I've been doing this for many years and am pretty happy with it. I can sync from my Android and my wife's iPhone. The Photos app is nice and smooth. Backups happen automatically in the background. It can even de-dupe and clean up old photos that have been backed up. All in all, quite pleased with it.
Over time it saves money. I got a home server and a tiny remote backup server 8 years ago and it runs quite a few services saving me hundreds each month and costing in electricity and hardware (over time) about 15EUR/mo. The longer it runs, the cheaper it is. Most of the updates are automatic so no babysitting required.
I would love this if it allowed me to backup all photos taken with the iPhone to an external drive. Currently, Apple dumps all pictures (from the Camera, from iMessage, WhatsApp, etc.) into folder makes it difficult to backup just my pictures.
I use a usb cable and a Linux laptop to copy to a couple of external hard drives (which I store separately). It’s all manual but not too orrenous although i ought backup more often. The biggest hassle is accessing the new heic format on pretty much everything.
Could it all be made into a sd card image for a pi zero perhaps? Even with a web ui accessible over Wi-Fi? A basic cheap sync-cable-appliance that non-techies can easily use?
I think I heard that the latest 'rclone' now, finally, support iCloud ... but I think there is an issue there because you can't sync full quality / RAW photos to icloud, can you ?
I wrote a guide on copying photos from an iPhone onto a Linux host: https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2024/12/22/exporting-photos-fr...
Where is the link? How can iPhone backup directly to an external hard drive?
I believe it's this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/backigo-live-photos-backup/id6...
Plug it in to the USB port on the phone. iPhone Pro can transfer at up to 20 Gbps but the non-pro models are much slower.
The iPhone camera can also shoot directly to an attached SSD.
> iPhone Pro can transfer at up to 20 Gbps
Citation/proof strongly needed on 20 Gbps
Right you are. I was going off my (bad) memory. It’s a 10 Gbps port.
I have bad news for you, that's not a real iPhone
This is a real feature of iPhones since the iPhone 15 Pro model. https://support.apple.com/en-in/109041
>home NAS setups aren't realistic for most users
Citation needed. Get a Synology NAS and use their Photos app which backups Live photos on both iDevices and Androids. Buy it for life.
Let's be real, that's already far less approachable to 90% of consumers I know.
The simples hurdle just being knowledge.
The existence of NAS is probably an unknown unkown to a large part of the population.
Compare that to "there's an app for that" & plug USB.
Drastically simpler.
No skin in the game either way, but I can very much understand OPs reasoning and would reach the same conclusion.
I've been doing this for many years and am pretty happy with it. I can sync from my Android and my wife's iPhone. The Photos app is nice and smooth. Backups happen automatically in the background. It can even de-dupe and clean up old photos that have been backed up. All in all, quite pleased with it.
You’re looking at £300ish for an entry level Synology and the storage. That isn’t a realistic expense for many users.
Over time it saves money. I got a home server and a tiny remote backup server 8 years ago and it runs quite a few services saving me hundreds each month and costing in electricity and hardware (over time) about 15EUR/mo. The longer it runs, the cheaper it is. Most of the updates are automatic so no babysitting required.
Synology is still my go to with the model I already purchased. But I'm not sure I'll be buying them again after this:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requ...
A Synology NAS doesn’t last for life.
And isn't protection against fire, flood, theft or other disasters.
Or checkout https://immich.app/ !
I wouldn't use it personally, but I could see it being useful for my parents or family.
ifuse and rsync works fine for me.
I would love this if it allowed me to backup all photos taken with the iPhone to an external drive. Currently, Apple dumps all pictures (from the Camera, from iMessage, WhatsApp, etc.) into folder makes it difficult to backup just my pictures.
Thank you for including a non subscription “lifetime” payment option.
I am using PhotoSync to backup photos from iPhone to a self-hosted Photoprism via WebDAV (accessible from everywhere via tailscale).
How is this different from iMazing?
https://imazing.com/backup-iphone-ipad#:~:text=Choose%20iPho...
It’s more like PhotoSync as it only does photos
I loved the idea until I saw that it's only available as a subscription.
Would immich work for this? You can run it locally in docker container
Can you add a feature to upload to a ftp server?
Will it work with large (huge) photos libraries? Eg. 150k photos/videos - most of them in iCloud. Does it preserve album/folder structure?
Btw, there is also LocalSend. Pretty nifty app
Isn't that to transfer wirelessly to devices?
Is this a native IOS app?
How much does it cost?
In-App Purchases
BackiGo Pro Yearly (1 Year) $6.99
BackiGo Pro Monthly (1 Month) $0.99
BackiGo Pro Lifetime $14.99
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I just use rsync, works great
Would you explain how you are using rsync to backup photos on an iPhone ?
I'm not aware of an iOS app named "rsync" and ... presumably you don't have a shell ... ?
Don't know if still works, but this is how I did it back in the days I had an iPhone:
https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/01/access-and-recover-files-fr...
Nowadays I'd use immich or ente.io, which has and e2e encryption cloud as well as self-hosted setup
here is the script I use https://gist.github.com/er0k/86843b62fedc2f533068f04c689be97...
You can load the IPhone’s pictures on Linux using the folders namespace and then rsync from the loaded namespace to /local…
But does it work for Live Photos which is the main premise of this app?
I use a usb cable and a Linux laptop to copy to a couple of external hard drives (which I store separately). It’s all manual but not too orrenous although i ought backup more often. The biggest hassle is accessing the new heic format on pretty much everything.
Could it all be made into a sd card image for a pi zero perhaps? Even with a web ui accessible over Wi-Fi? A basic cheap sync-cable-appliance that non-techies can easily use?
I think I heard that the latest 'rclone' now, finally, support iCloud ... but I think there is an issue there because you can't sync full quality / RAW photos to icloud, can you ?
rclone has support for iCloud Drive, but it sounds like you are talking about iCloud Photos, which is a different service.
This project lets you download from the latter: https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...