Relocated ~400GB (~93,000 photos & videos) System Photos library to external Thunderbolt SSD. Why is Photos so poisonous to Time Machine?)Ĭlosing the loop on my own issue here in the hopes it may help someone else. (iPhoto's database could be backed up by Time Machine, for instance. While your workarounds would probably work, that doesn't address the matter: Apple should provide an easy and reliable way to back up these most critical of things, our photos.
I am not trying to make this a controversy, I am trying to raise attention to the fact that there are probably a large number of Mac users-myself included-who are doing something Apple explicitly says not to do. I'd be inclined to just go with Apple's suggestion of dragging the database to another drive. I wouldn't consider trying to walk someone through it as a way to back up their Photos database. There are many reasons why you may not want permissions enabled on the external drive-it might be one that moves between users, for instance.Īs for your second recommendation, that's a power-user-level fix that no typical Mac user will even attempt, much less find out about. What's a terrible recommendation? I didn't make any recommendations, I just repeated what Apple says you should do: Manually drag the Photos library to another drive. Manual backups aren't usually the best solution. You'd want to use an app like CarbonCop圜loner or similar to automate this process, obviously. I don't know if it's OK to copy it to the Time Machine drive, just outside the Time Machine folder, or if you'd ideally need a third drive. Thanks Ed that appears to address the second question. Update: Ed Mechem's comment points out Apple's Back up thew Photos library page, which recommends simply dragging your Photos library to another drive to back it up.
Seriously, Apple, tell me how to back up the 8TB external drive I'm using to hold my photos…there must be an Apple-accepted solution, right? So if I have to go to the cloud for primary photo storage, I don't think I'll be using Apple's solution (even though it's obviously the best-integrated).
At that level, I'd need the 2TB iCloud plan at $10 a month…versus Google and Amazon, both of which offer unlimited photo storage space for free (though Google has caps on image and video resolution). My library is over 40,000 photos and 1,400+ videos, requiring in excess of 500GB of storage. I know Apple's answer to the second question is "You shouldn't be storing photos locally, they should all be in the cloud." But if you have a huge collection of photos and videos, and/or if you've got slow or limited internet, this is not a realistic option.
How, exactly, am I supposed to back up my photos, if I can't use Time Machine? (See update at end for Apple's recommended solution.) Will SuperDuper or CarbonCop圜loner also run into permissions problems? I'm using a 1TB Flickr account and their upload tool as a backup method, but I have lots of upstream bandwidth, so it's not bad…but not everyone is lucky enough to have fiber to the door.What if I exclude the iPhoto Library folder from Time Machine-is that sufficient to prevent the permissions issues, such that I can use Time Machine for the rest of the drive?.Yikes again!Īpple's writeup leaves me with a couple of critical questions… So there are potentially a lot of Mac users with small internal drives who may be affected by this. And in today's Mac world, that could be a lot of people-while you can configre some machines with up to 2TB of solid state storage (and iMacs with bigger Fusion drive), doing so is wildly expensive. Think about that for a bit…this affects anyone with limited internal storage space who has their photos stored on an external drive. Not just "don't back up the Photos Library folder with Time Machine," but "don't back up the entire drive with Time Machine." Yikes! In a nutshell, Apple recommends that if you've moved the System Photo Library to an external drive-as nearly anyone who takes lots of pictures will have done, given space-limited solid-state internal drives-you do not use Time Machine on that drive. That's taken from the System Photo Library overview, part of Photos' help. This makes much more sense continue reading only if you care about my feelings on the original incorrect wording. That just means you shouldn't use the same external drive for both your Photos library and as a destination drive in Time Machine. The permissions for your Photos library may conflict with those for the Time Machine backup. If a Photos library is located on an external drive, don’t use Time Machine to store a backup on that external drive. Update: Thanks to reader Brian for commenting below that Apple has updated this page with much clearer wording.