iCloud alternative

[24lemons]

I’m at the point where I need to upgrade my iCloud storage but before I do, is it possible to get a home HDD that will work in the same way (auto upload photos videos etc from my iPhone)

I have a large archive of photos sitting in a drive which I would like to have access to via my phone. Would it be possible to add these to the home cloud HDD too?

Finally if I get a home cloud drive, how easy would it be to transfer my entire iCloud library of photos to the drive?

Thanks in advance

[Jenny Tailor]

24lemons said:

I’m at the point where I need to upgrade my iCloud storage but before I do, is it possible to get a home HDD that will work in the same way (auto upload photos videos etc from my iPhone)

I have a large archive of photos sitting in a drive which I would like to have access to via my phone. Would it be possible to add these to the home cloud HDD too?

Finally if I get a home cloud drive, how easy would it be to transfer my entire iCloud library of photos to the drive?

Thanks in advance

How much storage do you need?

[Ham_and_Jam]

A NAS would pretty much do exactly what your wanting.

I have a Synology NAS with WD red drives and it’s been prettymuch flawless is the last few years. I don’t pretend to be an IT god, but in some ways knowing that it can be set up and works by someone who isn’t is probably a good thing.

I use it as a file storage network for my business and a personal media storage / player, and a back up drive for both. Its easily accessible from a phone / PC on your local network or on a mobile network.

The Synology UI is regarded as probably the best out of the bunch of NAS drive manufacturers, it works and is easy to understand and use.

I wont bog you down too much with technical details, but the link here is to a similar one that I have, albeit the newer model. It’s pretty much made for what you want. It will need the actual hard drives to be purchased separately, they recommend WD red as they are quiet and reliable.

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS218play#...

[telford_mike]

Just upgrade your iCloud storage. It’s likely to be cheaper than buying your own storage solution. Remember, you'd need to backup your 'home cloud' to somewhere too.

[Captain_Morgan]

24lemons said:

Finally if I get a home cloud drive, how easy would it be to transfer my entire iCloud library of photos to the drive?

Don’t forget the plan to backup all of that data...

[Davie_GLA]

I suspect you need to think this through a bit more. iCloud is cheap to upgrade and cheaper to restore. HDD at home is a risk and will vaporise everything if it goes tits up / a fire / stolen.

There are HDD's that come with services to upload to cloud storage but iCloud / Amazon / google does all of this at pennies per month and gives peace of mind. Of course, the risk is never zero. Apple *could* go bust or be compromised but unlikely that it will be to the point where your data is lost forever.

[seveb]

I have 2TB with iCloud and it's from memory £7/month. All my devices can see all the files, even a Windows laptop. I do still back up critical things to AWS which copies my data to several data centres, all of which being destroyed at the same time is in reality not going to happen.

I'm hoping Apple will offer larger storage options soon as 2TB for video footage isn't very big.

[sjg]

telford_mike said:

Just upgrade your iCloud storage. It’s likely to be cheaper than buying your own storage solution. Remember, you'd need to backup your 'home cloud' to somewhere too.

This. I have a Synology that can do it but we do an upgraded family iCloud sub because it makes life far easier - not just for photos but general device backup so if you lose/break/upgrade then it's super easy to restore.

We tend to keep the last year's photos on there (plus we keep some albums like the good photos of the kids), and have the habit of copying and clearing down anything older each year so we stay inside the 200GB plan.