I have over 30,000 pictures in my iPhoto Library. With iPhoto being retired, and currently crashes when I try to edit photos, I am afraid I may lose the entire library.
Can I safely move all pix, including all data and masters to my Amazon Prime Cloud?
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)
No
There is no known cloud service that can safely hold the iPhoto library
What version of iphoto do you have? What exact problem are you having?
you should always have a backup on a local hard drive for safety
LN
What about the new Photos app that Apple will release soon? Will that have a better file structure that plays nice with cloud backup?
No, not with 3rd party cloud structures. It will have its own Apple provided cloud file storage for its iCloud Photo Library feature.
The new Photos.app will let you store your photos in iCloud. You will be able to access them from all devices. But the library in iCloud will be no backup. It will be your working copy, so you still need to create a backup copy of your photo library.
See Apple's preview of the Photos.app: Apple - OS X - Photos Preview
And of iCloud Photo Library: iCloud Photo Library beta FAQ
Thanks leonie, I saw that about photo...but also saw prices for storage. Recommended amount of space I "rent"...$21/month
Your safest backup is a copy on an external drive and not a cloud backup for several reasons. You control the backup, and you can check if it is complete and working, and in an emergency, when you need it, it is readily available. Restoring from any cloud is error prone, because of possible transmission errors and it is slow. And you cannot restore at all, if there is a problem with the network.
If you want a cloud backup because you want the backup in a different location, store the backup drive in your car, at your place of work, in the house of a relative.
You can get a decent external drive for the price of yearly cloud storage.
Thanks leonie, I know some people don't have a good grasp of backup but I do. Decent advice though.
But I still think it's pretty lame of Apple to have a photo library that hates everyone else's cloud backup, even if I do have 2x local time machine drives, it still makes a ton of sense for me to do a cloud backup except....it sounds like it's impossible to conveniently/easily cloud backup an iPhoto library.
It's not good.
But I still think it's pretty lame of Apple to have a photo library that hates everyone else's cloud backup,
That's not quite accurate. The problem isn't that iPhoto hates these services, it's that these services use disks that are not formatted appropriately for the database - and that's not only iPhoto, but any complex database. Mostly, these servers run a version of Linux and the data structures are different. Fine for a file, but not for a complex data ecosystem. So you would not use these for Lightroom libraries, DevonThink libraries and so on - nor indeed, Windows apps with complex data structures.
.it sounds like it's impossible to conveniently/easily cloud backup an iPhoto library.
It is not the Cloud - iPhoto has not be designed to use a library on a remote location. iPhoto's database architecture will only work, when the library is on a locally mounted drive. The application would have to be much more complicated to support remote access. Network photo database applications are much more expensive than iPhoto or even Aperture.
How can I safely move iPhoto Library to Amazon Cloud?
