How my brother's iCloud account was stolen

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by HomeDeLaPot on Monday January 16, 2023 @07:56PM (#34407783)

One takeaway: a cloud account isn't a sufficient backup on its own. If you have to log into Apple/Google to download your files and photos, then they're at risk. Make regular backups to an external hard drive or something, and ideally have your stuff automatically back up to a NAS somewhere as well.

Also, after reading this I'm going to have to think about what would happen if someone stole my phone. I take it everywhere with me. It's not an iPhone, but it's still worth a few hundred dollars and it has all kinds of data and logged-in accounts on it. I assume if it was stolen at gunpoint, I wouldn't be in a position to refuse to unlock it and unlock some apps/accounts.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by muppetman on Monday January 16, 2023 @08:18PM (#34407963)

Exactly this. I have Google photos and I use it all the time, for every photo/video I take. But I also back up everything I can using the [gphotos-sync](https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync) python script. As it says, it's not the 100% quality in either photo or video, but it's still the memories.

Please if you aren't backing up your cloud storage photos/important files, stop reading HN and go and set it up now.

I can recommend backblaze for cheap reliable storage and the restic backup client which is brilliant (a single, small binary). There's also rclone, or even the backblaze cli client. [Sorry I sound like a Backblaze shill!]

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by travisporter on Monday January 16, 2023 @08:10PM (#34407901)

Can you routinely and reliably back up iPhone photos to a NAS? I have a NAS but synlogy app is just not reliable

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by Gigachad on Monday January 16, 2023 @08:15PM (#34407940)

With Google I have it set up to email me the Takeout download link every 2 months which I then download manually

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by climb_stealth on Monday January 16, 2023 @08:40PM (#34408137)

Doesn't the takeout strip the metadata from the photos? Things like the location data. I vaguely remember looking into this in the past and from what I remember there was no good way around it.

I haven't seen any alternatives to Google Photos either. Ente might be most promising, but their iOS app is not great at actually automatically uploading photos.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by Gigachad on Monday January 16, 2023 @08:42PM (#34408150)

Google Takeout dumps the files exactly how they were uploaded without any modifications. It then provides it's own info/metadata as a json file with the same name.

There are some situations where you may have entered geolocation data on the app/website and this will end up in the json file rather than embedded in the image file metadata. It's up to you to work out how you want to merge this back in.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by climb_stealth on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @12:12AM (#34409378)

That is good to know, thanks! I might be misremembering it. It has been a while since I looked at it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by sitkack on Monday January 16, 2023 @08:28PM (#34408045)

https://takeout.google.com/

I recommend everyone who hasn't done it before, to hit the above url while logged in and firing off an export. It will respond back after some time with URLs you can download. Great for downloading your Youtube playlists and history.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by CharlesW on Monday January 16, 2023 @08:59PM (#34408262)

BTW, Apple's version of Takeout is at privacy.apple.com. Once you log in, click on "Get a copy of your data".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by CharlesW on Monday January 16, 2023 @09:01PM (#34408276)

> Can you routinely and reliably back up iPhone photos to a NAS?

The way I do it is slightly roundabout but works well — I sync to iCloud, which in turn syncs to my desktop, which I backup to my NAS from there.

(Important note: You'll need to turn on "Download Originals to this Mac" in Photo's Settings, otherwise you'll get hi-res proxies rather than bit-for-bit source images.)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by voltaireodactyl on Monday January 16, 2023 @09:08PM (#34408314)

I highly recommend PhotoSync for iOS. I believe it’s about $25-$40 for a lifetime license. It’s hugely configurable in terms of targets, triggers, and schedules for upload. But most importantly to me, it’s been rock solid and I’ve never run into an issue with it. Only thing to remember is to open it once upon reboot. Works brilliantly after that.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by thedanbob on Monday January 16, 2023 @09:51PM (#34408600)

Seconded. I don’t keep photos on my phone for very long, instead I regularly upload them to a self-hosted PhotoPrism instance via PhotoSync.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by benhurmarcel on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @03:44AM (#34410406)

Make sure to check the saved photos. I stopped using it after I found that random photos were blank after the export. It wasn't reliable, and I only backed up 20Gb, so not that much.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by voltaireodactyl on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @05:47AM (#34411070)

I definitely check it regularly because I’m insane; but in the years I’ve been using it I’ve thankfully never had the issue you describe.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by ssss11 on Monday January 16, 2023 @09:32PM (#34408493)

I use the syno app just fine. I setup a geo boundary so that if I’m at home it backs up - for my wife’s phone it just happens in the background, for me though I have to open the app for some reason… so I do it every week or so.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by fmajid on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @02:06AM (#34409867)

PhotoBackup rsyncs your photos and is free (a nag pop up at the end, that’s it). You have to trigger it manually, however:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photobackup-backup-photos-and-...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by nowahe on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @06:27AM (#34411305)

I found a tool to do just that, iCloud Photo Downloader[1] (tho you do need to have your photos backed up to iCloud).

I run it as a cron on my NAS, and the only intereaction I need to have with it is to give it a new 2FA code every ~2-3 months. Highly recommend it

[1]: https://github.com/icloud-photos-downloader/icloud_photos_do...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How my brother's iCloud account was stolen by limitedsupply on Monday January 16, 2023 @11:41PM (#34409224)

That's basically the old idea that a single point of failure/backup is not sufficient. It's not specific to Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. One copy can get damaged, hijacked, erased by accident - so ideally keep 2 or more (encrypted) copies.

[ Parent | on HN ]