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

4 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

43 comments

xmasterdev

Reply
gerdemb  3 days ago

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

gaudat  2 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  2 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  2 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  2 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  19 hours 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.

jlarocco  2 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  2 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.

atmosx  1 day ago

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

mfa1999  2 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?

er0k  2 days ago

I just use rsync, works great