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

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

75 points | by xmasterdev 3 days ago

15 comments

  • gerdemb 1 day ago
    Where is the link? How can iPhone backup directly to an external hard drive?
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  • gaudat 1 day 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.

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    • MehdiHK 1 hour ago
      Synology is still my go to with the model I already purchased. But I'm not sure I'll be buying them again after this:

      https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requ...

    • thenaturalist 22 hours 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 23 hours 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 22 hours ago
      You’re looking at £300ish for an entry level Synology and the storage. That isn’t a realistic expense for many users.
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      • Jnr 2 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.
    • michaelraiwet 15 hours ago
      A Synology NAS doesn’t last for life.
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      • uuddlrlrbaba 6 hours ago
        And isn't protection against fire, flood, theft or other disasters.
    • kzisme 20 hours ago
      Or checkout https://immich.app/ !
  • jlarocco 1 day 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.

  • atmosx 14 hours ago
    I am using PhotoSync to backup photos from iPhone to a self-hosted Photoprism via WebDAV (accessible from everywhere via tailscale).
  • mattfrommars 3 hours ago
    Btw, there is also LocalSend. Pretty nifty app
  • polymatter 23 hours ago
    Thank you for including a non subscription “lifetime” payment option.
  • mattfrommars 3 hours ago
    Is this a native IOS app?
  • SwamyM 1 day 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.
  • 1970-01-01 1 day ago
    How is this different from iMazing?

    https://imazing.com/backup-iphone-ipad#:~:text=Choose%20iPho...

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    • msh 1 day ago
      It’s more like PhotoSync as it only does photos
    • tempodox 1 day ago
      I loved the idea until I saw that it's only available as a subscription.
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  • mindwork 23 hours ago
    Would immich work for this? You can run it locally in docker container
  • mfa1999 22 hours ago
    Will it work with large (huge) photos libraries? Eg. 150k photos/videos - most of them in iCloud. Does it preserve album/folder structure?
  • keroro 1 day ago
    How much does it cost?
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    • recury 1 day ago
      In-App Purchases

      BackiGo Pro Yearly (1 Year) $6.99

      BackiGo Pro Monthly (1 Month) $0.99

      BackiGo Pro Lifetime $14.99

  • alain34 22 hours ago
    [dead]
  • er0k 1 day ago
    I just use rsync, works great
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    • rsync 1 day ago
      Would you explain how you are using rsync to backup photos on an iPhone ?

      I'm not aware of an iOS app named "rsync" and ... presumably you don't have a shell ... ?

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      • er0k 3 hours ago
        here is the script I use https://gist.github.com/er0k/86843b62fedc2f533068f04c689be97...
      • sandreas 16 hours ago
        Don't know if still works, but this is how I did it back in the days I had an iPhone:

        https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/01/access-and-recover-files-fr...

        Nowadays I'd use immich or ente.io, which has and e2e encryption cloud as well as self-hosted setup

      • slicktux 1 day ago
        You can load the IPhone’s pictures on Linux using the folders namespace and then rsync from the loaded namespace to /local…
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        • trinix912 23 hours ago
          But does it work for Live Photos which is the main premise of this app?
        • wood_spirit 1 day ago
          I use a usb cable and a Linux laptop to copy to a couple of external hard drives (which I store separately). It’s all manual but not too orrenous although i ought backup more often. The biggest hassle is accessing the new heic format on pretty much everything.

          Could it all be made into a sd card image for a pi zero perhaps? Even with a web ui accessible over Wi-Fi? A basic cheap sync-cable-appliance that non-techies can easily use?

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          • rsync 23 hours ago
            I think I heard that the latest 'rclone' now, finally, support iCloud ... but I think there is an issue there because you can't sync full quality / RAW photos to icloud, can you ?
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