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Trying to backup Photos to iCloud filled up my external drive with a “snapshot,” I think?

I have a 600GB Photos library on a 1 TB external SSD. I just decided to upgrade to 2TB of iCloud storage to keep an online backup of my library. However, my external drive is now showing that it’s full and Photos won’t open at all because I don’t have enough space to “migrate” my library.


Based on my online sleuthing, I think what’s happening is that iCloud is creating as temporary clone of my library to upload to the cloud, but since the drive is more than half full, it can’t finish that process, can’t upload to iCloud and now the drive can’t be used normally either. The cloned version is sitting there, but invisible in Finder.


What are my options here? First, is it impossible for me to create an iCloud backup because I don’t have more than twice the drive space of my library? Second, how do I get rid of the phantom backup, which does not appear in Finder? Is there a way to do that in Disk Utility? Maybe the backup will go away when I disable backing up my library to iCloud?


This is very frustrating.

Mac mini, macOS 12.5

Posted on Aug 10, 2022 8:25 AM

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Posted on Aug 10, 2022 9:55 AM

Just so you know the iCloud Photos feature is not an independent, off-computer, storage service but a syncing service. Any change you make to your local Photos library will be reflected in the iCloud Library, i.e. additions, edits, and deletions (both intended and accidental).


A backup plan that many subscribe to here is two types of independent backups:


1 - an external drive that's 2 ½ - 3 times the size of the drive(s) you're backing up setup with Time Machine. This makes an incremental backup every hour so if a file is deleted accidentally or you need a version from a day or two ago you can restore it.


2 - an external SSD that has your boot drive cloned to it (I use Carbon Copy Cloner for the cloning and backups). This lets you have a bootable replacement in the event your internal boot drive has problems. However, versioning is not part of this type of backup, i.e. you only get the latest version of all files.


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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 10, 2022 9:55 AM in response to Jeffnebraska

Just so you know the iCloud Photos feature is not an independent, off-computer, storage service but a syncing service. Any change you make to your local Photos library will be reflected in the iCloud Library, i.e. additions, edits, and deletions (both intended and accidental).


A backup plan that many subscribe to here is two types of independent backups:


1 - an external drive that's 2 ½ - 3 times the size of the drive(s) you're backing up setup with Time Machine. This makes an incremental backup every hour so if a file is deleted accidentally or you need a version from a day or two ago you can restore it.


2 - an external SSD that has your boot drive cloned to it (I use Carbon Copy Cloner for the cloning and backups). This lets you have a bootable replacement in the event your internal boot drive has problems. However, versioning is not part of this type of backup, i.e. you only get the latest version of all files.


Aug 10, 2022 8:55 PM in response to Jeffnebraska

FYI, the problem was definitely trying to sync/backup these photos to iCloud. As soon as I turned off iCloud sync for Photos on my Mac, the extra hundreds of gigabytes started winding off the drive. In a minute or two, it was back to the correct amount of free space. It's a real flaw with this system that I apparently can't backup these photos to iCloud without having enough local harddrive space to make two copies of them.


Any suggestions for solving this problem?

Aug 11, 2022 10:42 AM in response to TonyCollinet

That's an interesting question, but that's not the explanation. My current Photos file on iCloud shows only 55GB. That is small enough to download to my external drive for the comparison. It really seemed like the external drive was doing the time machine thing and cloning itself behind the scenes for an upload, and I can't fit both my original file and a clone on my 1TB external drive. I would get a bigger one, but the price for an ultrafast 2TB Thunderbolt 3 drive is hundreds more.

Trying to backup Photos to iCloud filled up my external drive with a “snapshot,” I think?

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