While not free, and not for any other platform than macOS. The program Parachute[1] in the App Store is very nice in downloading both photos from your library as well as files from the various locations.
Another option for iOS at least is PhotoSync. It’s nice, you can pull from photos and push to basically any remote service or local server. I have it backing up to both my nas and b2.
It works well enough, but it's not without flaws either.
The desktop version works reliably, if you can get macOS to keep shares mounted for long enough, and mount them on request. The scheduler is also kinda wonky.
The iOS version has so far never finished an incremental backup overnight of our ~1TB individual libraries. It handles resume/suspend well, but for some reason, while it exports unmodified originals, it doesn't include AAE files, which the desktop version does.
PhotoSync does everything right, with the exception of trying to keep state of what has been exported, which makes little sense as it doesn't support restoring photos.
Anyone know if it works with ADP? I emailed them months ago but no one ever replied.
On a related question, is there a download solution that does work with ADP? I’m looking to mitigate any potential account lockout issues for family members (and, no, they will not switch out of the ecosystem).
It does. It uses PhotoKit to access photos, so it basically uses your Apple Photos app (iOS or Mac) to download the photos.
The only scripted solution I can think of that works with ADP is osxphotos[^1], but that also uses PhotoKit, and requires the user to be signed in.
Personally I use PhotoSync [^2] to backup our photos from phones to a NAS. It works reliably, and supports exporting unmodified originals as well as edited versions, and XMP/AAE metadata alongside it.
I love recutils. The database format is simple enough, it has a bunch of options for constraints, and it has Bash integration and a great Emacs mode to search, edit and verify the integrity of the database.
Sure, it's not as fast as SQLite or bigger systems, but often it's enough for smaller projects.
It's always interesting to see how many sharp edges that C, as a language, has still. I know it's a language that eschews a lot of the ergonomics found in more recent languages, but it makes me sad that we're still teaching beginners the poor form these basic operations.
I like C, but it feels like you have to have an unhealthy amount of paranoia to write it well.
Yeah, I've been using Directory Opus[1] for years on my Windows machine(s). It's hard to overstate how much faster these alternatives are, but not only faster but with better features. I get that explorer.exe needs to be simple, but it doesn't have to do that at the cost of being abysmally slow.
Yeah, same with OpenOffice for years. It was a hack to get the program already resident in memory and ameliorate some of the startup costs.
Again, this was a hack. They should really be looking at fixing the issues with the startup time and slow performance of explorer, because even on vastly lesser machines, we've had near-to-instant startup times with, effectively, the same application.
I think there is probably a lot of work to do to fully pry the .mozilla folder apart. For a long time they've simply shipped everything in that folder and rolled with it. Making decisions on what is actually cache and what is user config vs "application data" is probably going to be harder than splitting the folder.
That's true, but they've already done it for macOS... ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/ (for both the config and non-config data) versus ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/ (for cached data that can always be deleted)
Oh, I hadn't even _thought_ of that. Yeah, that's going to be a fun debate. Realistically, extensions shouldn't care about the folder structure of other parts of the profile, but I also know that there is a _lot_ of history there.
Requiring a mozconfig file shows that the code base has failed to transition to cmake or meson/ninja (directly; there is some python wrapper which may help here but I refer to the primary configuration). Mozilla gave up on Firefox a long time ago already.
This is great news. Firefox respects the system-defined folders on Windows and macOS. Linux, being the free spirit it is, doesn't have a 'standard'. XDG makes recommendations that make a certain amount of sense and aligning to that is a great step forward for such a large project.
I've not had much of a problem with Time Machine. It works as advertised and does so quietly and without much input. The only thing I've had to do is turn off scheduled backups, as it tries to do a backup while I'm on a slow connection. This is because it can still see my NAS over Tailscale. I just put the menubar icon up there and trigger it when I get home.
I wonder if most folks have different expectations from it. Most of the HN crowd are probably already familiar with the usual suspects, so the lack of options and visibility into the process are probably concerns. For most folks, though, I imagine it's turn it on and forget it.
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