One thing that has changed since 2015 – storage limits on new MacBooks have increased a lot. It’s not the most attractive method, but it’s good backup hygiene for your collection of memories. The critical step is to keep a regularly updated Time Machine backup on a separate external drive. Either you have enough internal storage, or you connect enough external storage to have every photo and video if you library download locally. My method from seven years ago remains the best strategy today for desktop users. I would wager that the majority of users are on iPhone – Mac desktops probably rank last. The easiest way to keep an offline copy of your photo library is … own a desktop Mac. iCloud Photos really doesn’t encourage methods of keeping separate, offline copies of photos and videos. It’s really just your photo library in a single place - even if you don’t use Optimize Storage. Keeping a local backup of your photo library is mighty important. Still, iCloud Photos backups shouldn’t be ignored. Have a 300GB photo library? With an iCloud subscription and Optimize Storage, you don’t need a 512GB or 1TB iPhone to take your media with you.

ICloud Photos is a fantastic feature for syncing large photo and video libraries across all your devices.

Backup my mac to icloud