Preston921 wrote:
I keep my photos in the cloud, I just thought it would be nice to have a drive, in case my mac ever breaks. Or could I create a backup and store it in dropbox? Is that possible?
As others explained, a thumb drive is not reliable enough for a backup. And 64 GB is too small, so as den.thed suggested, just manually copy important files to that device.
More on iCloud: iCloud offers several options. One is to store lower resolution versions of your images on the Mac (or iPhone) and highest resolution images are physically stored in iCloud. This saves you space on your personal devices. But then to make a true backup of those images, you would need to download the full resolution image files to your Mac and make a separate copy (preferably on storage more reliable than a thumb drive).
iCloud is not really a backup method; it does make the images available on all your devices and keeps them synchronized. But if you were to accidentally delete or damage one of those files, that then happens on all your devices so it's more of a synchronization tool than a backup tool. The only sense of it being a backup tool is for the instance when your Mac fails or is lost/stolen, in which case you can get a new Mac and it will populate immediately with all your photos when connected to your iCloud account.
If you make an INDEPENDENT copy of files to Dropbox that would be like a backup. But keeping it updated might be cumbersome and manual. Also, Dropbox in the past did not properly store Photos Libraries in native format. But it can be used to store image files (jpg, raw ... etc.). So you could keep copies of important files in Dropbox so you have redundant copies of them.
The right way to back up important files is to obtain an external, reliable drive and copy those files to it, preferably with Time Machine, but other methods are ok also. If you cannot afford that, then you cannot afford to keep your files backed up properly. You could use some combination of Dropbox and iCloud but those are not free either (except for very small amounts).
