keep precious pics safe
How to really back up your Photos library
We love iCloud Photo Library. Being able to take a photo on our iPhone and see it instantly on our Mac or the kids’ iPad is one of those magical moments that makes
us love Apple. But for all its benefits, iCloud Photo Library – or iCloud Photos, as it’s called in iOS 12 and Mojave – is a lousy backup.
That’s because it isn’t actually intended as one. The service’s job is to sync changes between your devices, so you can access any of your pics on any of your devices at any time, and changes you make in one place take effect elsewhere too. However, if a photo is damaged in one place, that’ll propagate, and without another backup – one that’s detached from iCloud – the picture may be gone forever.
Accidental deletion is less of a concern, but still a real one. Deleted items are retained in the Recently Deleted album for up to 40 days, but that’s an awfully precarious peg on which to hang irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime pics.
Picture protection
The solution is simple: back up your photos. As you’ll discover in this tutorial, it’s easy to copy some or all of your Photos library from your Mac to an external drive. You can just as easily automate the process with a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner (£31.65, bombich.com).
The trick to backing up is to do it regularly and to add redundancy, so if one backup fails you’re not completely stuffed. One simple way to do that is to auto-upload to another cloud service: it’s much slower than an external drive, but it’s an extra bit of off-site insurance.