I too limit the amount of iCloud integration I use a bit.

After cancelling my iCloud 2TB plan, and turning iCloud off for photos I learned that being able to transfer photos off of my phone is not so easy.

Because basically Apple wants you to use iCloud for your photos or to sync between your computer and your phone. But I take a lot of photos as well as long videos and heaps and heaps of screenshots from articles that I read. The internal SSD on my MacBook Air is only 128GB, so I had to resort to an external drive. With huge amounts of images and photos in a Photos library macOS keeps wanting to scan through all of them and it spends forever to do so.

I began creating new Photos libraries but at that point Photos libraries begin to feel rather pointless. In order to find photos I’d have to sift through multiple libraries and each of them would want to scan the whole library again.

Aside from that the big annoyance with importing into Photos (instead of syncing) is that it does not transfer albums and favorites, it only transfers the media files.

So I was manually selecting photos and organizing stuff but that takes time so I put off transferring photos and videos and screenshots from my phone for a couple of months.

Very recently I finally found an application for macOS that uses the iPhone backup protocol in order to transfer whole albums and favorites. But it cost $60 so I was hesitant to buy it because I was very low on money so it was a significant amount. Instead I started doing a full backup of the device. About 30% through the process my phone goes in to a reboot loop.

I speak with an Apple store, I speak with Apple and I speak with a data recovery specialist company. The data recovery specialist company told me that from the description I was giving them about what had happened, it was highly probable that data had been corrupted and that this would make it impossible to recover anything. They could have a look at it for a fee of $150 they said, and recovery if possible would cost between $400 and $1000. Naturally this was way above what I could afford. So I went through with factory reset on my own instead, which means accepting that the data was gone.

I lost a couple of months worth of photos and videos and screenshots. Which sucks. At the same time though, nothing much exciting happened in these months anyway so it’s not a disaster either. But I would have preferred to not lose the data because there were a select few memories in there from that time that would have been nice to keep.

I am also growing worried about my data in general, as the drives I use are starting to age. I can’t afford new drives at the moment but began looking at renting storage from Hetzner.

Anyways, in terms of what’s on the phone I now have iCloud photos turned back on on the 5GB plan and try to transfer regularly using the macOS third-party application that I mentioned. After losing the data on my phone I shelled out those $60 for said application. It’s still a bit more cumbersome of a procedure compared to storing more in iCloud but at the same time I think this is pretty ok. This way, as long as I keep transferring to my computer when iCloud is full I always have the photos transferred or they are in iCloud. And then after I transfer them to the compute I delete them from the phone.

Ironically as I am typing this I ran out of storage again earlier today, but I am going to transfer the photos and videos that are currently on my phone as soon as I get home. And if my phone should misbehave again, or I lose the phone or whatever, well at least this time it’s a few hours worth of data that I am losing and not a couple of months worth.