By Glenn Fleishman

July 14, 2025 9:30 AM PT

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How to back up iCloud Drive and Photos

Cloud synchronization makes it easy to have a copy of your stuff everywhere, and, through optimization, to avoid filling your local storage with your least-accessed files or media, which is often the majority of those items.

But what if you want an active, up-to-date replica of these synced files? Six Colors subscriber Matthias asks:

I’d love to have a backup of my iCloud Drive/photos on my NAS. Is there any way without having a Mac constantly running in the background? If not, what would be the best way to make sure all photos are in a folder on my NAS? Just having the photos library on the share? What about iCloud Drive?

This simple question reveals the trouble with cloud-focused storage that doesn’t offer an API or other authenticated third-party access that would allow an ecosystem of products to build up around it.

The simple answer is “not exactly.” The more complicated answer is “sort of.”

Secret agents

iCloud synchronization requires a swarm of background agents or daemons that are constantly monitoring and chatting with iCloud on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Beyond the bits of code that manage keeping calendars, contacts, Health data, and other information up to date, specific agents watch for behavior that requires new syncing for iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos.

Did you take a picture? Did you import or edit an image? Did you modify a file on iCloud Drive and then save it? Did someone update images in a Shared Library or an iCloud Shared Album? Has a collaborator on an iCloud-shared file made a change? Immediately or shortly after any of these and related acts, data is copied in one direction or the other.

Part of the overall background management task is to ensure you don’t run out of storage. This happens through optimization, Apple’s catchall term for dumping items from local storage that have copies safely on iCloud. There’s no particular way to tune this optimization behavior: Apple makes it available or not, and uses cues like the file or media modification date or the last time you accessed something.

If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, you likely have optimized storage enabled for iCloud Photos, and there’s no way to disable it for iCloud Drive, accessible via the Files app. On a Mac, you can choose optimization for iCloud Drive files.

So this is the conundrum when you want to back up these files. On an iPhone or iPad, Apple doesn’t offer its own “first-party” to back up everything—only the stuff that isn’t stored on iCloud.¹ iMazing is one of the only third-party options that lets you pull down data that Apple doesn’t let you copy separately. But iMazing is limited to what’s on the iPhone or iPad—it can’t pull down iCloud data.

For Mac users, as long as optimization is enabled, there’s no way to locally back up files or the iCloud Photo Library in full. The only files that can be copied are the ones fully cached. If you have enough local storage, you can disable optimization and keep files and media stored on your own volumes. But that limits your cloud-stored totals to the startup volume or startup volume plus an external volume for the Photos Library, obviating one of the key advantages of having cloud storage in the first place!

Let’s consider what alternatives could let us meet Matthias’s criteria:

• Not keeping a Mac always on
• Allowing NAS or similar networked storage

A wake-up call to action

If the goal is to have an up-to-date, local, networked copy without a continuously active Mac, there are several ways to go about this. The first couple of options require enough locally attached storage to have optimization disabled, so that a complete copy of your iCloud drive, Photos library, or both is stored locally on a Mac.

Since your Mac can probably keep up with background archiving of files stored locally to a NAS over modern Wi-Fi or Ethernet, you could use archiving software that runs continuously or at frequent intervals without imposing a heavy load. Since the only items that need to be scanned for iCloud are the iCloud Drive folder and the Photos Library, that may work well enough.

Instead of keeping that Mac on all the time, you can automate its power settings via the macOS Unix command pmset, a rough abbreviation of “power management settings.”² You can enter a command in Terminal to have your Mac wake and sleep at specific intervals. If you wanted to power up and down your Mac during the day, but ensure the network sync occurred, you could schedule it to wake up for an hour every night.

To have your Mac wake or power up at 2 am each day and then shut down at 3 am, you would enter the following in Terminal, plus your administrative password when prompted:

sudo pmset repeat shutdown MTWRFSU 03:00:00 wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 02:00:00

You can make sure the schedule was set as expected by entering pmset -g sched to see:

Repeating power events:
wakepoweron at 2:00AM every day
shutdown at 3:00AM every day

(To reset this command, enter pmset repeat cancel.)

This approach has drawbacks:

• You cannot set your Mac’s Energy setting to allow sleep; having the display power down is fine. If the Mac is in sleep mode, it can’t be shut down via pmset.
• If someone is sleeping near the Mac that’s powering up daily at 2 a.m., you should mute its sound to avoid the startup chime causing a disturbance.

Cloudy with a chance of competition

You could opt out of the Apple ecosystem at least in part to achieve some or all of what you want. iCloud Photos is the bigger lift because of how deeply Apple has integrated media in its operating systems from the Photos Library and iCloud Photos. There’s no good way to back up an optimized Mac library in full, but if storage is an issue, you can relocate the Photos Library to an external volume.³ (That’s what I’ve done: I have a relatively inexpensive 2 TB SSD that uses 10 Gbps USB 3 to hold my Photos Library. It’s plenty fast for my purposes.)

Whether stored on an internal or external volume, you could use a cloning or archiving tool to copy your Photos Library to a NAS device with Arq Backup, Carbon Copy Cloner, or ChronoSync. (You can also have external volumes backed up locally or over the network using Time Machine.)

That might solve iCloud Photos for you, but what about an out-of-the-iCloud-box though for iCloud Drive: Use a competing cloud-storage system. Most cost the same or less (particularly with annual discounts) for the same storage as Apple’s iCloud+ paid tiers. And Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive have direct Finder integration. If you have enough local storage on your startup volume or an external volume—something iCloud doesn’t allow—you could use one of the backup apps above to archive files to a NAS.

However, if you have to or want to store only some of your cloud-synced files, you’re not out of luck: because Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft offer developer access for third-party apps, your NAS may already have built-in support where it can directly download a full copy of all files and keep it up to date. For instance, the popular Synology brand offers those three cloud services and pure cloud storage flavors, too.

I do wish Apple would provide an API for its cloud services, which feels against the Apple ethos but could help provide a rich ecosystem for third parties to backing up from and to iCloud.

For further reading

If you’re looking for deeper dives on the above topics, consider the following Take Control Books titles:

• My Take Control of Apple Screen and File Sharing digs into Dropbox, Google, and OneDrive as alternatives or supplements to iCloud Drive, including comparing file and folder sharing and linking options.
• Our fearless leader, Jason Snell, has a long-running title, Take Control of Photos, which tells you everything you want to know about using that app.
• For more about iCloud and its vagaries, consult Joe Kissell’s Take Control of iCloud.
• Local and networked digital storage of all kinds, including NAS, gets a good luck in Jeff Carlson’s Take Control of Digital Storage.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]

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