Three Ways to Back Up iCloud Photos to an External Hard Drive

If you have saved your photos from your iPhone to iCloud, you are already doing better than most people. Keeping an online backup of your photos means that it is easy to recover them if something happens on your phone. But even then, it should not be your only solution. Photos stored in the Cloud can come and go more easily than you think – for example, if you delete a synchronized photo on an Apple device, it is also deleted from your iCloud account.

For this reason, it is always a good idea to save your photos to a second location, preferably offline. Apple does not make it easier to do it very easy, because I learned of the hard year last year, when a member of the nearby family died. My family and I tried to save a copy of their photos, and before we could even record our sorrow correctly, we ended up juggling with a bunch of different tools to save their important photos. Since then, I have learned a lot about exporting iCloud photos to external hard drives, so you do not encounter the same problems we have made. Here are the best ways to save your iCloud photos locally, including certain methods that are much easier than the official Apple.

Use of Apple’s official export method to save iCloud photos

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The first call port here is Apple’s official export method. There are two main ways to do so: Download your photos to iCloud.com or ask for a copy of your data from the Apple data confidentiality page. Download from iCloud is the best for immediate backup, but it only allows you to download around 1,000 photos at a time, and these downloads can sometimes be stuck due to the bandwidth. The most reliable method is to ask Apple a copy of all your photos, but you will have to wait until a week for Apple to send you a link to where you can download it. Here’s how to apply for data for your iCloud photos:

1. Open the Apple data and confidentiality website and log in with your Apple account.

2. Click Ask for a copy of your data.

3. Scroll down ICloud photos from the list. Click Continue.

4. On the next page, choose the maximum size of your backup files. Apple will divide your photos into downloads the size of the file you choose. If you choose 1 GB, you will need to download more files to complete the export, and if you choose 25 GB, each file will be larger, but you will need to make fewer downloads overall.

5. Once you have chosen a file size, click Full request.

Then Apple will send you an email confirming your data request, and you will have to wait a week to receive a download link. Once it will arrive, you can download all your photos and videos directly on your external hard drives. This method is perfect to finish a unique backup of all your data, but if you want to continue to save each new photo that you make to an external hard drive, you will have to download them manually iCloud each time. It’s quite annoying, but there is a simpler way to do it.

Use a Mac application to save your iCloud photos

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If you do not want to wait before downloading your iCloud photos, you can use third -party applications to save your data. One of my favorites is the parachute backup ($ 5), which supports the backup of iCloud photos and iCloud readers to your Mac, external hard drives or even storage connected to the network such as a NAS.

Parachute backup is fairly easy to use and supports incremental backups, which means that you don’t have to continue to save the photos manually each time you take a new one. Instead, this application can detect when you have a new photo and copy it to your external hard drive designated in an instant, without the older download images that have already been saved. The application also supports complete backups, which is great in case you want to copy all your photos in a second external player.

Here’s how to start. When you open the parachute backup for the first time, you will see two sections: the iCloud reader and iCloud photos. Simply click on the authorize button under iCloud photos, give access to the application and click Run the backup now. The application will manage the rest. You can also configure synchronization planning on the same page to make sure that the application saves your new photos when you wish, whether it is immediately or during adjustment hours.

Use an iPhone application for iCloud photos backups

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For mobile users, Backigo is an iPhone application that can recover your iCloud photos and save them on an external hard drive. You can either connect an external reader to the USB-C port of your iPhone, or add storage connected to the network to the queues, and use backigo to save photos on these locations. The application does a very good job by moving iCloud photos to external players, and I like to use it to make icloud photos backups, then delete them from my phone to save space.

The default parameter allows incremental backups, which guarantees that after the end of the first backup, only the new photos are saved on the external hard drive. You can start for free with Backigo, and the application can save 500 photos for you without obliging to pay. After this limit, you have several payment options: $ 1 / month, $ 7 / year or a single payment of $ 15 to unlock all features.