How to PROPERLY back up your iPhone (iCloud is not a backup!)
iCloud is not a backup; it is a synchronization tool. If you delete things on your phone, it deletes them in iCloud. iCloud is not a backup. In fact, if you have storage optimization turned on, the high-resolution verion of your photos is stored in only one place. If you delete it, it's gone forever. Mr. Backup tries tries three different ways to back up your iPhone, and finally settled on idrive.
iDrive was the only solution we found that worked for both iPhone and Android (including if you turned on optimized storage). If you'd like to try it, make sure to use the link below.
Listeners to the podcast get 90% off their first year using the following link (We will also get a referral fee):
https://www.idrive.com/idrive/o/p/backupcentral/partner90
Mentioned in this episode:
Interview ad
You do know that iCloud is a synchronization tool
Speaker:and not a backup tool.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:If you didn't know that this is the episode you need to listen to because not
Speaker:only do we explain why that's the case.
Speaker:I give you a really good answer as to how you can solve this.
Speaker:The problem for both your iPhone and your Android.
Speaker:it took me weeks of research and I think it's a great episode.
Speaker:I hope you like it.
W. Curtis Preston:Hi, and welcome to Backup Centrals Restored All podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm your host, W.
W. Curtis Preston:Curtis Preston, a k a, Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup, and have with me a guy who was trying to get me to spend like a thousand
W. Curtis Preston:dollars more than I wanted to today.
W. Curtis Preston:Prasanna Malaiyandi.
W. Curtis Preston:How's it going?
W. Curtis Preston:Prasanna,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm good.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Be lucky.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's only a thousand dollars more.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I could have been like five grand more.
W. Curtis Preston:be like at least a thousand,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was thinking more like $800 more.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, but taxes too.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:I mean you, the thing is, I, I'm generally the same as you in
W. Curtis Preston:this scenario, you know, in this scenario.
W. Curtis Preston:So what we're talking about is that, is that, uh, I am now, um, independent
W. Curtis Preston:from my former employer and, uh, I wanted to get a new laptop cuz you
W. Curtis Preston:know, because I had a laptop provided by my previous employer and they, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:they want it back.
W. Curtis Preston:um, you know, they want it
W. Curtis Preston:back, you know.
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, it was, it was a condition of my, uh, you know, the thing I signed there.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you know, that's generally the way these things work, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, uh, so I needed one.
W. Curtis Preston:I.
W. Curtis Preston:And what I actually decided to do in the end was by a, uh, right, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Now, since I am neither fully employed or fully figured out what it is that I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, you wanna be a little
W. Curtis Preston:uh, replace employee, but I want to be, I want
W. Curtis Preston:to spend as little as possible.
W. Curtis Preston:So what I did was I actually bought the exact same model of the
W. Curtis Preston:laptop that I had been provided.
W. Curtis Preston:So that for two, for two reasons.
W. Curtis Preston:One is it was much less expensive.
W. Curtis Preston:It was a thousand bucks, uh, like out the door, like shipping
W. Curtis Preston:included and everything.
W. Curtis Preston:And it'll be here in a couple of days.
W. Curtis Preston:And the, um, the, uh, other reason is that it has the exact same port configuration,
W. Curtis Preston:so I can use all of the, all of
Prasanna Malaiyandi:For, for listeners who don't notice or who don't know, uh,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:if you go, I think we probably talked about Curtis's dongle slash device
Prasanna Malaiyandi:accessory issues for at least maybe 10 or 15 of the podcasts, I think.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think,
W. Curtis Preston:And the thing is, I feel like I have like the perfect setup
W. Curtis Preston:now, and if I get, you know, like if I get like an M one or M two, uh, MacBook, the
W. Curtis Preston:port configuration will be different and I will lose, I will not be able to use this,
W. Curtis Preston:what I think of as the perfect one, cuz I have to, this model has the two, uh, U S
W. Curtis Preston:B C, um, ports right next to each other.
W. Curtis Preston:So it's this dongle that plugs into both of them and then takes over.
W. Curtis Preston:It's just, it's just very nice.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:oh, Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But we are a creatures of habit, I guess, and I know you've spent months
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and months trying to deal with U S B hub issues, so I'm glad I'm not having
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that conversation with you again.
W. Curtis Preston:I did, I, I don't want to deal with that right now.
W. Curtis Preston:I want to figure out what's next for me and, uh, still doing that.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I have some really good, uh, ideas For those of you that are listeners to
W. Curtis Preston:the podcast, um, I am leaning towards being independent and doing, um, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, content generation, including podcasts, um, you know, papers, website,
W. Curtis Preston:content, videos, um, and reviews of Dongs.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, just do, just do, just do dongle reviews, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:is a lot of stuff out there, by the way, dongle wise.
W. Curtis Preston:They're, they're, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, just go, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:It, it's, it's ridiculous.
W. Curtis Preston:And I've been through a few of them, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Since you,
W. Curtis Preston:want to do that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Since you've talked about being independent, do you want
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to throw out our disclaimer.
W. Curtis Preston:Yes.
W. Curtis Preston:I will throw out our usual disclaimer.
W. Curtis Preston:This is an independent podcast and, uh, the opinions that you hear are ours.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, This is a new version of this disclaimer, so I'm practicing it here.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, the opinions that you hear are ours and do not necessarily reflect those of
W. Curtis Preston:our employers or non employers in my case.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, be sure to rate us@ratethispodcast.com slash restore.
W. Curtis Preston:And also if you'd like to join the conversation, you can reach me.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I'd love, you know, we'd love to have you on the podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I'm w Curtis Preston gmail at wc preston on twitter, linkedin.com/in/mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, uh, you know, just.
W. Curtis Preston:Reach out to me, what you wanna talk about, et cetera.
W. Curtis Preston:We're a kind,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think our guests like us, so Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:They do.
