Now I just don't backup my iCloud, though I do remove everything older than one year every new years to my home server which follows a good 3-2-1 backup strategy.
TL;DR: If you go this route, try to get a Mac Mini that can run a supported macOS for some time to come.
I like how the backup is outside my house, but I'm about to add Yubikey to my iCloud account and I'm not sure the Windows iCloud client is going to like that.
There is usually someone who’ll point out that this probably violates licensing, and it probably does if you do it on non-Apple hardware.
Its not perfect, but as a backup, it works well.
It doesn’t talk about not being able to access person tags. Not being able to programmatically access the data about who google thinks is in each of my photos has been an annoying pain point for me for years. Last I checked, the data is also not included in Google Takeout dumps.
https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...
My only gripe is that it downloads the shared photo album (new in iOS 16) once for each account, and when your photo library is 1.8TB, that suddenly becomes a lot of wasted space. When it comes to backing it up the backup software deduplicates the data, but not for the initial storage.
I really wish Apple would implement some kind of method for backing up photos stored in the cloud without the need for mirroring them.
Before the M1 I was using iCloud photo downloader ( https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do... ) on a Raspberry Pi 4 which also worked well, but in the end I got tired of iCloud credentials expiring every ~90 days, requiring each family member to login again through a console.
Considering the M1 idles at roughly 20% more than a RPi4 (M1 at 4.5W) it was an easy sell. I just got the cheapest model and added a large USB drive. Using a Mac also gives you the possibility of using something like Backblaze Personal with unlimited backup storage, if that’s your thing :-)
I use Healthchecks.IO ( https://healthchecks.io/ ) to keep an “eye” on the backup status (and other more mundane tasks like monitoring the power state of my summerhouse)
