Time Machine vs. Photos.app
In a nutshell, Apple recommends that if you’ve moved the System Photo Library to an external drive—as nearly anyone who takes lots of pictures will have done, given space-limited solid-state internal drives—you do not use Time Machine on that drive. Not just “don’t back up the Photos Library folder with Time Machine,” but “don’t back up the entire drive with Time Machine.” Yikes!
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I know Apple’s answer to the second question is “You shouldn’t be storing photos locally, they should all be in the cloud.” But if you have a huge collection of photos and videos, and/or if you’ve got slow or limited internet, this is not a realistic option.
It’s also not a very reliable one. Aside from not really being a backup, iCloud Photo Library doesn’t even sync reliably. My mother has four devices that are supposedly syncing, but some of the photos don’t make it to some of the devices. Each device gets most of each batch of new photos, so at a glance it looks like it worked, but upon closer inspection some of the photos are missing. No errors are reported.
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I really don't understand this at all....you back up tens, hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of gigabytes by drag and drop? What now? I don't really understand Apple product design at this juncture, but this just seems extra stupid to me. Maybe I misunderstood the whole dilemma....
How do you do incremental backups this way?
No...seriously. Is that Apple's official statement here? I read the linked article and all the linked references in said article. I remain perplexed by how unsophisticated this all sounds. I confess, never liked Time Machine anyway. With OS X, first I used SuperDuper, later moving to Carbon Copy Cloner.
The whole Time Capsule, iOS Backup and iCloud needs a rethink.
I have Space Saving options in Photos, so I try to send a Video or Photos via any IM, It will download the photos or Video from iCloud, and then sent it out. The problem is many many times iCloud simply could not fetch my photos. It produces an error, I try it on my LTE network, on Home WiFi, Public WiFi. It is all the same. So i am pretty sure it is a problem on Apple's End. And it is not only once, this happen to me a lot of times that I am scared to recommend iCloud to any others. And this problem / for the particular file would only go away after 24 / 48 hours.
OSX Server has the option to do iCloud caching. I wish they could ship an TIme Capsule with this feature, so I always have a local backup of iCloud files. There are lots of advantage in it, if I am off the net, I have the files with me at home.
My problem with Dropbox solution is that I cant restore those files to a new iPhone. It will only live inside Dropbox.
I use Dropbox Camera Upload and have a copy of all the photos sent OK very to Dropbox. I can share and from there and can also get the Dropbox Syncs on all devices. I don't have to worry about iCloud.
I make a copy of photos to Smugmug also automatically so I have two sets of online photo copy.