W. Curtis Preston:They, they seem to enjoy the, the experience.
W. Curtis Preston:We're not, we're not mean.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I mean, Prasanna can be sometimes,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I ask questions, that's all.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, it's really good at doing that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and speaking of questions, this episode, uh, it all
W. Curtis Preston:goes back to something.
W. Curtis Preston:Somebody brought it up on a podcast, didn't
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It was, uh, I think it wasn't this part of the Sue Peterson podcast where she was,
W. Curtis Preston:Was it?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:how do I recover from my environment?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:This is where it all started.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And then you were like, oh, I have data in iTunes or in iCloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:What do I do with my data?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And they started this whole long saga.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I think by the time this goes live, the Sue Peterson slash Daniel Rosehill
Prasanna Malaiyandi:episode will be published, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Talking about how do you recover your environment and where do you start from?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But that sort of kicked off this discussion about,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hey, what does Curtis do?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or what does Mr.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Backup do with his, uh, iCloud
W. Curtis Preston:his own stuff.
W. Curtis Preston:With, with, with, with arguably what some might consider my most
W. Curtis Preston:important data, which are the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Aw.
W. Curtis Preston:grandkid.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so, so here, so here's the thing.
W. Curtis Preston:What, so I, I have an iPhone, I have an iCloud account.
W. Curtis Preston:I pay for the extra storage.
W. Curtis Preston:so when I started Prasanna, what, what do you, you're in a, you're in a, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, you're in the beginning of this.
W. Curtis Preston:What, what, what do you, what do you Google?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:iCloud photo backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, how do I back up?
W. Curtis Preston:My, my eye photos, my, you know, how do I back it?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And what is the answer on every one of the articles that I got?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do use iCloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm like, but that's not a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:That is not a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Please tell me that's not, you know, um, that was so frustrating, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, was that, uh, so I, so I had to find, I wanted a consumer level
W. Curtis Preston:answer, and I wasn't getting one.
W. Curtis Preston:That was the answer that I was getting.
W. Curtis Preston:I was like, the whole point of this project is that my data is only in iCloud.
W. Curtis Preston:That is not a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so that's why I embarked on this project.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So everyone thinks that, oh yeah, the data on
Prasanna Malaiyandi:your phone is syncing to the cloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The cloud, they're backing it up for you, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Apple's doing that, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Apple with the goodness of their heart, right, is taking backups
Prasanna Malaiyandi:of all your pictures, making sure that you'll never lose 'em, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No matter what happens to your device, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:To your iPhone, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Everything's always good to go in the cloud and preserved
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and following the 3, 2, 1.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Rule of backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, it's not really like that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:burst my bubble, Curtis.
W. Curtis Preston:um, I mean they may indeed be backing up because
W. Curtis Preston:in this case it is a service.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:They may be indeed backing up what they give, what they
W. Curtis Preston:are storing on your behalf.
W. Curtis Preston:Like in the case of, uh, for the case of a total data center failure, for example.
W. Curtis Preston:They may indeed be backing that up.
W. Curtis Preston:But what they're not doing this, this is very similar to, I mean,
W. Curtis Preston:this is very similar to Microsoft 365, where they may indeed be
W. Curtis Preston:doing backups of that data center.
W. Curtis Preston:They, we, I actually know for a fact that they have, uh, delayed replication,
W. Curtis Preston:copies of exchange specifically.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, but I also know that I've contacted them as a customer, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:By
W. Curtis Preston:employer was a customer and, and said, Hey, can I get access?
W. Curtis Preston:If, if, if we lost data, can I get access?
W. Curtis Preston:Do any of those delayed replication copies?
W. Curtis Preston:And they said, absolutely not, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It's not for that, it's for the entire data center.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, goes away and they're gonna bring it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and I think in the case of iCloud, at least when I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:was reading the contract, the msa, I don't think they talked or I think
Prasanna Malaiyandi:they said that there's no guarantee that you will be able to restore
Prasanna Malaiyandi:your data or get back your data in case something happens that's on you.
W. Curtis Preston:Just what, just what you want to, just what you want to hear.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, but I think the most important thing to understand about iCloud
W. Curtis Preston:specifically, and the, the same is true of, you know, um, Android phones
W. Curtis Preston:and syncing to like Google Cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:And that is that it is a sync, it is not a backup
W. Curtis Preston:and the, it is a synchronization.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and that the fact that that's the case, really, it's, it's funny that I, I,
W. Curtis Preston:we were gonna record this episode today, and I think it was last night or this
W. Curtis Preston:morning, I got in my little newsfeed.
W. Curtis Preston:I got this story and it was like, you know, the, you know what, the way
W. Curtis Preston:they write headlines nowadays of like,
W. Curtis Preston:you know, five things you don't do with your phone and the third
W. Curtis Preston:one's really gonna shock you.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it, it, it said like, make sure you don't make this mistake when
W. Curtis Preston:selling your old iPhone right now.
W. Curtis Preston:I was thinking the mistake would be don't erase it.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Don't you know, or not erasing it.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:So you would give
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Some on your data.
W. Curtis Preston:with all of your Prasannal data
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm sure people do
W. Curtis Preston:would also be a mistake, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it's easy to not do that, right?
W. Curtis Preston:You can go in and basically say, erase all data from this phone.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but apparently what some people do is they just go in and erase their contacts
W. Curtis Preston:and they erase their photos like manually.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I, I don't know why you would do that,
W. Curtis Preston:but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:your phone.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:What's
W. Curtis Preston:that?
W. Curtis Preston:No, I'm just saying why you would do it that way.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Basically what they said was that if you are still synchronizing.
