I’ve taken a look around but I couldn’t find the right answer.
My wife and I have iCloud family shared plan, the 2TB storage plan. She has about 20k photos on her iCloud Photo library currently and I probably have 16k. It totals only about 106gb total for our photos.
I am paranoid that something happens one day and we lose the pictures, I know iCloud is probably pretty safe but you never know. Our pictures and videos are of our new babies and all our family times and it would be terrible to lose any of them.
I just bought a Synology DS1918+ and am backing up our computers to it, and also using back blaze.
How can I backup/start to automatically backup all the photos we take with our iPhones onto the Synology? Because we use the photo library, they all just seem to be available on our devices only. I had thought about running a Mac mini that would run photos constantly and download originals to this mini, which then in turn would backup to Synology. But you can only have one account on photos at a time I think?
Sorry if this is written badly, it is hard to explain fully what I am thinking!
If you have enough space on one of your computers, you should be able to set “Download Originals to this Mac” in Photos and then use a scheduled activity for say Carbon Copy Cloner or ChronoSync to synchronize the Photos folder to the Synology.
If you are already backing up the Macs via Backblaze and Time Machine, the images would be included as long as the originals are on the Mac.
If familiar with shell scripts and cron or launcher, you could build your own script using rsync.
Do you know how we could download the originals of both of our libraries though? Even though it is iCloud family sharing, we still have individual libraries and I don’t think photos can download both libraries to one computer ?
Easiest way I can think of, but have not tried, would be to create a second user on the Mac and sign that user into the second Apple ID then set up Photos to download originals and create a second backup location.
I have a Synology as well. I have never bothered with the DS File app. This is a fantastic and easy solution for backing up the iCloud Photo Library. Thank you!