How can I backup my iCloud photos with Time Machine?

December 19, 2016 6:51 AM

I have my photos stored on iCloud, but have it set to 'optimize storage' so it only downloads the thumbnails and stores the full photos on the cloud. If I backup my computer using Time Machine, do my full photos get backed up?

If not, how can I backup my photos without downloading all of them from the cloud?

posted by MisantropicPainforest to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Time Machine won't back up anything that isn't on your hard drive, to my knowledge. I use cloud-based backups for some things, but couple it with local ones - e.g. all my photos are on Flickr, and recent ones are in iCloud, but I manually back up my photos periodically to an external drive; when my iCloud storage gets full, I download full-res versions of the images, back up to the local drive, then clear out (e.g. delete) the iCloud originals. I currently keep the images on my hard drive as well, but I have an older Mac with a 1 TB internal drive - the newer, lower-capacity SSDs make this hard.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:31 AM on December 19, 2016

You can tell Photos to download all originals to your Mac (it is a setting in Preferences). Once that is done, Time Machine will back them up.
posted by plo_veggie at 10:10 AM on December 19, 2016

Time Machine can only back up what it can see, and it can't see your photos because you don't have a local copy. If you're concerned with storage space on your internal startup drive, you'll need to get an external drive and put a Photos library on it. Set that as your System Photo Library and have it set to download Originals. You can still have another library on the startup drive set to "optimize storage" and use that one when you're not plugged in.
posted by fedward at 11:33 AM on December 21, 2016