W. Curtis Preston:To iCloud if you didn't think to uncheck that box on that photo.
W. Curtis Preston:First off, I think it's a dumb way to do it.
W. Curtis Preston:But second, if you do it this dumb way and then you don't uncheck iCloud
W. Curtis Preston:synchronization, it will sync all of the deletions of your contacts and your
W. Curtis Preston:photos or whatever it else is you delete.
W. Curtis Preston:It will sync that up to iCloud, which will then sync down to the
W. Curtis Preston:new iPhone that you just bought.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Which means you will then delete the data from all of your devices forever.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Wonderful.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That's exactly what the consumer wanted, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, that is why iCloud is not a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, is that it's a synchronization tool, not a backup tool.
W. Curtis Preston:There is zero history built into that
W. Curtis Preston:tool.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and so I set out to, uh, on this little project of mine, and ultimately
W. Curtis Preston:I ended up, yeah, multi-week project.
W. Curtis Preston:Ultimately I ended up testing two, um, well,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:three, four.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Four.
W. Curtis Preston:right?
W. Curtis Preston:Was it four?
W. Curtis Preston:What?
W. Curtis Preston:So remind me here, what did we do?
W. Curtis Preston:I did the, the syc.net
Prasanna Malaiyandi:arsy.net.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You did.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You did Google photos and that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Didn't you also pull down the data to your hard drive and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:then back it up with some other
W. Curtis Preston:that's what
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, that was just the RS thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I thought you used a different one as well.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I could be wrong.
W. Curtis Preston:well that, well that, but that, that would all be the
W. Curtis Preston:same method, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Basically.
W. Curtis Preston:So, Here is the problem with the iPhone, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So the problem is that many people, including myself, have
W. Curtis Preston:optimized storage turned on.
W. Curtis Preston:So if I put an agent on this, if I put I was gonna lose my phone, uh, if
W. Curtis Preston:I put an agent on this phone, it may or may not, um, synchronize, or it,
W. Curtis Preston:it may not, it, it, it might back up
W. Curtis Preston:the, like the, the thumbnail on, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It might back up the thumbnail, not the original photo, which is only
W. Curtis Preston:up in iCloud, which again, I really should have thought about this.
W. Curtis Preston:I, this is bad, this is bad on me.
W. Curtis Preston:That means not only am I using a synchronization tool, I'm not
W. Curtis Preston:even using a synchronization tool.
W. Curtis Preston:I am knowingly.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Pushing data.
W. Curtis Preston:to Apple?
W. Curtis Preston:No, no, I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm knowingly saying to Apple,
W. Curtis Preston:please keep these photos that are really important to me only in one
W. Curtis Preston:place.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh gosh.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Even worse.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:It's wor it's not just a synchronization tool.
W. Curtis Preston:It's a synchronization and optimization tool.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and so I, I'm just, I'm a, I'm a little ashamed Prasanna that I, um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Do we have like a wall of shame for Curtis, for Mr.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Backup?
W. Curtis Preston:I, yeah, it needs to be on there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, and so, so
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But, but, but, but, but, but wait, just be before you go on.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think it is important to know, to tell the listeners like, you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:were tricked by this feature cuz you didn't realize what it does.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think a lot of people don't actually understand that implication, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That turning on this feature, because Apple makes it so easy to be like,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hey, go buy 200 gigs of iCloud storage for a dollar 99 a month.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And by the way, I know that you bought the smaller iPhone to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:save a hundred dollars a month.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Instead of going up the next level and just turn on this feature and everything
Prasanna Malaiyandi:automatically goes to the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, the, the irony of all of this, okay, is that when I actually saw how
W. Curtis Preston:much, how the size of all my photos, they would totally fit on my phone.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, I have a, I think I have a 256 gigabyte phone, and
W. Curtis Preston:I had about 60 gigabytes of
W. Curtis Preston:photos.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, which for the record is what made this whole thing possible.
W. Curtis Preston:Because if I had like, you know, a terabyte of photos, this every
W. Curtis Preston:step in this project would've taken much longer, right?
W. Curtis Preston:When I was looking at this, my dream would be that I could, like, if you look
W. Curtis Preston:at Microsoft 365, there are 50 companies all trying to sell Microsoft 365 backup
W. Curtis Preston:services, meaning that you can buy a service that will authenticate with
W. Curtis Preston:Microsoft 365, back it up and you're good.
W. Curtis Preston:That is not possible.
W. Curtis Preston:With iCloud, that was my first thing that annoyed me, is that, um, I couldn't,
W. Curtis Preston:there was, there's no such thing as a service that authenticates with iCloud
W. Curtis Preston:and then backs it up via the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:That would've been the most efficient, easy way to do this.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:But
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I do
W. Curtis Preston:there is no such
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I do wonder if some of that is maybe because
Prasanna Malaiyandi:things are end-to-end encrypted nowadays with Apple iCloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I just dunno.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:I'm gonna say it's because Apple doesn't want them to,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that's probably true.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:um, right.
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, the um, So the first thing, the first idea that I got was because
W. Curtis Preston:I didn't, I didn't, well, I didn't know what I know at the end, right?
W. Curtis Preston:The first thing I said, well, I need to get, so I can't go directly to the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:What I need to do is I need to get those versions down here, right
W. Curtis Preston:down here on, on the planet Earth.
W. Curtis Preston:And although the cloud is also on planet Earth, but you
W. Curtis Preston:know what I'm saying, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So I got a, uh, and it, and it wasn't gonna, you know, it's not
W. Curtis Preston:something I'm gonna put uh, on, it's not gonna fit on a regular laptop.
W. Curtis Preston:So I just happened to have a portable hard drive and I just connected that
W. Curtis Preston:I was actually able to, using some tricks in Apple, you can specify my
W. Curtis Preston:pictures folder is over here, right?
W. Curtis Preston:There's a series of steps to move your pictures folder.
W. Curtis Preston:And I moved my pictures folder to this portable hard
W. Curtis Preston:drive and then I, um, told I.
W. Curtis Preston:The iCloud to synchronize, you know, my iCloud pictures down to that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:To the library, I think is what they call it in.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, to the library.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And it's weird the way it stores it, and I don't like the way it stores it.
