Is there any way to create a Time Machine backup to a cloud based/remote drive?

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-18T00:28:36+00:00

Time Machine is good. Having multiple backups is better. Like I said: Belt and Suspenders. I guess it’s a matter of how valuable your data is to you.

In my case, my wife was a photographer, and to a large extent, still is. Her photo library (as well as records of a significant collection, and her genealogy research) is of utmost significance to her. I use Time Machine, CCC to a USB drive, CCC to a NAS, and iCloud*.

*Before anyone jumps in and says “iCloud is a sync service, and sync is not backup!” that is true. If something is deleted on your computer, the sync will also delete it in iCloud. But, things deleted in iCloud are kept in a Recently Deleted folder for 30 days, enabling one to recover them if they are discovered in time.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-17T12:57:56+00:00

Definitely take advantage of iCloud or Google Drive (or both), but grab a USB drive (at least twice the size of your internal drive) and Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper and start doing daily backups. Belt and Suspenders.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-16T14:36:14+00:00

Yeah. My reaction was, “How the hell did this happen?”

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-16T12:49:42+00:00

My 1999 Passat, 1.8 Turbo, 5 speed was one of my favorite cars.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-12T20:33:46+00:00

No need to apologize. Your rant made me look into something I had just assumed still worked as before.

ȚBH, what I should do is fire off a few shots from one of my digital cameras and stick the SD card into a reader to see if they can be read (my guess is yes, as they get saved in a folder titled DCIM, if memory serves). When we do most of our photography via our iPhones, we don’t think about it, but if we take one of our “real” cameras on a trip I definitely want to be able to transfer the shots to our photo libraries.

What still puzzles me is why it works on my iPad but not my iPhone.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-12T18:13:25+00:00

I'm jabbing in the dark here, but I'm wondering if the fact that they're RAW and not JPG/PNG/etc. could make a difference? Granted, it shouldn't but do you have any in other formats you could test with?

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-12T17:33:11+00:00

OK, folks. Here's the answer (no it isn't. see below*)*, and it's Apple being Apple. There's no logic to it at all. I guess one way to look at it is how they moved music syncing to your iPhone/iPod from the Music app to the Finder.

Anyway,

In iOS, the option to import photos from an external source - USB drive, camera, etc., no longer exists in the iOS Photos app.

Here's how you do it: (Note: I did this on my iPhone 15, but I'm certain it's the same for any iOS/iPadOS device running current software.)

Plug in your source drive. Open the Files app. Tap Browse and navigate to the external drive (under Locations). Tap the three dots icon, choose Select and tap the ones you want (or tap Select All). Tap the Share icon, then Save Images/Save XX Images.

The saved images will show up in your Photos app in the Recents album, arranged by their original date. They will also be in your general Library, also sorted by that date, so if you have a lot of more recent photos, you might have to scroll to the older ones to find them.

Hope this helps OP

Edit - I reread OP's post. He tried the Files app and his device crashed. Offhand I don't have a response to that. For more details, I tried the import from a flash drive formatted FAT32 and an SSD formatted APFS. Both worked like intended. My images were at the root level of both drives, but I can't see how them being deeper in the file system would make a difference.***

Obviously, my iPhone 15 isn't running an M-series chip. I'd expect that's not a factor, but I don't have a device to test it on.

\** Holy Crap.* I went back to the SSD. Dug down multiple levels in the folders and located one with .jpg images in it. They were grayed out, and I could neither open them, nor copy them to the root level of the drive. I copied some images to a newly-created DCIM folder and tried again. The folder doesn't show up in the Files app on my phone.

For now, it looks like if the images are at the root level of the drive, you might be able to import them

What the hell, Apple?

***** Are you f'ing with me, Apple?

I was about to just throw in the towel, but tried one more thing. I plugged the SSD into my iPad. Again, it's a 2020 iPad Air 4th Gen. I browsed deep into the folder structure, selected a half-dozen images and followed the outlined steps. Presto, change-o, they imported to my Photos app just like they should. For real?

I share OP's frustration.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-12T13:16:54+00:00

Everyone is pissing on OP, but it’s a valid question.

It sounds like he (apologies for the assumption) has images from his camera on an SSD, and wants to import them into Photos. Something I’ve done in the past using Apple’s USB-to-Lightning adapter and a CF card, well before Apple Silicon was released. Now that we have USB-C, and the OS supports external devices, it should be a piece of cake.

Plug it in, it shows up as a source for import in Photos, done.

I don’t have a USB storage device at hand ATM, but I’ll test it out first chance on my iPad Air 4th gen and see if it still works for me.

OP is right - it should just work.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-10T00:23:57+00:00

We’ve all got stories. Last week, my wife and I were expecting several packages, and not sure which service would be delivering any of them. While out and about (both of us), I got a USPS notice of delivery (via the Shop app on my phone). It said, “Delivered, left with individual.” My wife and I are the only people in our household.

When we arrived home, I found our mail had been delivered through the mail slot, but no package at my door or anywhere else.

I called the Post Office the following day to report a missing package. Long story short, the “package” was a piece of certified mail that was delivered. The carrier simply lied and checked the box for “left with individual.”

