Transfer Google Photos to NAS

[Condi]

Sometimes I'm sure IT people make things especially complicated for the sake of it....

Well aware that all my photos are on Google Photos, and there isn't much of a backup if something happens I bought a NAS (Synology DS120j, for anyone interested). Firstly you need to be a fking network engineer to get it all set up and running. Hoping for a simple drag and drop interface? Forget it. Hoping a simple and logical file structure copied from one PC to the NAS? Forget it. Hoping that you can easily use Filezilla or an FTP program to move files? Forget it. I'm sure all those things are possible, but they're not easy for an average user.

Anyway......

What is the easiest way to download/transfer all the photos on Google across to a network drive? I can download them all, from Google, but that also downloads a lot of Json files (no idea what they do), it doesn't seem to download them very logically, splitting them into multiple zip files. I did have a look a Multcloud, which is recommended by lots of IT websites and does seem to offer the functionality, but reviews from real users are crap, and I tried the free version which manage to transfer 1 photo in 45 mins then failed.

Help, please!

[wyson]

Mr minium,

I see you are stuck doing things the old way and struggling. Fast symmetrical FTTP and cloud backup is the answer here!

I got rid of all this local stuff ages ago, just no need for it with a fast internet connection.

Edited by wyson on Friday 4th August 07:29

[Condi]

In which case you are entirely missing the point. It is better to have a local/hard copy of everything. Things on "the cloud" are simply in someone else's PC. And I don't trust them (whoever they are!) to have the only copy of things.

[wyson]

Condi said:

In which case you are entirely missing the point. It is better to have a local/hard copy of everything. Things on "the cloud" are simply in someone else's PC. And I don't trust them (whoever they are!) to have the only copy of things.

Your NAS is far more likely to fall over / perish through disaster than reliable cloud backup providers. If you want belt and braces, you can use two different providers.

Onedrive for files, something like Backblaze for imaging the whole machine. You will have your photos backed up to two different places then.

You are supposed to remote back up anyway, incase your house gets burgled / burns down etc. Lots of people have an Office 365 subscription anyway. So it isn’t necessarily much additional cost… all you need is decent upload speeds for your internet.

Renounce your faith in your 64mbps connection! What is the upload on that? 10mbps? At least make that a 3 digit number! Join the 20’s!

Edited by wyson on Thursday 3rd August 19:24

[Condi]

Possibly, but like a lot of things in life it's good to have a copy to hand. One which isn't reliant on anyone else.

Anyway, this isn't to discuss the pro's and con's of offline vs cloud storage. We clearly don't agree.

[xeny]

So is the problem getting the photos onto the PC, or from the PC onto the NAS?

You've presumably got as far as creating a file share on the NAS you can map as a drive on the PC?

[eccles]

I've got a Synology NAS (DS220+) and I've managed to set it up that my phone and computer sync/back up to it daily. My photos then appear in Synology photos.

I've also got a thing called cloud sync, this backs up my google cloud to my NAS as well..

Not being very computer literate I followed a series of videos on youtube by a bloke called mydoodads who specialises in videos for the non computer types. It seems to have got my NAS up and running ok.

[Lynchie999]

have you downloaded the Google Drive desktop app ?

[bigandclever]

Isn't the first part going to be using Google Takeout to get everything, and the second part set up some synching?
There'll be daily limits on the extract.

[Corso Marche]

To have a backup of older stuff I started by using Google Takeout. Download the backups and save them to your NAS, or download directly to a location on the NAS.

Once up to recent times what I do is open G Photos and download one or two months from G Photos itself and place the ZIP files on the NAS. I name each new backup file 042023.zip or 04_05_2023.zip

[donkmeister]

No idea about Synology, but TrueNAS allows you to sync your Google photos so it is technically possible... Whether Synology have implemented it is another question.

IIRC the Google drive desktop app doesn't sync your Google Photos, just the files bit. Happy to be shown to be wrong though.

[donkmeister]

wyson said:

Onedrive for files, something like Backblaze for imaging the whole machine. You will have your photos backed up to two different places then.

OneDrive? I'd rather st in my hands and clap. Google drive is the ubiquitous option if you are going to suggest a cloud service - works nicely with all the major OS's for computers and mobile devices

You have to remember that your use case differs from others'.
NAS's still have a place for larger consumer level data such as photos and videos. I looked at Backblaze a while back and it was only really suitable for small backups of a few TB or less, I.e. your system drive, not any bulky data. IIRC the storage was touted as "unlimited", there were other factors that made it limited unless you went for a corporate service level as they would only send you small HDDs for restore and cloud restore wasn't fast enough to get all the data back before it was time expired. I've got FTTP but it still made more sense for me to keep a small cloud service (2TB) and bulk data local (with a back-up server in an outbuilding). I have considered getting rid of the G-drive but I concede that having a totally independent store away from my own equipment means I can keep some critical data there and at least the photos I've taken on my phone.

Yes it's significantly more expensive than a consumer Backblaze account and takes more effort, but it avoids culling photos and videos, or having to reduce their quality. Sure, I may never look at a RAW image that Mrs D took of a beach in 2017 ever, but it's still there if we ever need it.

[wyson]

My goodness man, how many RAW photos did your Mrs take?

Is the outbuilding server a proper racked set up with air conditioning?

[donkmeister]

Oh... too many. Far too many. I swear you could print them out, turn them into flicker books and it would be a realtime movie of our life But, she's good at her photography and it gave an excuse for me to upgrade my gear too.

Not rackmount though - the outbuilding one may go in an old 4u case at some point simply for extra man points, but I found the 19" rack under my stairs a PITA for server hardware simply because accessibility was awkward. Probably saved me money due to avoiding upgrades and tinkering! So these days it's just switches and patch panels on the racks and the servers are in PC cases.