W. Curtis Preston:And that's a whole other thing, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because it stores it in a, in a package.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you know, it's just, it's just, and it means that like, well, whatever,
W. Curtis Preston:it, it's just annoying the way
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you, it's not like you could see it in the normal
Prasanna Malaiyandi:finder on your Mac where you see the folders and all the rest, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It and the picture
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, you, you can go in and say show package
W. Curtis Preston:contents and you can see it, but it, but anyway, it's just weird.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but then what I said was, well, I need, I'm gonna try to back up.
W. Curtis Preston:That and the, the, there are a variety of things that you can do to do that,
W. Curtis Preston:where you can ba you basically, you can use any decent backup software
W. Curtis Preston:that is able to penetrate that package.
W. Curtis Preston:And everything I played with actually was able to understand
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like a file
W. Curtis Preston:it actually, yeah, it's, well, it's really just a directory.
W. Curtis Preston:It's really a folder structure, um, with completely, and, and again, this is why
W. Curtis Preston:I'm just annoyed at, luckily this method was not the only method that worked.
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, and what I chose to do, because we'd had 'em on the podcast,
W. Curtis Preston:I chose to use our sync.net, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So I paid for the minimum amount of storage that you can get
W. Curtis Preston:on syc.net, which was like 600 gigabytes, which was way more than I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But you didn't know at the time how much you actually
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, yeah, I do.
W. Curtis Preston:You're right.
W. Curtis Preston:I didn't know how much I had and I went and I just synced that
W. Curtis Preston:folder, the, the pictures folder.
W. Curtis Preston:And it worked right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it was relatively straightforward, it synchronized it, and I could see
W. Curtis Preston:the folder structure over there, just like the folder structure over here.
W. Curtis Preston:And I could see that when I made incremental updates to.
W. Curtis Preston:Because that's the problem.
W. Curtis Preston:If it's one monolithic file, you do incremental update and you
W. Curtis Preston:have to back up the whole file.
W. Curtis Preston:You didn't have to do that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it, an incremental update would cause a, a minimal
W. Curtis Preston:synchronization up to our sync.
W. Curtis Preston:And by the way, let's just talk about our sync not there for a minute.
W. Curtis Preston:So, um, it was really straightforward, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I just needed, um, you know, a fuse mounted system on this end.
W. Curtis Preston:It created, um, what, what does FUSE stand for?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, file system and user
W. Curtis Preston:space.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, that's not the, that's not what the acronym means, but,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:It's like a user, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:A user space file system.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And so I, I, so that was the only hurdle I had to, to crawl no hurdle,
W. Curtis Preston:crawl hurdle that I had, hurdle that I had to get over is I had to find.
W. Curtis Preston:A, a way to mount the, you know, to do a fuse mount on my Mac.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, that wasn't, that wasn't too hard.
W. Curtis Preston:So I used a tool called Cloud Mounter.
W. Curtis Preston:I didn't have to do that.
W. Curtis Preston:I could have downloaded a piece of software and, um, just did that.
W. Curtis Preston:But I just used Cloud Mounter and, um, it basically made the syc.net a file
W. Curtis Preston:system on my remote, on my laptop.
W. Curtis Preston:And then I ran syc,
W. Curtis Preston:it's syc.net.
W. Curtis Preston:So I ran SYC and, and it was simple.
W. Curtis Preston:I had a copy of my stuff over there and they do history.
W. Curtis Preston:So that was, uh, an interesting, so they do historic copies of your file system
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like snapshots,
W. Curtis Preston:days?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Like snapshots.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, I, I would've had history.
W. Curtis Preston:I would've had another copy.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, And that all really worked, I guess I would say of all of the
W. Curtis Preston:ones I did, though, it was certainly the most complicated, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because I had to set up a thing over there, uh, and I had to set up
W. Curtis Preston:a thing over here to do the mount.
W. Curtis Preston:Then I had, then I have to manage the backup process.
W. Curtis Preston:I, you know, I mean, our sink is, if you know, ARS sink,
W. Curtis Preston:ars arsy, it's pretty easy.
W. Curtis Preston:But, um, you know, I've got all the switches that I normally use memorized.
W. Curtis Preston:It's really, you know, pretty
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and it might be a bit overkill for you,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like for this use case, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, if, if, especially if you're a consumer,
W. Curtis Preston:if you're just a regular non-techie consumer, this is not
W. Curtis Preston:really an option for the average
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Now, I know that you looked@syc.net and then there were
Prasanna Malaiyandi:other things that you were thinking about with a similar mechanism.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right, where it's basically, I kind of liken it to like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:a dump and sweep approach.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right,
W. Curtis Preston:It is a dump and sweep.
W. Curtis Preston:It's exactly a dump and sweep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know you were also considering looking at our clone, right,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:which is also done by Nick, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The creator of syc.net.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That allows you to sort of sync to various, uh, object stores.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know you were looking at that, but I think there were also
W. Curtis Preston:I think, I think our clone would've been actually a
W. Curtis Preston:simpler method than syc.net plus syc.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and that would, but it would've been the same workflow in the end.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm just not a fan of this workflow.
W. Curtis Preston:I was, I was only a fan of the workflow because at the beginning of the project,
W. Curtis Preston:I thought it was the only way to
W. Curtis Preston:make it
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And by fan of the workflow, it's also the fact that you're taking a picture
Prasanna Malaiyandi:on your iPhone, it goes up to iCloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You then have to synchronize it down to your laptop.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And then I think on your laptop too.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Did you, ah, this is the one that I was gonna ask you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think in initially you were, were also telling it to export
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the high res pictures first.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And then later you did the copy my photo library out.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:No, no, that, that, that was a, that was a way
W. Curtis Preston:of, I did that for testing purposes.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but the, um, oh, that was, because this is, this is one of the things that
W. Curtis Preston:I hate about the, the folder structure of the pictures is that the names of
W. Curtis Preston:the folder of the, of the pictures there, um, are complete nonsense.
W. Curtis Preston:They're, they're managed and is random and managed by Apple, and
W. Curtis Preston:apparently they change over time.
W. Curtis Preston:So like, you just have to treat that as a monolithic entity, even
W. Curtis Preston:though it's not technically one.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I just, I just hate that.
