Backup solutions for an iOS-only household?

Monday, December 22, 2025

Just over a month ago, I was booting up our last remaining Mac for some routine maintenance. After watching Dock icons bounce for literally minutes, I had to ask why we even have an iMac from 2019. Turned out the answer was: because I’ve owned a Mac since 1997. That didn’t seem like a good enough answer.

My wife and I both have iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches, plus we’re required to use Windows laptops for work. This is why I almost never used the iMac and, consequently, why whenever I found a use for it, I had to endure far too many minutes of waiting for it to boot up and launch an app. So, I decided to recycle the iMac and we’re now an iOS-only house (ignoring my son’s rarely used gaming PC).

The simplicity is nice and it helps keep me away from screens, since having a Mac was a good excuse to fiddle with software. This was partly made possible by my intentional adoption of mostly Apple default apps. Until the recent Apple ID debacle with Paris Buttfield-Addison, everything seemed good. Now that this glaring dependency is obvious, I do have some concerns. Specifically, all of our photos and files are only on iOS devices and only backed up via Apple’s backup service. This is no longer wise or sufficient. When we had a Mac, I’d happily used Backblaze for many years and now need the equivalent for iOS.

I asked for some advice on the friendly Hemispheric Views Discord and got pointers to some alternative webservices, along with this cool project. At the moment, I’m tempted by the Synology BeeStation, which seems to be a “local cloud” storage device. Having a physical drive in my home is appealing as a supplement to our online backups.

I’ll keep investigating. Any suggestions are appreciated.