplicate, and unwanted images. Now I've imported 'the keepers' back into (Catalina) Photos 5 which does not display the duplicate behavior at the moment, saving many gigabytes of space.

The downside to Mac Photos that I've encountered is that once you access a .photoslibrary file with a newer version of macOS Photos, it can never be opened by any older version. So make certain you have backups before upgrading to a newer version of macOS.

Final thought: "You can never be too rich or have too many backups."