W. Curtis Preston:I just hate that whole thing.
W. Curtis Preston:There's nothing I like, that's why I've never used it.
W. Curtis Preston:I've never used that feature to store the pictures on my local, uh, hard drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:And it's a pain, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Because you have to now sync it to another device that you may not use,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:and you have that external hard drive sitting around and all the rest, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:It's a painful process.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So, yeah, so it requires me using the pictures folder thing that I don't like.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, it requires me to hook up an external hard drive because I don't
W. Curtis Preston:have enough storage on the laptop.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, it requires this two-step dump and sweep approach.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and in the end, if I needed to restore a particular, uh, photo, I would have no
W. Curtis Preston:idea, which, real cuz the, the, the file names are like really, really long, right?
W. Curtis Preston:They're, they're, it is just complete nonsense.
W. Curtis Preston:So I just, I, after all that was done, it wouldn't matter whether it was oury.net or
W. Curtis Preston:our clone or, you know, backup exact, like it wouldn't, it wouldn't have mattered.
W. Curtis Preston:The other thing, and again, it's just because of the method that
W. Curtis Preston:I chose, syc.net, although it's.
W. Curtis Preston:I think it's very affordable when you're larger, when you're only
W. Curtis Preston:dealing with like 75 gigabytes of information, being forced to buy
W. Curtis Preston:600 gigabytes of stuff it, you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:is wrong.
W. Curtis Preston:I think it was like 10 bucks a month.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I think also the other thing to point out
Prasanna Malaiyandi:is with, um, our clone, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um, With, sorry, with syc.net, there was no egress costs, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think with our clone, one of the things when you and I were talking
Prasanna Malaiyandi:about, right, it's like, what is this really going to cost you, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because it's what's your request pricing, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You as a user, you have to figure out what your request pricing is.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:If you have to retrieve data, like say you decide to use Amazon s3, glacier
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Deep Archive to store this, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Super cheap, cost-wise per gigabyte, but pulling the data out right might
Prasanna Malaiyandi:be a little bit more expensive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so you have all these things that you're trying to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:figure out as an end user.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And again, I, I was trying to view this from the concept of an end
W. Curtis Preston:user and, uh, just that whole thing.
W. Curtis Preston:The cost was a lot.
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, $10 a month doesn't sound like a lot, but $10 a month.
W. Curtis Preston:Just to back up my photos if I'm an average person is a lot.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, I just, I just hated that whole process from beginning to end.
W. Curtis Preston:So, so fail on, on step one.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, so the next option that I looked at, uh, and I was really surprised that
W. Curtis Preston:this was an option, and that is Google
W. Curtis Preston:Photos.
W. Curtis Preston:So I could install Google Photos, which is essentially the Amazon or
W. Curtis Preston:the, uh, the Android version of iCloud.
W. Curtis Preston:I can install it on my iPhone.
W. Curtis Preston:It would magically pull down the high res copies and then, uh, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, archive them that we're gonna come back to that in a minute.
W. Curtis Preston:Archive them to Google Cloud,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, and, and wait before you go.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And also, when it pulls it down, it's doing it in such a
Prasanna Malaiyandi:way that it's not consuming all the space again on your phone.
W. Curtis Preston:I watched, uh, during all the methods that
W. Curtis Preston:I tried, um, never once did I see my storage change on my phone.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so that was nice.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but yeah, so, and we're gonna get back to the archive thing.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and it's back, it's, it's like a, it's like a bastard child
W. Curtis Preston:between backup and archive is what, what both of these tools do.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, basically they're missing this concept of, of delete.
W. Curtis Preston:What it is, is that Google Photos is a one way backup to, or a one-way
W. Curtis Preston:sync really, to, from iCloud from the photos on your phone, high-res
W. Curtis Preston:versions from iCloud to Google Photos.
W. Curtis Preston:If you delete a photo out of, um, iCloud or your phone, nothing's going
W. Curtis Preston:to happen to the copy that's in Google
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, which is good if that's what
W. Curtis Preston:which is good if that's what you want, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Well, it's just, it's just, you just need to be aware of that, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and it, it is you go ahead.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so what if you did the other way?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So can I go to Google Cloud and delete the photos there if I needed to?
W. Curtis Preston:So the, uh, good question, Prasanna, and the answer is yes.
W. Curtis Preston:You can go to Google Cloud, the, um, like the website.
W. Curtis Preston:The website, you can go to Google Photos, the website.
W. Curtis Preston:You can delete photos that you want to delete, and then, uh, it will sync that
W. Curtis Preston:back down to Google Photos and you'll get, when you open Google Photos, the
W. Curtis Preston:next time on your phone, you'll get this little notification said, Hey.
W. Curtis Preston:So I think it calls it like offline changes.
W. Curtis Preston:Like offline changes happened since the last time you were here.
W. Curtis Preston:You deleted 15 photos.
W. Curtis Preston:Would you like to just delete them now or would you like to review them?
W. Curtis Preston:And you can review what's been deleted.
W. Curtis Preston:And then when you do that, you have the option of deleting them both in the Google
W. Curtis Preston:Photos archive on your phone as well as the I, uh, the iPhoto, or no, I'm sorry.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the camera
W. Curtis Preston:No, it's got they, well, they have a thumb, they have a,
W. Curtis Preston:they have a storage optimized copy, um, just like Apple does, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So you, you, you have the choice of, you deleted a bunch of stuff up in Google.
