If you are like most Apple users, you probably rely on iCloud to back up your photos. That’s great! By all means, keep doing that! But what if you want to create an additional backup of your photo library that is not optimized by iCloud and located on an external hard drive? As the Boy Scouts say, “always be prepared,” and we’re here to help you earn your digital merit badge.
Before you proceed, we strongly encourage you to use a new solid-state drive for this process. The reason why is speed. When you’re moving big amounts of data, you want to move it quickly in order to reduce the chances that something goes wrong. In order to test the speed of your external device, go to the App Store and download the free app Blackmagic disk speed test.
In just a moment, we are going to copy and paste your photo library into the external hard drive, but there’s one thing that we need to check out first. Click where it says “photos” in the top menu bar and go into settings. Now, go into the iCloud tab. If your library is set to “download Originals,” all you have to do is copy and paste your library into the external drive.
If it’s set to “optimize,” you’ll have one additional step that you’ll need to do after the library has copied to the external drive. Double click on the library that is located on your external drive, and then go into settings. Here in general, you’ll need to temporarily mark this as the system library. Now, click over to the iCloud tab and let’s turn on iCloud photos. Now let’s switch it over to download Originals.
Basically, “use as system Library” translates into communicating with iCloud, so you’ll now need to give it time to download any optimized content. You’ll know it’s done when you go into the library, scroll all the way to the bottom, and it should say “synced.” When it’s done, you can eject your external hard drive. You will then need to go back to the photos library located in your pictures folder and double click on it to launch the library. We now need to go back into settings and mark this as the system library so that iCloud keeps talking to this library. Just make sure that iCloud is set back to “optimized,” that is if you want it to be.
So let’s say a few months go by, and now you want to update your backup so that it has your most recent photos. All you need to do is plug it back in manually, open the library on your external drive by double-clicking on it once again, let’s go into settings, and let’s switch it so that this is the system library. Now, let’s click over to the iCloud tab, turn iCloud photos back on, and make sure that it is set to download Originals. After a few minutes, it should download all of your new photos.
This is an easy way to create an additional backup of your photo library, and it’s always a good idea to have multiple backups. Keep in mind, if you ever need help with your Mac, whether it’s organizing your photos, removing duplicates, or just learning how to use your Mac more efficiently, you can book a one-hour tech therapy session with Tech Talk America.
Class dismissed!