Three Ways to Back up ICloud Photos to an External Hard Drive
If you’ve backed up your iPhone photos to iCloud, you’re already doing a better job than most. Backing up your photos online will make it easy to restore them if something happens to your phone. But even then, it shouldn’t be your only solution. Photos stored in the cloud can come and go more easily than you think — for example, if you delete a synced photo on any Apple device, it’ll also be deleted from your iCloud account.
For this reason, it’s always a good idea to back up your photos elsewhere, preferably offline. Apple doesn’t make this very easy, as I learned the hard way last year when a close relative died. My family and I tried to save copies of their photos, and before we could properly express our grief, we had to juggle a bunch of different tools to save their important photos. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about exporting photos from iCloud to external hard drives, so you don’t run into the same problems we did. Here are the best ways to back up your iCloud photos locally, including a few that are much easier than Apple’s official method.
Using Apple’s Official Export Method to Back Up iCloud Photos
The first step here is to use Apple’s official export method. There are two main ways to do this: download photos from iCloud.com or request a copy of your data from Apple’s data privacy page. Downloading from iCloud is best for immediate backup, but it only lets you download about 1,000 photos at a time, and these downloads can sometimes be delayed due to network bandwidth. A more reliable way is to request a copy of all your photos from Apple, but you’ll have to wait up to a week for Apple to send you a download link. Here’s how to request data for your photos from iCloud:
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Go to Apple’s data and privacy website and sign in to your Apple account.
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Click “Request a copy of your data” .
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Scroll down and select iCloud Photos from the list. Click Continue .
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On the next page, choose the maximum size for your backup files. Apple will split your photos into uploads of the size you choose. If you choose 1GB, you’ll have to upload more files to complete the export, while 25GB will have larger files per file but fewer uploads overall.
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Once you have selected the file size, click the Finish Request button.
After that, Apple will send you an email confirming the data request, and you will have to wait about a week to receive the download link. After that, you will be able to download all your photos and videos directly to external hard drives. This method is ideal for a one-time backup of all your data, but if you want to continue saving all new photos to the external hard drive, you will have to manually download them from iCloud each time. This is quite inconvenient, but there is an easier way.
Use a Mac app to back up iCloud photos
If you don’t want to wait for your photos to download from iCloud, you can use third-party backup apps. One of my favorites is Parachute Backup ($5), which supports backing up iCloud photos and iCloud Drive files to your Mac, external hard drives, and even network storage devices like NAS.
Parachute Backup is fairly easy to use and supports incremental backups, which eliminates the need to manually back up every time you take a new photo. Instead, the app automatically detects when a new photo is taken and instantly copies it to the selected external hard drive, without re-downloading older photos that were already backed up. The app also supports full backups, which is great if you want to copy all your photos to a second external drive.
Here’s how to get started. When you first launch Parachute Backup, you’ll see two sections: iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos. Just click the Authorize button under iCloud Photos, grant the app access, and click Start Backup Now . The app will take care of the rest. You can also set up a sync schedule on the same page so that the app backs up new photos at your convenience — immediately or at a scheduled time.
Use the iPhone app to back up your iCloud photos
For mobile users, BackiGo is an iPhone app that lets you download photos from iCloud and save them to an external hard drive. You can connect an external drive to your iPhone’s USB-C port or add online storage to the Files app and use BackiGo to save photos to those drives. The app does a great job of transferring photos from iCloud to external drives, and I like to use it to back up photos from iCloud and then delete them from my phone to save space.
The default setting is to enable incremental backups, which ensures that after the first backup is complete, only new photos are saved to the external hard drive. You can get started with BackiGo for free, and the app can back up 500 photos for free. Once that limit is reached, you have several payment options: $1 per month, $7 per year, or a one-time payment of $15 to unlock all features.