W. Curtis Preston:Do you want to delete those from your phone?
W. Curtis Preston:And that was pretty slick overall.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:So, because I did some, um, Optimization.
W. Curtis Preston:I went and bought, uh, a product called system spelled C I S D E
W. Curtis Preston:M, which was a duplicate finder.
W. Curtis Preston:I realized that I had a ton of duplicates.
W. Curtis Preston:I had a, outta the 11,000 photos, I had about 1600 duplicates.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and that product's pretty cool in that it finds similar photos.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, it finds low res and high res versions of the same photos.
W. Curtis Preston:It finds
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like
W. Curtis Preston:when you did a, when you do a burst, yeah, it finds those.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and then you can just literally say, select all and
W. Curtis Preston:delete the, delete the duplicates.
W. Curtis Preston:Or you can manually pick them if you want to be picky.
W. Curtis Preston:Me, it was 1600.
W. Curtis Preston:I didn't have time for that crap, so I just deleted them all.
W. Curtis Preston:And I was able to do that in Google Cloud, which then synchronized down to
W. Curtis Preston:the phone, which then synchronized over
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, nice.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:iCloud
W. Curtis Preston:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, It was 2 99 a month, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, was the Google Cloud version.
W. Curtis Preston:I think my only, um, I think the fact that it is a one way
W. Curtis Preston:sync is probably safer, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So your phone could get completely hacked and nothing would happen to
W. Curtis Preston:the stuff that you have up in Google
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Mm-hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, you, you can do, and you can do some maintenance of like
W. Curtis Preston:going in and deleting photos that you really just wish you didn't take right?
W. Curtis Preston:And then just get rid of them and then it can, but you gotta do 'em in Google Cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:I think my only complaint about that is as a frequent user of icloud.com,
W. Curtis Preston:I found the iCloud website, uh, much easier to use for mass, mass deletes.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Literally I can just, I just hold on the command.
W. Curtis Preston:Key, and I'm either hitting, uh, command, delete or next command, delete
W. Curtis Preston:next command, delete next, whatever.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:It, it just wasn't that slick when I was in Google
W. Curtis Preston:photos.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so it was doable, but it just wasn't slick.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but overall it's a decent solution.
W. Curtis Preston:Unfortunately, the, the reverse doesn't work.
W. Curtis Preston:There isn't an iPhoto app that you can load on Android to do the same
W. Curtis Preston:thing, which I thought was interesting.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sense from Apple's perspective, closed ecosystem and all.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like only recently did you actually get Apple TV Plus on an Android
Prasanna Malaiyandi:phone, or sorry, on an Android box.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, they don't, yeah, that's a philosophical discussion.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't really want to get into that.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, but um, and that's what led me to my third, um, Experiment.
W. Curtis Preston:I guess these are all
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Third option.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So first one fails, second one good, but
W. Curtis Preston:there's no Android version of it.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and it's 2 99 a month.
W. Curtis Preston:The question is,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And you already pay for iCloud.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh, sorry.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And it's 2 99 a month and you already pay for iCloud, and so
Prasanna Malaiyandi:now you're gonna be paying this as well to Google for 2 99 a month.
W. Curtis Preston:right, right.
W. Curtis Preston:So the question is, can we get something that's just as good, if not
W. Curtis Preston:better, that maybe even costs less?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Because like you said, this is like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:your doomsday copy, if you will.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're trying to be efficient from a cost perspective.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It,
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:And by the way, we could, I, you know, again, if, if all you're concerned
W. Curtis Preston:with this cost, there, there were some other ways that we could have done it.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:I could have that, that first option.
W. Curtis Preston:We remember when, when I was doing the first option, we were thinking
W. Curtis Preston:about backing it up to like, uh, Glacier Deep archive or something.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and just hoped that I didn't ever have to use it.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, but again, uh, I was trying to think like a consumer,
W. Curtis Preston:so thinking like a consumer, I just kept, I just kept Googling,
W. Curtis Preston:I think what I started Googling, uh, later was, This idea of the storage, you know,
W. Curtis Preston:how to back up storage optimized iPhone.
W. Curtis Preston:So I started searching.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, of like full resolution iPhone backup and, you know, various things.
W. Curtis Preston:Cuz again, the, the challenge was that optimized storage.
W. Curtis Preston:And I found, I found a number of companies who basically said,
W. Curtis Preston:Hey, uh, yeah, that's a problem,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You're like, great.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:This doesn't help me.
W. Curtis Preston:right.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm like, well, Google figured it out.
W. Curtis Preston:So clearly the API is there.
W. Curtis Preston:And so I found this company that I've known for years,
W. Curtis Preston:I've just never used them.
W. Curtis Preston:And that the company is called iDrive, which is kind of funny that,
W. Curtis Preston:you know,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:They were called something else before, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I think they were, I think they were called something
W. Curtis Preston:else before they've been, but they've been around for a while and they are
W. Curtis Preston:a, a company who, you know is, is.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I mean, I, I know nothing about them other than their features and you know,
W. Curtis Preston:how the product works and how it's priced.
W. Curtis Preston:they support, you know, PCs, max iPhones, iPads, and Androids to a single account.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But you've talked to their support folks?
W. Curtis Preston:I did talk to the support folks.
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, but basically they do both Android and iPhone.
W. Curtis Preston:And I said, you know what?
W. Curtis Preston:This might be the ultimate solution.
W. Curtis Preston:I thought I found another company out there, but I,
W. Curtis Preston:but I didn't see it anywhere.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:At least I was looking around if I found a second company that did this.
W. Curtis Preston:And if you're a company that does this, where you're backing up both
W. Curtis Preston:iPhone and Android, uh, you, and, and very important, and you deal with the
W. Curtis Preston:optimized storage issue, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, then feel free to reach out to me and we'll do, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:you know, do a second episode.
