I built an app to backup Live Photos from iPhone to external hard drives

79 points by xmasterdev 6 days ago

I noticed so many iPhone users are dealing with the same storage nightmare. Here's a common scenario that sounds familiar to a lot of people:

The widespread problem: iPhone storage fills up crazy fast, not everyone has a Mac, many don't want to pay monthly for iCloud storage, and home NAS setups aren't realistic for most users. The manual approach of creating folders and selecting photos one by one is tedious, and keeping up with new photos becomes overwhelming

So I built an app called BackiGo that addresses this exact pain point - it allows direct backup of Live Photos from iPhone to external hard drives, no Mac needed.

What makes it useful:

Backs up your Live Photos with all the motion intact

Can restore Live Photos back to your iPhone camera roll

Super easy to backup new photos

You can browse and view all your saved Live Photos directly from the external drive without having to restore them first

You can test it out with up to 500 photos & videos backup before deciding if it works for your needs

gerdemb 5 days ago

Where is the link? How can iPhone backup directly to an external hard drive?

gaudat 4 days ago

>home NAS setups aren't realistic for most users

Citation needed. Get a Synology NAS and use their Photos app which backups Live photos on both iDevices and Androids. Buy it for life.

  • thenaturalist 4 days ago

    Let's be real, that's already far less approachable to 90% of consumers I know.

    The simples hurdle just being knowledge.

    The existence of NAS is probably an unknown unkown to a large part of the population.

    Compare that to "there's an app for that" & plug USB.

    Drastically simpler.

    No skin in the game either way, but I can very much understand OPs reasoning and would reach the same conclusion.

  • pdxandi 4 days ago

    I've been doing this for many years and am pretty happy with it. I can sync from my Android and my wife's iPhone. The Photos app is nice and smooth. Backups happen automatically in the background. It can even de-dupe and clean up old photos that have been backed up. All in all, quite pleased with it.

  • HuwFulcher 4 days ago

    You’re looking at £300ish for an entry level Synology and the storage. That isn’t a realistic expense for many users.

    • Jnr 3 days ago

      Over time it saves money. I got a home server and a tiny remote backup server 8 years ago and it runs quite a few services saving me hundreds each month and costing in electricity and hardware (over time) about 15EUR/mo. The longer it runs, the cheaper it is. Most of the updates are automatic so no babysitting required.

  • al_borland a day ago

    I have a Synology NAS. I don't remember what I paid for the device it itself, but let's call it $300 on the cheap side + nearly $600 for the drives + $280/year to back it up (about $23/month).

    That's a nearly $1,000 investment with a $23/month ongoing cost for backups, not to mention the added administrative (time) costs... and the eventual need for new drives and hardware (more money).... along with with migration costs (more time).

    I'm also an iCloud Photos user. I pay $2.99/month for extra storage to backup all my photos/videos to the cloud and never think about it or manage my on-device storage.

    The initial sunk cost of investing in the NAS could pay for 27 years of iCloud drive space (at the current price I pay), and the ongoing cost of my NAS backup is over 7x the price of what I pay for iCloud on an ongoing basis.

    If it's a question of money at all, it makes 0 financial sense to buy a NAS to solve a simple photo management issue on a cell phone.

    Then there is the technical requirements. Step 1 is getting someone to understand what a NAS is, which is where you will already lose 80% of users.

    I have no delusions that I will keep this Synology solution for life. At some point I will need to migrate, which means solving the current problems it solves again. The big question is if I will be doing it proactively or reactively. If it's reactive, I will very likely end up forced into another Synology product due to vendor lock-in, unless I take active steps to mitigate that risk. Most users don't want to think or care about any of this; I don't even want to think about this stuff, but it's often on my mind.

    The big risk I'm taking right now with iCloud Photos is that I have no idea how redundant the solution on Apple's side is. I hope they are good stewards of the data, but I really don't know. It would be a PR nightmare if they lost a bunch of people's photos. I have been thinking about looking into creating a copy of my photos/videos stored in iCloud on my NAS, but that is more time, and will likely require some kind of ongoing maintenance. It will likely also push me over a threshold for my NAS backup, and require that price to go up. I'm not excited about any of those prospects, so I've been trusting Apple for now (and for the last several years).

    These aren't thoughts of "most users", and I envy them.

  • michaelraiwet 3 days ago

    A Synology NAS doesn’t last for life.

    • uuddlrlrbaba 3 days ago

      And isn't protection against fire, flood, theft or other disasters.

jlarocco 4 days ago

I wouldn't use it personally, but I could see it being useful for my parents or family.

ifuse and rsync works fine for me.

SwamyM 4 days ago

I would love this if it allowed me to backup all photos taken with the iPhone to an external drive. Currently, Apple dumps all pictures (from the Camera, from iMessage, WhatsApp, etc.) into folder makes it difficult to backup just my pictures.

polymatter 4 days ago

Thank you for including a non subscription “lifetime” payment option.

atmosx 3 days ago

I am using PhotoSync to backup photos from iPhone to a self-hosted Photoprism via WebDAV (accessible from everywhere via tailscale).

mindwork 4 days ago

Would immich work for this? You can run it locally in docker container

mfa1999 4 days ago

Will it work with large (huge) photos libraries? Eg. 150k photos/videos - most of them in iCloud. Does it preserve album/folder structure?

scriu 2 days ago

Can you add a feature to upload to a ftp server?

mattfrommars 3 days ago

Btw, there is also LocalSend. Pretty nifty app

  • coldtrait 2 days ago

    Isn't that to transfer wirelessly to devices?

keroro 4 days ago

How much does it cost?

  • recury 4 days ago

    In-App Purchases

    BackiGo Pro Yearly (1 Year) $6.99

    BackiGo Pro Monthly (1 Month) $0.99

    BackiGo Pro Lifetime $14.99

er0k 4 days ago

I just use rsync, works great

  • rsync 4 days ago

    Would you explain how you are using rsync to backup photos on an iPhone ?

    I'm not aware of an iOS app named "rsync" and ... presumably you don't have a shell ... ?

    • slicktux 4 days ago

      You can load the IPhone’s pictures on Linux using the folders namespace and then rsync from the loaded namespace to /local…

      • trinix912 4 days ago

        But does it work for Live Photos which is the main premise of this app?

      • wood_spirit 4 days ago

        I use a usb cable and a Linux laptop to copy to a couple of external hard drives (which I store separately). It’s all manual but not too orrenous although i ought backup more often. The biggest hassle is accessing the new heic format on pretty much everything.

        Could it all be made into a sd card image for a pi zero perhaps? Even with a web ui accessible over Wi-Fi? A basic cheap sync-cable-appliance that non-techies can easily use?

        • rsync 4 days ago

          I think I heard that the latest 'rclone' now, finally, support iCloud ... but I think there is an issue there because you can't sync full quality / RAW photos to icloud, can you ?