alt Hacker NewsMy concern with backing up iCloud Photos with anything but Apple Photos is that there are some proprietary formats like Live Photos and slow mo video for which exports are lossy. Also, Apple Photos stores all edits non-destructively, so 'flattening' the edits into a single file for export is also a lossy operation.
It seems like an obvious improvement for Time Machine to support full backups while using optimized storage on the primary system.
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How about just turning off optimized storage and letting Time Machine do its job?
Could the first obvious improvement please be its speed? My god. The local Time Machine backup is slower on a 10gb network than Backblaze over the Internet. It isn’t even close.
The most annoying thing for me is if you set the date for a photo, it gets stored externally rather than modifying the photo metadata. So when you switch platform, every photo which didn't originally have a captured at date ends up reset to the current day every time you move.
For edits, I don't care too much about just baking them in since it's unlikely I'm going back to old photos and want to undo the crop.
In my experience migrating to another provider from iCloud, this hasn’t been a significant issue. Live Photos in particular are not really proprietary in the sense that they’re implemented in an extremely simple way that basically every photo tool understands. ~~Slow motion videos are also not proprietary, they’re just a plain video file.~~ <<< edit: I think I’m wrong about slow motion
I’ve used this tool for years and it’s great. But it really saves just the raw data. You’d never get it back in to Apple Photos as nice as when you pulled it out. Metadata is missing. Live Photos come out as an image and a similarly named video. But I treat it as the emergency backup. If some Apple DC burns down or they ban my Apple ID for some reason, at least the photos still exist.