W. Curtis Preston:So, um, so basically it was as easy to install as the, uh, Google Photos.
W. Curtis Preston:All I did was I, you know, I created an iDrive account.
W. Curtis Preston:I paid the.
W. Curtis Preston:Enormous fee, $2 and 95 cents for a year with a hundred gigabytes of storage.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, now I had a, I had a good, I, I had a talk with, you know, your friend in mine,
W. Curtis Preston:Steven, and he is like, well, there's no way they're making money with that.
W. Curtis Preston:And I, I was like, well, I think it's a lost leader.
W. Curtis Preston:You know what I mean?
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Or it also
W. Curtis Preston:uh, and I don't know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or, and or it also depends on how much storage people are
Prasanna Malaiyandi:actually consuming, because I'm sure there are people who buy a hundred gigs or 500
Prasanna Malaiyandi:gigs and they'll pay the price and they'll only be consuming, say like 50 gigs.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, right.
W. Curtis Preston:So I again, want to go, if there was a better service, a more expensive
W. Curtis Preston:service, I would've reviewed that.
W. Curtis Preston:I would've reviewed both of them.
W. Curtis Preston:So far, this is the only actual backup and restore piece of software
W. Curtis Preston:that does what I needed to do.
W. Curtis Preston:And it happens to cost $2 and 95 cents a year for up to a hundred gigabytes,
W. Curtis Preston:which was more than enough to cover my
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And I think the 500 gig was like 7
Prasanna Malaiyandi:95 or something for the year.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, yeah, it's, let me just, uh, yeah, 500 gig is 9 95 a year.
W. Curtis Preston:Once you go up to over 500 gigs, then you have to go into their personal
W. Curtis Preston:plan and it's $60 for the first year.
W. Curtis Preston:See what I mean?
W. Curtis Preston:Like it goes from $10 to $60, but that goes up to five, uh, terabytes.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And they're running a deal right now where
Prasanna Malaiyandi:you get $8 for the first year for five terabytes of cloud backup.
W. Curtis Preston:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So they, they definitely have some aggressive pricing.
W. Curtis Preston:So how did it work?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I installed it.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, I installed it.
W. Curtis Preston:I backed up, I restored, I deleted photos, I restored the deleted photos.
W. Curtis Preston:It restored them in place, et
Prasanna Malaiyandi:so, but what, I know you're briefly talking about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:like the installation process.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So you installed an app on your phone, you went to the iDrive
Prasanna Malaiyandi:website, you created an account,
W. Curtis Preston:right,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:in on your phone into that account, and then Baa Bing, baa boom.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Done.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:You just selected a couple of options.
W. Curtis Preston:It was like, do you wanna back up photos or videos or both?
W. Curtis Preston:Do you also, I think it also does, you know, contacts, uh, stuff like that.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, then it just took, like, in my case, it took, and this is why the project
W. Curtis Preston:took so long, is it takes a couple of days to back up, you know, 60 gigabytes
W. Curtis Preston:of photo over a, you know, a cell
W. Curtis Preston:phone connection.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And for those listeners who are keeping track of this,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:it should be a drinking game, I think.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think this is the sixth time Curtis is uploading his photo library to the cloud.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Which is why if I, if, if I was like a 500 gigabyte library, this
W. Curtis Preston:would've taken months, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and by the way, each time I am uploading, I am then restoring the
W. Curtis Preston:entire library down to a folder.
W. Curtis Preston:And then I'm doing a, a, a diff between the size of the folder
W. Curtis Preston:and, you know, and I'm doing visual inspection of the different photos.
W. Curtis Preston:So with both the Google photo and the iDrive photo, I was able to verify
W. Curtis Preston:that they are storing the entire, you know, the, the, the, the full
W. Curtis Preston:resolution version of the photo.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, um, it was just, and, and most importantly, it was cheap and easy, right?
W. Curtis Preston:This, this was, this was the cheapest and the easiest, I think.
W. Curtis Preston:I think the Google photo again would also work.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, maybe it's a bigger brand name.
W. Curtis Preston:Maybe you like that.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I, I like that With this.
W. Curtis Preston:By the way, with this, um, it's also a, it's not a one way sink,
W. Curtis Preston:but it's a backup without deletion.
W. Curtis Preston:So it keeps track of, um, like if I restore the whole thing, like it, it
W. Curtis Preston:will always be able to restore a photo.
W. Curtis Preston:But if I restore the entire library, I'm going to get all of the stuff
W. Curtis Preston:I've backed up from that library.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Including all the
W. Curtis Preston:do garbage collection included on include,
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, you can do garbage collection, but that's a manual process.
W. Curtis Preston:Basically the, cuz they give you, you know, in this case up to 500 gigabytes and
W. Curtis Preston:the, um, cuz I did by the way, actually upgrade to the 500 gigabyte plan for 10
W. Curtis Preston:bucks, uh, and start backing up my laptop.
W. Curtis Preston:And so the, um, but if you delete something and then.
W. Curtis Preston:You want this reclaim that space.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you have to do a manual compaction.
W. Curtis Preston:And I, I think that's like my one complaint, um, is that it didn't seem
W. Curtis Preston:to have the point in time concept that I'm familiar with in the backup space.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And what would you consider that, like,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that's a little weird, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Not having, Hey, I'm gonna bring your world back to a certain point in time.
W. Curtis Preston:yeah, that was, that's why, that's why like both of these,
W. Curtis Preston:I, I kind of, they're kind of, they're almost like archives and less like
W. Curtis Preston:backup, but they do backup and restore.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, If, if, if I could, if I could make a, a very strong suggestion
W. Curtis Preston:to both of them, but especially IDR because it is advertising itself as a
W. Curtis Preston:backup software, it should understand the concept of point in time.
W. Curtis Preston:I should be able to restore.
W. Curtis Preston:I understand they, you know, for, they'd see it as a feature to keep the older
W. Curtis Preston:stuff, that's fine, but I should be able to restore the way my iPhone looked
W. Curtis Preston:yesterday and the fact that I deleted a bunch of stuff two weeks ago, those
W. Curtis Preston:photos should not come back and then I have to go and redo the deletion.
W. Curtis Preston:That took me so long to do.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, yeah, and again, average consumer not gonna think about that.
