My partner’s iPhone had ~50,000 photos and videos (~400 GB). She doesn’t use iCloud, so everything was stored locally. We nearly lost them once, which got me looking for a way to back up to a PC.
I couldn’t find a reliable solution — most tools would fail halfway, mess up album structure, compress images, or skip Live Photos.
We decided to build our own, focusing on:
Handling tens of thousands of PHAssets in a single run
Preserving album hierarchy and full-quality originals (including iCloud-only items)
Incremental backups and resume after interruptions
USB transfer to avoid slow network/cloud bottlenecks
Cross-platform (macOS + Windows)
In testing, we’ve transferred hundreds of GB in one go without restart, at speeds up to 330 MB/s over USB 3.
One big “oops” moment: after a major update, a bug caused a black-screen crash on launch for some users. I ended up flying to meet a user and debug on-site (turns out it was a device-specific media API crash).
Curious if anyone here has tackled similar large-scale media backup or USB transfer systems. How did you handle iCloud integration, resume reliability, or cross-platform compatibility?
I couldn’t find a reliable solution — most tools would fail halfway, mess up album structure, compress images, or skip Live Photos.
We decided to build our own, focusing on:
Handling tens of thousands of PHAssets in a single run
Preserving album hierarchy and full-quality originals (including iCloud-only items)
Incremental backups and resume after interruptions
USB transfer to avoid slow network/cloud bottlenecks
Cross-platform (macOS + Windows)
In testing, we’ve transferred hundreds of GB in one go without restart, at speeds up to 330 MB/s over USB 3.
One big “oops” moment: after a major update, a bug caused a black-screen crash on launch for some users. I ended up flying to meet a user and debug on-site (turns out it was a device-specific media API crash).
Curious if anyone here has tackled similar large-scale media backup or USB transfer systems. How did you handle iCloud integration, resume reliability, or cross-platform compatibility?