Backup

Imagine, you decide to backup your photos from a website such as flickr, but you find that it generates over a hundred files. Imagine going through and downloading every file manually. Imagine clicking hyperlinks one hundred and sixty eight times. Imagine having so little pressure on your time.

That’s where a quick ai prompt will get AI to get a shell script to do the work for you. A shell script is a few lines of code that you run via a dot sh file to do a repetitive task, or chore for you.

Yesterday I turned off iCloud Photo synching, and then I wiped my photos from iCloud Photos but before that I took several precautions.

Triple Backup to Apple Devices with Enough Storage

The first precaution I took was to ensure that the Photos app on a mac was downloading all the original photos locally. While this task was taking place I also got an iPhone 8+ and an older iPad to backup my photos locally to their hard drives.

Over two or three years I have been playing with Immich. In that time I have exported my photos from two or three phones multiple times. The reason for me importing photos multiple times is that every so often I update immich and something breaks. It is at this point that I reimport libraries yet again.

From One Pi to Another

This morning I swapped from one Pi to another because the other Pi has an NVMe drive attached to it. The logic is that I can use the SD card as the primary drive, and the NVMe drive as the backup drive.

As I write this I am waiting for my Apple Laptop to complete two tasks. The first task is to convert all my audible books from AAX to MP3 format. This is taking days to complete because I have over 500 books and my mac book pro is slow, due to it being from 2016.

Very Slow Time Machine

I’m also waiting for my mac book pro to backup to a one terabyte external HD, before repurposing a one terabyte SSD. It’s a waste to have an SSD working as a time machine backup when it could be used for more interesting tasks.

When you take photos on an iphone or other such device it’s easy to take photos and never organise them, unless you share specific photos with specific people. Images are automatically organised by time, date, month, location and people by photo apps but this is just an illusion of organisation.

By playing with Photoprism, Nextcloud, OneCloud, MyCloud (the Swisscom one), Immich and others I have often come across the same problem. When you’re synching thousands of images at a time devices time out after a few minutes, and you need to start from scratch over, and over, and over again. I’ve encountered this issue with almost all backup solutions.

Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with Nextcloudpi. The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.

A few years ago I bought a 256 gigabyte iphone because I wanted more space and for a long time it was great because it meant that I had plenty of room to grow into. The issue comes when you get to over 200 gigabytes of data stored in iCloud because you go from 3 CHF per month to 10 CHF per month. You go from 36 CHF per year to 120 CHF per year. That is a big increase.

KDrive peaks my interest because instead of cost over 100 dollars per year it costs around 64 if you buy directly from their website rather than The Apple App Store, but also because once you send your photos up to the cloud, you can get them down more easily.

With Google One you can store all of your images to the cloud quite easily but because apps like Picasa and others no longer exist, you cannot get them back without spending hours downloading them manually. iCloud is not quite as bad but they are still not ideal. You can upload images to their service, but if you do so, your image gallery must be on a drive with enough storage to take the gallery offline. On mobile phones and laptops this is complicated. In effect your images are stuck until you buy a higher capacity laptop or phone. I know an HD would also work but the issue is that when your image gallery is on another drive you have to keep it plugged in, or sync regularly for it to be efficient.

Recently I was using a one terabyte drive to backup a half terabyte drive and it would take four and a half hours to backup and I think I may have figured out why the software was taking so long. It’s because it was never designed to be used as I am using it.

Time Machine is designed to work with a hard drive that is smaller or as big as the system it’s backing up. When you get a one terabyte disk to backup a half terabyte hard drive it has the opportunity to save many more files than are on the system and this is fine initially but over time the number of files that it has to check gets larger and larger until finally it takes hours, rather than minutes to backup.

Over the last two days, I have been playing with Infomaniak K Drive, Swisscom MyCloud, Apple iCloud and Google Drive. I settled for Swisscom Mycloud because backing up pictures is free with my current contract and it’s cheaper than two terabytes with Apple iCloud. It’s free.

Infomaniak K drive is interesting because you can back up images automatically but when you have over ten thousand images on your phone like I do it cannot work through the backlog without timing out. The only way for me to update would be to keep the app alive for several hours as it uploads images and videos.