Alright, let’s talk about getting my iPhone stuff backed up onto my NAS. My phone’s storage was screaming for mercy, you know? And paying for more cloud space every month wasn’t really my plan. I figured, I’ve got this NAS box sitting right here on my network, why not use it?
Starting Point: What I Had
So, I already had a NAS running at home. It’s one of those Synology ones, nothing too fancy, but it does the job. First thing, I logged into it, just to make sure everything was working fine and checked how much space I actually had left. Plenty, turns out.
Looking for the How-To
I poked around the NAS settings, looking for anything obvious about phone backups. Synology has this ‘Package Center’ thing, like an app store for the NAS. I scrolled through it and saw something called Synology Photos. Sounded promising, right? There was also DS File, which is more like a general file manager, but Photos seemed built exactly for pictures and videos, which is most of the stuff clogging up my phone.
Giving Synology Photos a Shot
Okay, decision made. I clicked ‘Install’ on Synology Photos on the NAS side. Easy enough. Then, I grabbed my iPhone, went to the App Store, and searched for ‘Synology Photos’. Found it, installed it.
Opened the app on the phone. It asked for my NAS address (like its name on the network or its IP address), my username, and my password. Typed all that stuff in. Connected first try, nice.
Then came the settings part inside the phone app:
- It asked what I wanted to back up. I chose photos and videos.
- It asked where on the NAS to put them. I just let it use the default folder it suggested.
- There were options like ‘Wi-Fi only backup’ – definitely turned that on, don’t want it munching my mobile data.
- Also enabled the ‘background backup’ option, hoping it would just do its thing without me needing to open the app all the time.
With the settings done, I hit the button to start the backup. Man, that first run took ages. Seriously, hours. But I guess that makes sense, I had years of photos and videos on there. I just plugged my phone in, left it on Wi-Fi, and let it churn overnight.
Checking the Results
The next morning, I went back to my computer and logged into the NAS again. Navigated to the folder where Synology Photos was supposed to be saving everything. And there they were! All my pictures and videos, neatly organized by year and month folders. Phew, it actually worked.
What About a Full Backup?
Now, I did realize this Synology Photos thing is mainly for, well, photos and videos. It doesn’t create a full system backup image like when you plug your iPhone into a computer and use Finder or iTunes. That kind of complete backup, straight from iPhone to NAS wirelessly, doesn’t seem to be a standard thing Apple supports easily. For that, I’d probably still need to back up to my Mac first, and then maybe copy that backup file over to the NAS. A bit clunky.
So, How’s It Going?
For now, I’m pretty happy just having my photos and videos automatically copied over. That was the main space hog anyway. The Synology Photos app seems to do its background thing reasonably well when I’m home on Wi-Fi. I check the NAS folder now and then just to be sure recent stuff is there. It’s not a perfect ‘whole phone’ backup, but it covers the most important memories and frees up precious space on my iPhone, all stored locally on my own hardware. Good enough for me right now.