Comment on Discussion Thread š° Tuesday 10 March 2026
melbaboutown@aussie.zone āØ6ā© āØdaysā© ago
Iāve finished downloading the most urgent iCloud photos and videos for now. Saving your stuff locally to have a backup outside the cloud seems to have deliberately been made to suck.
spoiler
My Windows computer is full because of Win 11 bloating (which for some people going over a certain percent of storage wiped their files) so I couldnāt do it there and use the app. Using a Mac you still canāt download more than 1000 files at once so I selected them manually and downloaded in batches of 50-300ish photos at a time. And thatās only for the ones of Melbcat because I donāt want Apple to randomly lock access to them before they can be backed up. Iām not sure how it would go on Linux, maybe the same⦠no idea if there would be any incompatibilities but that old computer could be a good storage place. Bonus if I take out the wifi dongle and unplug the ethernet cable these companies literally canāt access my stuff on there to mess with it. Thereās so much still to do but right now I just need to pull my finger out for the ones of baby girl. I struggle so badly with the memory and organisation aspects of keeping things backed up (to the point Iāve lost entire hard drives worth of stuff repeatedly before cloud services and still havenāt finished the work now) but I donāt like how your own stuff is low key kept hostage, scanned for anything potentially offensive with notoriously inaccurate AI, and they have a million little ways to make it tricky or tedious to get your own files back. I wonāt even get into how Microsoft yoinked my files without consent, hid the option to back up to drive, and tried to extort money for more cloud storage.
Iām genuinely considering returning to a digital camera with SD cards.