Tried backing up my phone to iCloud and Google Photos at the same time, what a mess

Last week I decided to get smart and back up my photos to both services so I'd never lose anything. Thought I was being extra careful, you know? But then my phone started throwing errors about duplicate storage and my Google Photos showed like 3000 photos from the last 3 months that were supposed to be from 2019. Turns out both apps were fighting over the same camera roll and creating copies of copies. I spent about 4 hours on Saturday deleting duplicates and trying to figure out which one actually kept the originals. Google Photos won hands down because it actually let me sort by date taken and batch delete the junk without losing quality. iCloud just dumped everything into a big mess with no real way to clean it up. Has anyone else tried doing dual backups and just ended up with a digital landfill?

2 comments

2 Comments

shane_ross9d ago

You hit it right on the head with the digital landfill description. My exact setup turned into a nightmare where I’d take a photo, give it a custom name in Google Photos, then iCloud would sync that renamed file back down to my phone as a new copy and upload the original no-name version all over again. Ended up with about 500 photos that had "1" and "2" at the end of their file names because the two clouds kept duplicating each other’s work. Google Photos really does save the day with that date sort and batch delete feature, I used it to wipe out a whole year of doubles in under 30 minutes. That tool in Google where you can "show duplicates" saved my sanity, it flagged every single copy that iCloud had accidentally pushed back through. Still gotta check once a month now though because those two services just do not play nice together.

ray_webb69d ago

Wait @shane_ross I've totally been there. I had a folder full of "IMG_001 (1) (1) copy" that I swear multiplied every time I looked at it. At one point I got so fed up I just started taking screenshots of my screenshots to be sure I had the right version. That was dumb. Ended up with a 50GB mess of the same blurry photo of my cat about 87 times. Finally just sat down one night with a coffee and manually deleted everything that looked like a clone. Not my finest moment but hey, at least I only do a quick sanity check now instead of a whole cleanout.