Enterprise class storage is not cheap, whether that’s achieved by the purchase of enterprise class disks, and/or through the implementation of redundancy through the use of disposable hardware.
Layer on top of this the software which manages photo storage and the costs begin to mount.
I appreciate that the more people using the solution, the lower the software overhead costs become, but it’s still an important part of the solution.
This is all built into the use of the Photos product and is seamless. I’m not saying it’s perfect, I’m sure it breaks for some, but for the vast majority it just works.
Does Apple make a profit from services like this, yes.a lot of profit. Also yes. Are reliable solutions cheap, not at all. Can you get cheaper online storage, possibly, is it as secure, maybe. Look at Lightroom and Adobe, it’s no cheaper and you get less storage.
As far as I understand it, There is an option with Apple One to add a second 2TB to increase your storage from 2TB to 4TB using.
Last, but by no means least. Photos and iCloud Photos is not a backup, it’s a photo syncing service.
There are ways to store your photos elsewhere, but we’ve seen over the years that other services have come, but have then either been bought and shuttered, or have gone bust due to being unsustainable.
With 95,000 photos, do you want to spend your precious time managing your library, or taking photos and enjoying life?
I’d argue its sin is that it doesn’t deliver on its promise of always working.
Apple really need to accept that the industry is not kidding when it routinely says syncing is hard. It is!! Certainly for Photos and Drive, they need at least a button to say “sync now”. Realistically, they need more. Much more.
To 90%+ of the smartphone using community, Apple Photos or Google Photos are the only backup and they assume they are fully protected or never even think about it until they have lost their life’s photos too late to do anything about it.
That’s why Apple’s promise of “it simply works” really must.
I am using Parachute Backup to backup original files to an external drive, which is then also backed up to cloud.
The software works well and is able to download from the cloud to save locally abd then removes the file after so it doesn’t fill your hard drive.
Backs up files into YYYY/MM/DD folders and a separate (duplicated) backup of albums (don’t mind the duplication). It doesn’t currently backup Shared Folders but developer has said he is looking at that.
Designed for Apple Photos but also backs up iCloud Drive.
The dev (Eric) sold parachute backup to a rogue company with no notification to its users except a small notice on their web site, which no one checks. Not a single notice in the changelog.
I regret buying it on MacSparky’s recommendation because the company who bought it is notorious for making apps subscriptions.
This is a very good point, and we nerds and experts need to be a little more generous with our definition of “backup.” I’ve heard or read countless stories about users in the “90% of the smartphone using community” who lose, break, or brick their phones, and along with it, their entire photo collection, because it is only stored on the phone. In the cases where these non-MPU types had iCloud Photos syncing (a.k.a., backing up) their photos, they were able to restore their collection to the replacement phone. In these cases, iCloud Photos absolutely worked as a backup: the images still existed despite loss of what the user might consider the “originals.” Yes, yes, of course if a photo is manually deleted from the phone, it is deleted from the cloud too - but my guess is the vast majority of the heartbreak from lost photos is because an entire collection was only stored on a phone (or a Mac?) that was lost or bricked, and not because a individual photos were mistakenly sent to the trash.
My family and I use the iCloud 2TB plan for reliable access to all photos on all devices, as well as for “safety.” Our Macs are set to “download originals to this Mac” so the photos exist there, even when not connected to the internet. And of course since they exist on the Macs’ drives, they can be backed up with Time Machine, and cloned with CCC. I also use Backblaze, so I’m fairly well protected from loss. But when I try explaining this to non MPU types, I can see their eyes glaze over quick, no matter how easy I make the explanation. For those users, iCloud photos is much, much better than nothing.
For my non power user family and friends, this is the biggest challenge - they simply never delete photos and so the thousands and thousands of photos have tons of obviously bad (blurry, no focus, eyes closed) duplicates.
I’ve given up trying to change their habit to immediate delete the bad photos when they shoot twenty selfies or a group shot of people at an event, and worse, have never had any success suggesting that when they are bored and doom scrolling social media they could be incrementally culling/deleting through their photos library.
