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Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

Backing up iPhone photos to an external disk is pretty easy. It's not the happy path because most people cannot handle their own backups.

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this is false. Apple does not support this. If they did, you could connect a USB drive to your phone or tablet and save the photos.

To some extent this was eventually solved by third party vendors laboriously creating lightning flash drives and creating an app to talk to them.

But it is definite that you cannot backup your phone. Even apple's backup method is crippled.

I would like an image backup - where you could back up every bit of phone data - but apple gets in the way of that.

You can have it automatically generate an image over WiFi to a computer with an external drive. I mean, it requires iTunes, but it's trivial.

But compare that to an Android phone, where I have no idea how to get access to anything more than pictures without ADB.

This is where Android shines. I have everything on my phone daily backed up to my personal Nextcloud server. If I ever get in a bind, with a few gestures I can wipe my whole phone and then later restore everything. One can alternatively use Syncthing to sync files to a PC.

Well, I suspect you are rooted for this and a whole bunch of app complain about rooting. I have android and appreciate the ability to backup, but it's infuriating what apps are doing.

I am not rooted, but I am using GrapheneOS which is technically a fork of Android. I am using the built in Seedvault for app backup to Nextcloud. Files are synced with Nextcloud client.

I don't believe you can create an image even with itunes.

afaict it doesn't back up apps and app data. You can restore your phone, but the apps download again and app data is lost.

I believe this means if you are on version 10 of an app and 11 is the latest, a restore will upgrade you. And it you have say kindle books downloaded, you will have to re-download them again.

Can you just connect a external disk into the iPhone and click on "Backup" or it requires more than that?

No, but you also can't do that with a linux computer or any other device. You can easily copy and paste all of the photos onto a computer though.

What's stopping me from setting up a Linux computer to do that?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, but idevicebackup2 does exactly that.

They make special external disks (that may require an iOS app). I bought some for a friend.

But you can also have it connect to a computer over wifi and auto-backup. Does Google let you do that?

Not if you want to avoid itunes or icloud.

Image Capture.app, which is built in to macOS, is very no-nonsense and works great.

If you have macOS you don't need either, just plug your iPhone open up "/Applications/Image Capture.app" and it will show your photos. You can select and drag and drop to a disk and delete them all from this app.

Having it happen automatically is what I was after, and that isn’t particularly easy to achieve. There must surely be a better way than my nasty hack, but I do now have automatic backups of iPhone photos onto a nas:

A VM running macOS and a script. Open Photos.app and sync with ‘Download Originals’ checked. Quit Photos.app and rsync the folder ‘Originals’ out of the app bundle and onto a NAS. Once finished, reopen Photos.app.

It’s quite horrible getting the script to run as permissions get tricky with chrontab, so I used Lingon X to schedule it.

Maybe try it with an app on the phone instead? I've been using Synology's photos app to automatically upload everything in my photos library to my NAS for a couple of months now, and it's been seamless. Other apps, like PhotoSync, seem to offer similar functionality in a platform-independent way.

Thank you - I’ve had this suggested before but just couldn’t get it to work. I’ll have another go as that is obviously way better (and saves running a very large VM).

Modern versions of iTunes and modern iOS versions can be set up so that whenever they are on the same network iTunes automatically backs up over WiFi in the background. Then it's just a matter of a cron job pushing the files to the NAS.

That’s not a million miles off what I’m doing. It’s unhelpful that there isn’t a built in way to get images out of Photos.app as downloading a full library can use a lot of storage.

My bad, I misunderstood. Do you do all of this with an AppleScript? I would be really interested to look at this if you have it hosted on a repo somewhere.

You can use an adapter:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD821AM/A/lightning-to-us...

I mean, "avoiding backup software on your computer" seems like a big ask for organized backups.

But, yeah, I have lightening drives that connect directly to download pictures onto (well, purchased as a gift).. They even also have USB to be read in a computer.

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