I keep my 450GB Photos library on an external SSD, but it failed and is not recoverable. I do have a TM backup from a few days ago, as well as iCLoud Photos. The TM is an external mechanical drive. It is USB 3 but I’m not sure of the speed. Whatever it is, it ain’t SSD. The library had many years of albums, keywords, and other tags. I presume that is all saved on the TM, but not sure about the library in iCloud.
To anyone who has had to restore a decent size library such as this, what method did you use? I’m copying the library from TM to an SSD now, and it is estimating backup to take 2 days. I understand why, but I’m wondering if I can get the same result more quickly via iCloud.
You can go to iCloud.com and check if all your albums are there. IF that’s the case you should be able to enable iCloud Library and let you computer download everything from iCloud again. But it would possibly take a couple of days too.
SSDs, SD cards and thumb drives are susceptible to data loss if you leave them unused (“cold”) for an extended period of time, due to an inherent limitation of flash memory technology. Thumb drives are typically more vulnerable than SSDs, because manufacturers always reserve the best quality memory chips for SSDs, and because USB sticks are not really designed for durability.
Spinning drives, as well as mainstream cloud storage providers, are a better shot at cold data retention.
That risk is massively overblown. Some people talk about it like the second you unplug the drive, it’ll start losing data. It’s very unlikely that an SSD drive left in a drawer for 6 months would lose any data.
A brand new Thumb Drive or SD drive will be clean and will have had a minimal number of read/writes. The risk can be be further mitigated by plugging the SSD in for 10 minutes once a month, safely ejecting it and storing it again. But the level of risk reduction is minimal below the already incredibly low risk. Plus the original backup on Time Machine will still be there.
There’s also the factor that on the assumption that the OP reviews their data after the restore on the restore from iCloud, the chance of them needing that data will reduce over time, and 6 months in it’s very unlikely.
That is true only when you buy legit drives. If you buy a cheap thumb drive from some shady Chinese vendors online, chances are that the drive contains a recycled or binned NAND, if not something worse. Again, thumb drives are most vulnerable to such fraud because they are the bottom tier of flash memory products. Those things don’t last nearly as long as a new, legit one. I have got my hands on a few of these drives. They failed really quick.
I’m not going to assume that a random poster on a gadget-unrelated forum knows which drives are legit. You don’t know you have a fraud drive until it fails, usually irrecoverably.
By the way, when someone puts anything into a secret place and declares they will retrieve it in 6 months, don’t assume they will actually do that a half year later. If there is one thing we humans excel at, it is the art of forgetting.
My dad was a gadget enthusiast in the early 2000s. He worked in IT all his life. He used fancy MacBook Pros. Like you, I assumed he would always buy top quality equipment.
It turned out that the only such equipment he had acquired in the last ~5 years were Apple ones. The rest were recommendations from his social media feeds, after his Google search history had been disseminated to all interested parties.
The last gadget he bought was a 1TB SD card from an unknown vendor, at a higher price than Sandisk or Samsung counterparts. It was unusably slow all the time.
That SD card has been sitting cold in a drawer for 6 months now.
Anyway, let’s get back to the topic of restoring a Photos library.
Finder so far has failed 3 times (actually I cancelled the second attempt, at an Apple genius’ suggestion) copying the library from TM to a freshly formatted external SSD. Both drives are connected directly to the MBP. I let it run overnight, with all sleep and power saving settings off, and still woke up to this unhelpful message:
Not sure about how TM works, but I’d assume that the previous attempts left a half-restored photo library in the target drive and TM is refusing to overwrite it. Perhaps removing everything in the target drive and emptying the Trash would solve it, or just nuking the drive with Disk Utility would help solve this.
Try formatting the external target disk with Mac OS Extended, or exFAT. And when finished reboot and format with APFS again, if that is what you have been using.
This has worked for me, at least once, when I had trouble with an APFS external drive. Why? I haven’t a clue.
And have you tried restoring an earlier TM backup of your photos?
I reformatted in APFS (again), and tried to recopy from the most updated Photos library (again). I got the same error message. Inexplicably, when I closed out that error message window this time, the file name just appeared on the external SSD, complete and fully functional.
