Backup iCloud Photo Library to Unraid

hey everyone it is Mike the dad nerd here and today we're doing a quick video on my favorite Docker container that I run in my home lab for me the best Docker container is one that solves something for you and for me it's something that automate something that was manual before and makes your life easier and you guys know if you're into home Labs there are a ton of fantastic Docker containers out there but this one might be one that you don't have and you're not utilizing and it's a especially important if you are an iPhone user if your family utilizes kind of the Apple ecosystem um if you take photos and store them in Apple iCloud you guys are going to love this Docker container and it's actually going to lead into one of my other favorite Docker containers that we'll do a separate video on so without further Ado what is my favorite Docker container that I run in my home lab well it's iCloud PD so iCloud PD is a Docker container that you can run run on your system you authenticate it with your Apple credentials and essentially what it does is every night it goes out to iCloud and pulls in all of your photos into whatever directory on your server you want them to so what this has solved for me was backing up all the photos that my wife and I take um on our iPhones and before you I was utilizing different apps that your phone was responsible for the upload so if you're using nextcloud back in the day Plex photos used to even have an upload feature um those require your phone to be the source of uploading all the files and you know getting my wife on board with that making sure she had the app set up correctly making sure the app was running in the background and all of that was just becoming more pain than it was worth and so I had stopped doing it and I had relied on the iCloud essentially being our backup but that meant I didn't have a local source for all of our photos on our server and that's something I really wanted well enter iCloud PD and iCloud PD solves that for us our phones don't need to do any of the upload this is reaching out directly to the Apple iCloud and pulling the photos and videos down from there which is perfect it's exactly what we want so today I'm going to walk you guys through how to get this installed on unraid uh very similar for other systems you'll just probably have to do a little bit more of the docker config um but on unraid this could not be any easier so let's go ahead and jump right in so the first thing I want to show you guys is the uh GitHub for iCloud PD this is where you guys can pull this Docker container from depending on what system you're running uh unraid has this in the community application store is when where we're going to pull this from but if you guys want to run this on any other system running Docker it is the docker hyphen iCloud PD with some great instructions and there is a configuration link here as well and the configuration. MD file that walks you through all the variables and how you would get this set up on any other system but let's go ahead and and jump over to UNR and get this set up so over in UNR I am on the community applications Tab and I'm just going to search for iCloud PD and there's really only one option here so this is where you would click the install button and get it installed I've already installed it so I'm going to jump over to my configuration one thing to note is that it is one container per icod Library what I mean by that is I run two instances of this Docker one for my iCloud Library I run a separate instance for my wife's iCloud Library I have them download into separate folders within my photo share on unraid but you do have to run you can't run multiple people's iCloud from one container easy enough though you just spin up a second instance um and you put in their credentials for their container so I run two of these but let's just talk about my one main one for myself so now jumping over to the setup of the application in unraid it's pretty simple what you're going to do is you're going to plug in the the email address for your Apple ID and then you want your app data where it's going to store not the photos but where it's going to store the app data for the docker so for me all of that is always stored in the app data folder synchronization interval this is really where you can tell it how often you want it to synchronize it doesn't have to be daily it could be every 12 hours it could be every week whatever you want it to be I leave it at the default for every 24 hours that's that's fine this is again this is a backup for me so it's pulling every night the data variable now this is where it's going to store your actual photos so what I have done is I created a share in unraid for photos and then I created a subfolder within that share called Mike iCloud I have a separate folder called Hannah iCloud for my wife but for me I want to make sure that those are separate so I do put it in this subfolder of mic iCloud and that's essentially it I did put in the time zone but once you have those variables plugged in you can go ahead and spin up the docker you can go ahead and click create and it will fire it up now there's a few more steps that we need to do to get it running uh but the docker will be running at this point but it will not be synchronizing anything there's a few more things that we need to do that are pretty important one of the interesting Parts about iCloud PD is that you do need to create a DOT mounted file wherever you are storing your photos so if you remember for me I'm storing it in that photo share under the mic iCloud Library folder when I what I need to do is I need to create a file called mounted and just put it into that share easiest way to do that that I have found is just open up notepad don't put anything in do a save as go to just save it anywhere so I'm going to save it to my desktop and I am just going to save this as Untitled save it and then what I do is I open back up my desktop I find that Untitled txt I click to edit the name I edit the entire name and all I do is I just put mounted with no file name in front of it click enter yes I want to change it and now I have a mounted file so from this point it's going to be different for everyone but all you need to do is you need to put that mounted file into your data folder so what I would do is I would go to my shares so if I go to shares and I go to my photos I'm going to go down to mic iCloud and I'm going to go to upload and I'm going to go to my desktop and find that mounted file and put it in there so that is extremely important your synchronization will not happen if you do not have the do mounted file wherever you told iCloud PD to start storing photos so the final step here is to actually get the docker container initialized if you remember when we set up the docker container we gave it the email address for the iCloud account but we have not given it the password we haven't gone through the two- Factor authentication if you have that set up up so that is what we need to do now on UNR the easiest way I found to do that is to click on your Docker container and go to console and then what you're going to type and I will put this in the description below but it's sync icloud.on hyphen initialize which is capitalized once you hit enter I've already hit enter it will run through the initialization process It'll ask you for the password for your account it will also walk you through if you have two Factor authentication through iCloud it'll give you the option to actually do that two-factor authentication and then you should be good to go and it will fire up the first round of syncing for you that first round of syncing can take a long time and you've got to remember that it's going to download your entire iCloud library to wherever it's you have mapped it to so it can take a little bit of time it's also going to take a little bit of bandwidth so just be prepared for that fact but once you have that done you now have your entire iCloud Library store stored locally and you can do a lot of things with that that's it's pretty powerful to have all of your photos backed up my favorite way to manage all of those photos once they are on my system is to use another fantastic Docker container called image so image for me is a Docker container that I run on that same server on my unraid server and I point the libraries back to those two folders my wife's iCloud PD sync folder and mine and then I'm able to view all of those photos in a really nice clean UI that is very similar to something like Google photos or iCloud photo library where it gives you memories you can search by people uh here's just a quick screenshot I don't want to show you all my photos uh in of my system but this is kind of a quick glance of what my image looks like uh you can see that actually we were just yesterday at my boy's basketball game and it already last night iCloud PD went and pulled those from the cloud and then image is recycl and scanning that Library folder so it already has all of our photos in here so it's a very clean way to view all the photos I have image pull from my wife's library and mine and we just share One login but image does allow you to have multiple users and you can pull and separate those libraries out so you guys can keep your system separate if you want for us we are actually looking for a way to integrate to see all of our photos in one place and this was the best way to do that but you do have a lot of flexibility with image image is something that I want to do a much more indepth video on I think it deserves uh its own video and how to set it up and unraid and all of the features and great things that you can do with it so that will be coming in the future and with all of that I hope this video helped you guys out hope you enjoyed my favorite Docker container and if you're an iOS user or if you're in the Apple ecosystem I think it really does solve a very Niche problem that a lot of us have in getting local backups of all of our photos and videos If you like this content if you like home Labs home automation Docker containers all that make sure to hit the Subscribe button we're back in the YouTube game now it took a few years off but we're back uh putting out a lot of content around that I hope to catch you guys next time but until then Tech on

Channel: TheDadNerd

Views: 5,325

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Id: 9UJBkxg9tCo

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 12 2023