What is the best option for Photos backup on Mac mini?

Haha I understand your confusion, it’s hard to explain but it’s caught me out before.

let’s say I have backup 1 with 10,000 files, backup 2 with 12,000 files and backup 3 with 14,000 files. What if backup 2 and 3 had a handful of photos missing that were in backup 1… but as there are so many files accessed not very often, I wasn’t aware that those files were no longer in the latest backups. If I lost access to my OneDrive or needed to restore for any reason, how would I know which backup to use or where to look for any missing files? I’d essentially restore from backup 3 without knowing a handful of important pictures were missing from it. And eventually, backup 1 would be removed for space, without the later backups having those missing files.

provided ChatGPT is correct, it looks like I can run an rclone script connected to OneDrive via API that will sync to an external drive without even needing the files to be stored locally on the MAC… this would be ideal if correct. This would be a cumulative, non destructive backup maintaining the one backup file that would be used as the one source of truth. It seems this would work the same as robocopy on windows, IF ChatGPT is correct :-)

thanks

Thanks for the response. I assume I should be able to backup OneDrive files if they are set to store locally? Backblaze wouldn’t see them but acronis does.

How does the timeline of backups work? Could it end up being that the backups are Mia-match with some files missing in each and is there a tool to compare them?

what’s happened to us in the past is that we have backed up photos over the years but because we don’t look at them all the time we haven’t realised they’ve been accidentally deleted from source, therefore whilst they were in older backups, they weren’t in newer and we weren’t aware. They’ve then been lost. With lots of pictures over so many years it’s not easy to know what’s been lost until it’s too late (even with historic backups). Ideally I’d like a backup solution where your latest backup includes data from all previous backups, plus new/ changed data. But if previously backed up data is no longer on the new backup, it still retains it in the backup because it’s already there. This is what I was able to achieve with robocopy on windows but I’m not coming across anything that does this on Mac.

I don’t want to fall into the trap again where the latest backup on Time Machine does not include a file as it’s been deleted, but I’m not aware it’s no longer there… if that makes sense? You can only restore something from previous backups if you know it’s gone missing.

Thanks

Thanks.

im not sure Time Machine is what I’m after then. I want to ensure that tens of thousands of photos are kept secure without risk of losing. But if it goes missing in latest backups I won’t be necessarily aware to go looking back in old ones.

From research I think Rsync will probably be my best bet then. As I said, with Robocopy I was able to have one single backup and then each time I run a backup it is amended to include new and changed files BUT keep any files that are no longer in the source. I think with a large dataset this is the only way to ensure nothing slips through the gaps, as it has before.

Thanks