My last hope (lighthearted sarcasm/humor), is somebody builds a smart culling/photo review app driven by AI that requires no user interaction.
I know Adobe has been adding culling features to Lightroom (with sliders to adjust the match/selection criteria) and I’m vaguely aware of a few professional culling apps targeting wedding and other photographers that have thousands of almost identical photos to cull, but haven’t seen much in the consumer space I would trust recommending?
You know, there’s another point here too, and that has to do with the level of responsibility a user has to take with their technology, no matter what form it takes. I don’t know if it’s personality or upbringing or what, but it seems many people want the benefit of the device without the accountability for understanding it. This obviously is not limited to digital photo devices. Take any complex system (or is it complicated system - I always confuse the two) like a computer or a car or a home (or a smartphone). While virtually no one has the bandwidth to be an expert at all systems they use, they certainly have the bandwidth to have a working level of familiarity and understanding beyond it’s essential use. Or they should be so busy with their substantial financial resources to not have to. The old stereotype of the helpless woman in the auto service center is an example.
“My car is making a funny noise.”
“Well, you haven’t changed the oil in 30,000 miles and your wheels have never been balanced.”
“How am I supposed to know that?”
I tend to lean towards the “ignorance is no excuse” way to look at it. “I didn’t know,” is not a reason. A challenge I’m struggling with now is raising my kids in a society that is showing them otherwise.
Given the resources at our fingertips, there is even less excuse for not knowing or being able to find out what we need to know. This is a matter of conscientiousness. Many, and none of us is immune, have been habituated to expecting and demanding the instant. Searching and learning are not instant. There is friction. Like the proverbial frog in the kettle, we barely notice as the temperature of instant gratification steadily rises.
The people who habitually cite their own ignorance rarely use that as a defense or excuse. To them, ignorance is a genuine, persisting situation (i.e. a fact). They are convinced that (1) only an expert can solve the problem, that (2) they are not an expert, and (3) that it’s not possible for them to become an expert.
Telling them the “right” way to do things only proves that you are an expert, which does nothing to challenge their belief in their own incompatibility with expertise.
I just back-up photos periodically to an iDiskk external hard drive. Maybe I’m doing something wrong because it couldn’t be any easier. Perhaps I need to backup my back-up.
I take your point, and I personally agree with you. but I think it’s a sign of where we are from a technology perspective.
I’m unsure how old you are @Drewski, but as someone who’s now 50, this was an expectation on me as I grew, but then (as an example) a car manual (if you got one) was maybe 40 pages, not the 300 they tend to be today, and the people I grew up around rarely got a new car, it was always at least second hand. I changed my own filters and brake pads, maintained my own car because I couldn’t afford to pay a mechanic.
You looked after what you had because it was too expensive to replace it, and finance was only used when you absolutely needed something, otherwise you saved up.
These days, who has the time to RTFM (actually I make time, but many don’t), or to learn about the complex things we use every single day.
The flip side of this is that there are many 80 year old people who haven’t a clue how a computer works, but happily use a smartphone, Tablet or laptop every day with very few problems because IT has matured from a consumer perspective to remove many of the older barriers.
My wife has what she calls “technotromp”. It’s not technofear. Rather, she just wants it to do what she needs and she wants that now.
My personal view, formed by observing friends and family over many years, is that (non-technical) people will only learn when they care about the outcome.
When it comes to backing up photos — they probably won’t care unless they have already experienced the loss of photos they cared about.
It’s not only about what is a backup, but the risk you are trying to mitigate. I am certainly sure that I will not wipe my 25 years of photos by deleting them by error, but I am also absolutely sure that if I lose access to my Apple account due to some billing issue or an attacker stealing my identity, they will probably be gone for good.
But I find these issues less menacing than a backup procedure to physical disks.
Apple already muddies the definition by using the term “iCloud Backup”. But photos, apple notes, etc. that are synced to iCloud, and then accidentally deleted etc., disappear forever after 30 days.
