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Why Back up Google Photos to Hard Drive?

Google Photos
Google Photos

Released in 2015, Google Photos is the first choice for most users to save, organize and share precious images and videos. Previously, Google Photos offered an unlimited storage space for compressed photos, which has attracted millions of users worldwide. Although this policy is ended now, Google Photos is always one of the most popular and useful photo storage service in the market.

However, it’s not secure enough to store your precious pictures and videos in only one place. And sometimes Google Photos doesn’t work well. For example, many users have encountered the problems like “Google Photos not syncing”, “Google Photos lost photos”, etc. Thus, it’s suggested to backup your Google Photos to hard drive, such as external hard drive or your local hard drive for:

  • Data Protection. Backing up your Google Photos to hard drive is a good way to protect your data. Even if your source data is lost, you can simply and easily restore your data with a backup.
  • Access Your Photos and Videos Offline. Google Photos provides users with a convenient way to access data as long as the network is accessible.When there’s no internet connection, it’s difficult to head to your Google Photos. In contrast, you can directly access your data on Google Photos offline after backing the data to hard drive.

So, how to backup Google Photos to a hard drive? If you are wondering this question, you can read further to learn 3 easy and effective methods below:

🙂Download Manually Download selected photos from Google Photos and move them to your hard drive directly.
😃Google Takeout Download all photos from Google Photos and then drag and drop them to your hard drive.
😆MultCloud Download photos from Google Photos when there is a stuck or glitch on Google Photos. Next, migrate them to your hard drive.

How to Backup Google Photos to Hard Drive

No matter what kind of hard drive you want to backup to, you need to download data from Google Photos at first. Then you can move the data to your hard drive. Anyway, there’re 3 solutions to help you back up photos and videos from Google Photos to hard drive. After reading, you can choose the one that’s convenient for you.

Solution 1: Download Google Photos to Hard Drive via Google Photos Website

If you only have a few photos and videos on Google Photos to backup, you can directly go to your Google Photos on the web, and download the images and/or videos to your local computer. Then you can choose to move the data to any type of the hard drive by dragging and dropping.

Step 1: Log into your Google Photos

Sign in to your Google Photos and select the photos and/or videos you decide to backup.

Step 2: Download photos manually

Hit the 3-verical-dots icon to select the Download button. Then those files will be downloaded to your local computer.

Download from Google Photos
Download from Google Photos

If you only want to download Google Photos to local hard drive, you will need to perform the 2 steps above. But how to backup Google Photos to external hard drive? Then you need to connect your external hard drive to your computer. Then, drag and drop what you’ve downloaded to the external hard drive. Or directly choose the external hard drive as the destination during the downloading process.

Note: When using this method, you should always care about the internet connection. Because once the connection goes down, it will badly affect the downloading process.

Solution 2: Backup Google Photos to Hard Drive via Google Takeout

If you have a large amount of data from Google Photos to backup and feel irritated to select photos one by one to download, you can take advantage of Google Takeout. It is a data retrieval application that can help export data from Google devices at once. Here’s what you should follow:

Step 1: Go to Google Takeout

Head to Google Takeout on the web, then swipe down your cursor to select Google Photos only. After that, go to the bottom of the page to click Next step.

Next Step
Next Step

Step 2: Set up settings

Now, choose the file type you want the exported data to be. And then choose the export frequency and destination respectively. Next, press the Create export tab on the right lower side.

Create Export
Create Export

Step 3: Wait for an email

After a period of time, you will receive an email with a hyperlink to download the files. The waiting time for the email depends on the file size, from seconds to days.

Step 4: Download photos by the exporting link

After downloading the data from Google Photos, then you can drag and drop the data to your local drive.

Note: Google Takeout is relatively useful when exporting your data from Google Photos. However, it sometimes fails to export successfully for no reason. Also, one can only export 2-3 archives every day.

Solution 3: Backup Google Photos to Hard Drive with MultCloud

If you find both ways above cannot help you backup Google Photos to a hard drive successfully, then you can utilize an outstanding cloud file manager – MultCloud. MultCloud provides users with an integrated platform to manage multiple cloud services in only one place with one login. In this way, you don’t need to access your files from each official website of the cloud anymore.

By using MultCloud, you can perform basic features that you can enjoy on the official website of each cloud. For example, you can share Google Drive files, upload files to OneDrive as well as sync Google Photos to PC. Thus, if you find it difficult to download/upload/share files on the official website of each cloud, you can ask MultCloud for help.

Now, let’s head to how to backup Google Photos to hard drive via MultCloud:

Step 1: Sign up for an account

Register a MultCloud account on the web. Or, you can sign in with your Google or Facebook account.

Sign Up
Sign Up

Step 2: Go to Add Cloud

Head to Add Cloud on the left taskbar, then add Google Photos and grant MultCloud access.

Add Google Photos
Add Google Photos

Step 3: Download photos manually

Now, hit Google Photos on the left, and tick the box ahead of the photo, then tap the Download button on the upper side.

Download from Google Photos
Download from Google Photos

Step 4: Drag and drop photos to the hard drive

After the data is downloaded to your computer, you can then move it to the hard drive by dragging and dropping.

Bonus Tip: How to Backup Google Photos to Another Cloud

Basically, you can backup Google Photos to hard drive to protect your data. But some would doubt that the hard drive is threatened by natural disasters and hardware failure. In this case, you can backup Google Photos to another wonderful cloud to manage your photos and videos better.

Traditionally, most users would use the download-and-upload method to backup data from one cloud to another. However, it’s cumbersome and will cost a lot of time, especially when there are lots of data that need to be transferred. Here, turning to a professional cloud to cloud backup service, MultCloud, is a good way to achieve to backup goal. Here’re the detailed steps:

Step 1: Add Cloud

Go to your MultCloud and add Google Photos and another cloud by clicking Add Cloud on the left side. Here, use Google Photos and OneDrive as an example:

Add Google Photos and OneDrive
Add Google Photos and OneDrive

Step 2: Navigate to Cloud Backup

Head to Cloud Backup on the left side. Then choose Google Photos as the source directory and OneDrive as the target directory. Then, press the Backup Now tab.

Backup Google Photos to OneDrive
Backup Google Photos to OneDrive

As you can see from the above, only 2 steps are needed to backup data across clouds by using MultCloud. There’re other merits when using MultCloud to backup data between clouds:

  • Supporting Over 30 Clouds. MultCloud supports many major and popular cloud drives in the market, such as Google Drive, Google Photos, SharePoint, iCloud Photos, Flickr, OneDrive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, pCloud, Box, Synology NAS, etc.
  • Directly and Seamlessly. MultCloud offers users an efficient way to backup data between clouds without a troublesome download-and-upload process.
  • Offline Backup and Scheduled Backup. Once the backup task is starting, MultCloud can run it in the background even if the computer is switched off suddenly. And if you are busy with working or studying, you can set up scheduled backup tasks to make it run automatically at a regulated time, daily, weekly, or monthly.
  • Recover Data without Any Effort. The paramount feature of Cloud Backup of MultCloud is the Restore function. With only a few clicks, you can restore certain files easily.

Conclusion

To sum up, if you want to backup Google Photos to hard drive, you can use the Google Photos web app, Google Takeout, and a FREE third-party service - MultCloud. Except for basic features, MultCloud also allows you to backup data across clouds by the Cloud Backup feature.

On top of Cloud Backup, MultCloud offers other brilliant functions such as Cloud Transfer, Cloud Sync, and Remote Upload. For example, if you want to sync Google Photos with OneDrive, you can ask the Cloud Sync feature for help.

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