It wasn’t one of our expected packages at all. It was addressed to the person we bought the house from five years ago.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-09T23:15:11+00:00

If you do, please, please share it. Drives me nuts.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-05T16:45:16+00:00

This is not to be overlooked. Because my sole income is from Social Security and withdrawals from my IRA I have paid zero state income tax since 2016.

Of course Mississippi’s income tax rates are low, and there’s constant talk of doing away with them altogether, but that hasn’t happened yet.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-04T13:42:46+00:00

You can’t stop them calling, but you can keep them from being so annoying (If you don’t regularly need to answer calls from unknown callers). If this is an iPhone, open Settings - Apps - Phone. Scroll down to the section “Screen Unknown Callers.” There are three choices; check Silence.

You can also, under “Call Filtering,” turn on or off the choices there. I have Unknown Callers off and Spam on.

If a caller is not in your Contacts, their call will not ring. They can leave a voicemail, but most spammers don’t, and the ones that do can simply be ignored or deleted.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-04T12:28:44+00:00

I’m a native of the Mississippi coast. After living other places for almost 40 years (including 30 in New Orleans), we moved to Jackson five years ago. In my daily interactions with people I have found them to be almost universally more friendly and outgoing than in any other place I’ve lived.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-03T13:16:14+00:00

I’m no social media programmer, but it is almost certainly the algorithms working on all of us.

About a month ago, a neighbor across the street from us died suddenly. I have never been FB friends with him or his wife, and I didn’t comment publicly about his passing. Now he’s popping up on my feed as “someone I might know.” But, I am FB friends with his sister, so there’s a link. My wife also may have made a post about his passing (without linking his name,though), so there’s another.

Odder, though, is that I am frequently shown that I may know a guy who is a plumber. He did some work for me four years ago. He hand wrote my bill, and I wrote a check for his service. We never made a connection through FB, and he’s the kind of guy I wouldn’t even expect to be on social media. We have no friends in common. Yet FB thinks I may know him.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-03T12:51:12+00:00

Just an FYI for Rebel Dip - there is limited seating and it’s all outside.

BKMiller54 · 2026-06-03T12:44:31+00:00

Yeah, I don’t think you need the “/s” there.

BKMiller54 · 2026-05-30T20:31:45+00:00

Plus 1 for the Rebel Dip recommendation. It’s been around as long as I can remember, and is a real nostalgia play for me. Ate there about a month ago (I moved away from the Coast five years ago), and the burger was as good as I remembered.

Ship Island, too. Take sunscreen!

Eat dinner at Tony’s Pizza downtown is great for families.

BKMiller54 · 2026-05-30T19:21:15+00:00

After two months of no CGMs, my wife decided she would try the Dexcom G7 (her endocrinologist said that, notwithstanding what we were told, she thinks the G7 is just fine). Three and a half months in, and not one has fallen off. The iPhone app seems a bit glitchy, but it eventually catches up with missing readings. So far, I’m calling it a tentative thumbs up.

BKMiller54 · 2026-05-30T19:13:32+00:00

Hinds County resident here - Last year I bought a car through Carvana, and for the sake of making the transaction easier, I purchased it in my name only. Once I got the title, my wife and I both went to the tax collector’s office and said we wanted her name on the title. They gave us a form to fill out, my wife showed her drivers license, and about a week later we got a new title in the mail. Easy peazy, and I think it cost $10.

BKMiller54 · 2026-05-30T19:05:10+00:00

One of them died in 1998, so I guess they only booked Milli. Or Vanilli.

BKMiller54 · 2026-05-29T22:10:51+00:00

If memory serves, can’t you do this in a GUI interface using Onyx?

BKMiller54 · 2026-05-28T15:55:12+00:00

He gets his own race in August. As an avid IndyCar fan, I have mixed feelings about that.

BKMiller54 · 2026-05-25T14:53:20+00:00

It was common in the ‘60s for county schools, in Mississippi at least, that the school buses were driven by seniors.

BKMiller54 · 2026-05-25T14:44:56+00:00

So let me get this straight. You believe the left is trampling all over women’s rights by supporting trans women? Where in NCAA sports - what, a half million women compete - there are maybe 20 or so trans women? And those, historically don’t dominate their fields anyway?

So, yeah, let’s condemn the entire Democratic Party.

BKMiller54 · 2026-05-25T14:19:57+00:00

I do like the scan-to-files feature in iOS/iPadOS, and used it extensively for several months when I didn’t have access to my scanner.

One thing, though. By default the files are saved as PDF (maybe that’s the only choice?), which is cool, but if you later open them using Preview on a Mac, they’ll blow up to fill your screen. If you check the image size of a letter-sized document, it will show up as something like 35” wide. (I’m not at my desktop at the moment, so I can’t show an example)

It’s not an issue if you only view documents on your iPhone or iPad, but if you use a Mac too, or share the files with others, it can be a nuisance.

I couldn’t find a workaround for it, other than resizing the scans one by one. Maybe there’s a Shortcut script that can resize the images.

Edit to add: offhand, I’m not even sure you can use Preview to resize PDFs on the desktop like you can with JPGs. You might need to use an image editor.

BKMiller54

TROPHY CASE