Backing Up Photos On The Mac (And Pictures and Movies on Finder and iCloud Drive)

[jparker402]

I am trying to remember what I did and/or need to do to make sure that my photographs (not capitalized) and movies are backed up beyond just on my MacPro internal drive. I have started looking at YouTube tutorials again, and browsing through my computer files, and am becoming more confused than even usual for me (I am very easily confused).

First I have an external hard drive on Time Machine, and I have another external hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner (that I know almost nothing about). These are the assets I have for backing things up.

Second, when I open the Photos app on my computer, I see actual pictures. But no movies. When I go to Finder, I find Pictures listed which leads to Photos (numbers), Photos Library.jpg (one actual picture) and Photos Library.photoslibrary (which shows one large icon). When I open Time Machine, as I recall things look just like they are in Finder.

I do not know if Time Machine is actually saving my photos and movies, or if there is some separate process necessary to do that with Time Machine. Even assuming it does somehow, I also want a separate method of saving all my digitized photos and movies to some device whereby my children/descendants can take that device and view my photos and movies with Apple and/or MS machine. I am looking at YouTube (and will keep doing that), but have not yet found anything that explains all this simply enough for me.

 

[NoBoMac]

Time Machine is backing it up.

CCC is creating a backup as well.

Can always do a simple Finder copy of the Pictures folder to an external drive: will retain all images/movies, info, etc. Can open that copy of photo library in Photos by holding down Option key when starting Photos. Needless to say, can also copy from external back to internal via Finder copy.

Can also use command line to just copy deltas to external:

cd ~/Pictures
rsync  . -lptgorDHv "/Volumes/MyDrive/Pictures_Copy" --delete

Can also do periodic manual exports. What I do is I have a quarterly Smart Album that I adjust the dates on it ("all photos added between DateA and DateB"), select all in it, Export. Then I upload to my Amazon Photos account. Or copy the exported images to whatever service, drive, other, etc one wishes.

And of course, can automate this to some extent via AppleScript and or Shortcuts.

 

[ChrisA]

I am trying to remember what I did and/or need to do to make sure that my photographs (not capitalized) and movies are backed up beyond just on my MacPro internal drive. I have started looking at YouTube tutorials again, and browsing through my computer files, and am becoming more confused than even usual for me (I am very easily confused).

First I have an external hard drive on Time Machine, and I have another external hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner (that I know almost nothing about). These are the assets I have for backing things up.

Second, when I open the Photos app on my computer, I see actual pictures. But no movies. When I go to Finder, I find Pictures listed which leads to Photos (numbers), Photos Library.jpg (one actual picture) and Photos Library.photoslibrary (which shows one large icon). When I open Time Machine, as I recall things look just like they are in Finder.

I do not know if Time Machine is actually saving my photos and movies, or if there is some separate process necessary to do that with Time Machine. Even assuming it does somehow, I also want a separate method of saving all my digitized photos and movies to some device whereby my children/descendants can take that device and view my photos and movies with Apple and/or MS machine. I am looking at YouTube (and will keep doing that), but have not yet found anything that explains all this simply enough for me.

First off if you want this data to service for a long time you need to ensure your backup system does a few things: (1) there should always be (at least) three copies of the data. (2) the data should always be present in (at least) at two different geographical locations.

With macOS on a Mac, your first line of defense should always be Time Machine. It will backup the entire computer and it is easy to restore from TM. It makes VERSIONED backups which mean your old data is not overwritten with new data.

Here is the scenario to avoid and why "cloning" the data is a bad idea. Let's say you have a good backup of your data on an external disk. Now you make some edits but by accident, without knowing, you messed up your edits and damaged some files. But you have not yet discovered the problem. Then you make another manual backup to the external disk. You have just destroyed the only good copy of the data. The smarter way is to only copy the differences between current data and the older backup to the external drive. THis lets you go back to any previous state. This is how Time Machine works. It keeps older versions of all your data

Tiime Machine is one copy of the data, you will want another copy that is off-site, likely in a could service. There are many good cloud-based backup services that keep versioned backups for you. These services will continuously save data from you computer as you create the edit files. I use one called "Backblaze" but there are others. Google will find them.

A clone-style backup is a point in time and is usfull as long as you never over write it. Carbon Copy and do this. But the best way to do this kind of backup is to but four of five large disk drives and use them in rotation. COnnect the oldest drive to the computer, make the backup and them put it back in the fire safe.