Backup your iCloud photos
Protect your precious memories from digital disaster, with Carrie Marshall.
Storing photos in iCloud is a wonderful thing, but it isn’t a backup. That’s because of two things. One, if someone else gets your login details you’re stuffed; and two, it’s a single point of failure: if something goes wrong on iCloud, the problem could then be synced across all your devices. Not great when you’re talking about priceless photos and videos.
Backups should be separate from your Mac, there should be more than one and you should back up regularly. If you’re happy to back up manually, stick a recurring reminder in Calendar – but we’d recommend using a dedicated backup app, such as SuperDuper, and an external drive with a large storage capacity to ensure backups happen on time.
MIXED MEDIA
Think carefully about your choice of backup media. It’s not just about storage space, as important as that is: for example, storing a 200GB Photos library on multiple rewritable DVDs would take forever and cost a fortune. It’s about reliability and proximity too. Discs get scratched or can rot, USB sticks often disappear to wherever odd socks and Biros go, and an external drive or SSD that lives in your laptop case can be stolen or damaged alongside the computer.
As the playwrights Norton and Sackville wrote back in 1565: “Hope for the best and prepare for the worst”.
1 CHECK YOUR COLLECTION
You can’t back up things you don’t have, so go into Photos’ Preferences and make sure that iCloud Photos > Download Originals to this Mac is checked in the iCloud tab or your Mac won’t have all your images.
2 KEEP IT ORGANISED
Make sure ‘Copy items to the Photos library’ is selected in Preferences > General. If this isn’t checked, photographs that you import from elsewhere on your Mac will remain in their original location.
3 CONSOLIDATE THE LIBRARY
To copy any imported items that aren’t stored in the Library, go to File > Consolidate. Photos will now look for any images that haven’t been copied to the library, and will copy them across for you.
4 EXPORT YOUR IMAGES
If you have a large external drive you can simply select the images you want to back up and then select File > Export. Use the ‘Export Unmodified Original’ option to keep all of your images in their original unedited form.
5 ADJUST THE SETTINGS
You can also modify the export settings, so for example you might want to use a subfolder for each Photos Moment, to replace photos’ file names with titles or to export in JPG format for other devices.
6 DO IT REGULARLY
It’s wise to include your Photos library in your standard backup routine. We recommend using external storage with a third-party backup app, such as the excellent SuperDuper, so you don’t forget to back up.