Would telling people that they have a “good chance” of recovering their photos, etc. if they sync their data to iCloud be better? That could be a conversation starter.
I’m closing in on 50 this year. When I was a kid, the number of things you were expected to know about was vanishingly small, and most of them were mechanical in nature. “Keep your finger out of the way when you swing the hammer” sorts of things.
Our school got its first Apple II+ when I was in 1st grade. There was one of them. It was in a basement. You had to have special training to be allowed to use it (mostly around handling floppy disks), and most people didn’t care. All through grade school and high school, computers were the sorts of things that you generally travelled to, used, and walked away from.
But now it’s everything.
Example #1. We were driving around in my dad’s pickup, and every time we came to a stop, my mom - sitting in the back seat - couldn’t figure out how to get the door open. It had just started being an issue that day. After the third time this happened, I grabbed the huge whomping manual with the micro-print from the glove box, and started an odyssey of guessing and cross-referencing that yielded that my dad had apparently bumped a less-than-helpfully-labeled toggle switch on his door. This toggle switch engaged “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that” level child safety locks.
Example #2. Our new microwave, which I otherwise like, has a door lock. You turn the microwave on, it LOCKS the door. You have to press a button to disable the lock. This is in the manual, but it’s not obvious looking at the touchpad. So the day after we set it up I’m trying to get my morning tea out, and as far as I can tell this things is just broken. I’ve never even heard of a microwave with a lock, so I’m just hitting the door button like an idiot. I actually managed to jiggle the button and force it open (which doesn’t say much for the lock), and then a Google search clued me in to the presence of the lock. The lock can be disabled via some Konami-code sequence, but every time the power goes out the auto-lock comes back. I’m half-tempted to dismantle the panel and break whatever lever the lock engages, but I’m half afraid the microwave will stop working because of some unknown sensor that detects lock tampering.
I’m a tech guy. I get that all of this device-related nonsense is likely documented somewhere. And I absolutely get that people should have better backup strategies. But IMHO the whole “ignorance is no excuse” falls flat when everything that comes into your life seemingly requires reading (and comprehending!) a small, very boring novel to understand. A small, boring novel that you frequently don’t even get with the device.
Especially when the people who sell you your $1000+ phone tell you that your photos and documents are “automatically backed up to the cloud.”
Just for kicks, I went and found the iPhone user’s guide. I’m five clicks in trying to find out how iCloud Backup works, and I find this:
What iCloud Backup includes
Your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro backups include all the information and settings stored on > your device that don’t already sync to iCloud.
Sounds great, right? Except it’s a lie. I made a full backup of my phone, and migrated it to a new device - and a bunch of downloaded media in various apps wasn’t included. Apple figured that since it was downloaded from the Internet initially, it didn’t need to be backed up.
You need to know that from hard experience, because it’s not documented in a way that’s attached to the above (incorrect) statement. And even though they call it one, this documentation isn’t a “manual” - it’s a twisty maze of hyperlnks, all alike. Most of them are dead-ends. You’re not jumping around in a book. You’re jumping all over Apple’s website, seemingly at random.
This isn’t an environment where you can, IMHO, validly say “ignorance is no excuse.”
Agreed. And I’d say that the whole “Apple computer for the masses” successful shtick is based upon the breakthrough Jobs philosophy that “it simply works” and user manuals never need be read because everything is “intuitively obvious” and not needed.
Of course, that was before the iPad was Frankenstein’d into a multitasking, desktop second-cousin and horrible UI’s like Liquid Glass were unleashed upon us.
I’d argue that started with iOS 7 where it was considered “uncool” to have buttons in clearly identifiable ovals and action chevrons and arrows couldn’t have backgrounds and had to melt into the background of the page/card being displayed, and key information, like the iPhone digital clock has to be re-designed to use a hard-to-see thin font because the asethetics, to some Cupertino Gen Z’r, looks “cooler”?
TL;DR the industry has spent the last 20+ years telling us “it just works” so now turning around and blaming the user for not understanding the nuances of sync versus backup and what is or is not included in an “icloud backup” is wrong.
