Warning: the Photos app mysteriously deleted all my photos

[thefrost]

Sorry to hear that. Glad you managed to restore your photos. It is always good to have multiple backups in case anything goes wrong.

 

[subjonas]

No idea what happened there but it reminds me of when young me first got a smartphone (a Motorola) and started taking a lot of pictures. After about six months I realized I needed to back them up so I naively downloaded some Motorola photo syncing software on my PC thinking it would back it up. I initiated my first sync and instead of syncing my photos from my phone to my PC, it synced my empty folder from my PC to my phone and deleted all the photos from my phone. It synced the opposite direction. And just like that I lost the first six months of photos that I ever took. Still to this day I don’t know why it synced in that direction, nor gave no warning of deletion.
Probably a few morals in there but an important one I took away is never rely solely on one app for anything important.

 

[eyoungren]

Wow! I had Microsoft OneDrive do this to me one day; it deleted ALL my photos (I have an extensive, heavily organized photo collection, just over 20 GB at this point) from my all of my linked devices. Effectively, it completely erased nearly 50 years of photos! I was horrified that it would do such a thing! Happily, I follow a highly redundant backup strategy and was able to get most of them back from backups. The most recent photos had not been backed up yet and were totally lost until I got on the phone with Microsoft technical support. They hunted around on their servers and found and restored the last few dozen or so photos.

I never, never, never allow any of my media to be tied up in ANY proprietary format program, such as Photos. I manage my entire photo album as a simple folder tree on my Mac, with one subfolder for each year and all of the photos that I kept for that year stored in that year's folder. Each photo is kept in an industry standard format, usually JPEG. Together, this is an entirely application-agnostic and machine independent way to store photos and as such I can (and have) transferred the entire album to my vintage Macs, to vintage Windows and to Linux. JPEG is JPEG - it works everywhere - and all OS support folder hierarchies. This setup is entirely portable and completely machine/app independent. The entire collection is therefore just another set of folders on my Mac, and gets backed up regularly when I do backups.

I also refuse to allow any proprietary format backup program, even Time Machine, to get involved in backing up my files. Instead, even though it is slower than some of the highly optimized backup programs available out there, I manually copy all of my folders/files from my Mac onto my backup drives...no compression, no proprietary format. The files are all transparently there, immediately available via Finder. I can simply plug in my backup device, wait for it to mount on my desktop and then restore any file or set of files I want by simply copying them from the backup device to the Mac.

The same approach is true for my music. I am "old school" - I have CDs for almost all of my music and have over the years systematically ripped each new CD I purchase. I keep all of my music files in the same manner as my photos. I have a top level folder for Music, then a subfolder per artist, and within each artist, a subfolder per album I have from that artist. All of the songs from any given album are in that album's folder, each an independent, titled music file. All the music files are kept in an industry standard format (in this case, MP3). This setup too is therefore completely application and machine independent, and I have transferred the collection to my vintage Macs, my vintage Windows boxes and to Linux.

SO... keep redundant backups and never, never, never let your media be tied up into a proprietary format. If you do not do this, at some point you will inevitably lose access to the files, or perhaps even the files themselves!

I do thinks similarly…

First off, I have Dropbox on all my devices and computers. Any photos taken on those devices go automatically to the Camera Uploads folder in Dropbox. From there they are immediately accessible to every device. For my Macs or PCs, it means accessible through the Finder or File Explorer directly - because Dropbox exists as a folder on your computer. This is how I can take pics with my phones and upload them here (and elsewhere) directly from my computers.

No Photos app or third party app involved. Dropbox is cloud. Like iCloud, my stuff exists there. A phone could be reset, a drive wiped and all I'd need to do is reconnect to Dropbox and everything would come right back.

Periodically I transfer photos from the Camera Uploads folder directly to a folder on my NAS. This frees up storage space on Dropbox and backs my images up. Nightly, Carbon Copy Cloner will go off and back up that folder on my NAS to a disk image on my other NAS. That's one copy.

Weekly, Carbon Copy Cloner will go off and back up that folder on my NAS to a disk image inside my Dropbox folder on my MacPro. That pushes changes up to Dropbox. That's the second copy, and it's offsite.

This is just one backup of a specific folder that I use CCC for. I make similar backups nightly for all my Macs to my NAS and weekly to Dropbox. So, all the way around I have one local compressed disk image of all my data, and one offsite compressed disk image of all my data.

This has worked out fairly well. Twice now, I've had to go to my NAS for a restore. I've never been more than 24 hours out of date and never lost anything with regards to photos.

I do have a 2TB sub with iCloud, but I got it for convenience - not backups. Dropbox is for backups.

 

[mk313]

Just saw this & figured I'd post about some software that will back up your photos library to an external drive. One of the members on this forum created it, Photos Backup Anywhere is the name & it is (or was) $5 on the App Store. Works great to create a backup of your photos in folders by year, month, etc and works in the background once you have it set up.

I've been using iCloud for my photos for forever, and use the setting that only stores thunmbnails on my devices if the storage fills up, so I was always a little worried about losing the originals. This allows me to continue using that setting, but still have a full backup of everything. I have no affiliation with the developer, but am just really happy with the software, and sounds like it could fill a need here as well.

 

[droplink]

FWIW; I recently experimented with Lightroom Cloud.
I cannot recommend it at all.

It stores all photos online with an optional offline backup BUT the offline backup is not structured at all.
All the photos are pilled into folders according to the year they were taken and that is it.

It is much better to use Lightroom Classic which keeps the folder structure you set in the app in the finder and then backup that whole file library to external disk and either the built in cloud backup feature or a different system.