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?