W. Curtis Preston:Maybe the average consumer doesn't clean up,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think that's the thing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, think about it, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:If, if you didn't have that system tool right, you probably would never have
Prasanna Malaiyandi:gotten rid of your 1600 duplicates.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Cause it's not worth your
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:But I do, at least me, again, I can only speak about me.
W. Curtis Preston:I regularly, like in the la Let, lemme just pull up my phone here because
W. Curtis Preston:I am always sending goofy stuff to
W. Curtis Preston:you, right?
W. Curtis Preston:I'm scrolling through my photo library.
W. Curtis Preston:I see ju ju just like, you know, for those of you that are just in, wait on
W. Curtis Preston:the video, um, just in like this page, I see like 20 photos that I took so
W. Curtis Preston:that I could send them to you or send 'em to somebody else, and then I need
W. Curtis Preston:to then like immediately delete them.
W. Curtis Preston:But I don't
W. Curtis Preston:immediately delete 'em.
W. Curtis Preston:But then like a week later, I then go delete them.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, those photos would still be in iDrive,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:right?
W. Curtis Preston:So they really should get the concept of.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, point in time
Prasanna Malaiyandi:to do a point in time, you know?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So,
W. Curtis Preston:I didn't code
Prasanna Malaiyandi:yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:But I, I, I'd say if we, if we go all the way back to
W. Curtis Preston:the beginning, How do I back up my iPhone and my Android with, with ease
W. Curtis Preston:and relatively low cost Right now, the only answer I have for that is, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:iDrive and if you have an iPhone, I also have the answer of Google Photos
W. Curtis Preston:and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:would your answer change if you
Prasanna Malaiyandi:were not subscribed to iCloud?
W. Curtis Preston:no,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I don't know how,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No, that's
W. Curtis Preston:else would you do?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:no, no.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:No, that's
W. Curtis Preston:I mean, if you're not subscribed to iCloud, you definitely
W. Curtis Preston:have to have something, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Because then everything's all on that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And that's all you got?
W. Curtis Preston:at least in iCloud.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm gonna guess, I don't know for a fact, but I'm gonna guess that
W. Curtis Preston:the stuff that I'm storing in iCloud is at least on raid, right?
W. Curtis Preston:My, your
W. Curtis Preston:phone, it's, a single
Prasanna Malaiyandi:well, it's probably on object storage somewhere, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So,
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:It's on object storage, probably using, uh, eraser coating.
W. Curtis Preston:My point is a single device is not gonna take out, um, yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:But, um, so I
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But I'm, I'm, I'm glad you did this
Prasanna Malaiyandi:experiment though, Curtis, because honestly, I wasn't aware of this.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Granted, I don't use iCloud, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But I wasn't aware of this.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think a lot of people, like you said, make the assumption
Prasanna Malaiyandi:iCloud is a backup tool.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I don't have to worry about this.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:They probably were like, Hey, I wanna optimize storage.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Let's turn that on without realizing the implications.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So I'm glad someone at least did the due diligence to actually figure
Prasanna Malaiyandi:out, okay, what does this mean and what are possible solutions?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So thank you.
W. Curtis Preston:Hey, you are welcome.
W. Curtis Preston:In, in my best Maui voice.
W. Curtis Preston:You are welcome.
W. Curtis Preston:You know, I don't, I probably wasn't even in the right key or whatever.
W. Curtis Preston:Do you even know what I'm talking about?
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:There is the, your welcome song.
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, and by the way, if I would really love to hear if there are other things
W. Curtis Preston:that I could not find, uh, you know, if you're a product that does this and
W. Curtis Preston:you deal with the storage optimization problem, then, uh, so by the way, maybe
W. Curtis Preston:that's another answer to the question.
W. Curtis Preston:Don't use storage optimization and use any iPhone or Android backup tool.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:the other one also to mention is this only captures
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and backs up things that iDrive has access to, which includes your
Prasanna Malaiyandi:photos, your iOS photos, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So things in your photo, in your camera roll, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Your contacts, but it doesn't necessarily include photos that might only be
Prasanna Malaiyandi:stored in an application, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That isn't sharing it like maybe in WhatsApp or some other type of application
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or other data and video created natively within an application, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So this solution wouldn't work for that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So just be aware of it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's not gonna cover everything, but I think for a lot of people, they're just
Prasanna Malaiyandi:using the native camera roll, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So, or camera in iOS or Android.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so this should work for that, and it is gonna back up
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and at least protect that data.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:I, I know I have a handful of other apps.
W. Curtis Preston:Like I have a audio recording app and that stores data locally on the
W. Curtis Preston:phone and also synchronizes it with my cloud account for that company.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, that's part of that service.
W. Curtis Preston:But that also is a synchronization.
W. Curtis Preston:It's not a backup.
W. Curtis Preston:But I don't short of like imaging my phone, I got nothing.
W. Curtis Preston:Just a quick editor's note.
W. Curtis Preston:If you like to try, I drive, I put a link in the show description that
W. Curtis Preston:will get you 90% off the first year.
W. Curtis Preston:And also we do get a referral fee which will help support this podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:I wanna say thank you to those of you.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I wanna say thank you Brisa for excitedly waiting for the conclusion
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:No, I've been waiting.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:I'm glad.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:I'm glad that you actually saw it through to the end, Curtis, and
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:thanks for sharing your results.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, thanks again to the listeners.
W. Curtis Preston:Be sure to subscribe so that you can restore it all
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