I’ve set up Lightroom on my laptop as the repository of the pictures I’m taking on the trip. Getting the photos into Lightroom is easy, but I want to replicate everything to my server at home for backup purposes.

I have one machine at home with its SSH port exposed to the Internet; it’s not the machine I want to send the files to. So I need to use an SSH tunnel to get to the actual target machine (I’m using rsync to do the copy to avoid sending more data than I need, especially when connected over my phone).

I have set up both machines at home to trust my SSH key, so passwords and passing certificates aren’t a problem. I’ve defined home in my local .ssh/config file to point to my gateway system’s SSH port, so I can set up the tunnel by opening a terminal window and issuing this command:

ssh -NL 9091:office:22 home

9091 is an arbitrary port number; it can be anything more than 1024.
office is the system I want to connect to at home; I could also use the local network address at home (for example, 192.168.99.99).

Now I’m ready to do the copying; I need to open another terminal window and issue this command:

rsync -auv -e "ssh -p 9091" \
--exclude '*Previews*' --exclude '*ackup*'  \
~/Pictures/Lightroom david@localhost:Desktop/East

The Desktop/East directory on my home server is an image of the Lightroom directory here (including the catalog). If I were really brave, I could add --delete to the command to ensure that any deletions I make on the laptop are reflected at home.

After the copy is complete, I can go back to the first window and stop the SSH session.

When I get home, I plan to import the catalog from my laptop into my master Lightroom library, but if something happens to my laptop on the way home, I should be able to use the backup I’m creating.

I hope.

I brought a laptop on this trip so I could cull, edit, and publish photos while still traveling. I’m using Adobe Lightroom Classic as my main photo repository, especially for pictures I take with my Panasonic FZ1000M2, but photos I take with my iPhone wind up going into Apple Photos.

I want to be able to back up my photos even while I’m traveling. Photos I take on the iPhone go into the Apple cloud and are, probably, automatically download into Photos at home and then backed up by Time Machine and Backblaze. I say “probably” because I have been running into problems with getting those same photos onto the laptop I brought with me – it stops downloading for no reason that I can figure out.

In desperation, I told Apple Photos to “repair” the photos library on the laptop; that took a while, and then it said it was going to download all of my photos from iCloud. I hoped it would do checksums on the laptop and on the server and only download missing or damaged photos, but that doesn’t seem to be the case – it wanted to download every photo. And it kept stopping and starting.

After much fiddling, I discovered that Photos seemed to stop downloading if it wasn’t the foreground application (the one in the menu bar). I also discovered that I could monitor the progress of the download by looking at the Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/resources/cpl/cloudsync.index directory (Apple Photos is not very generous in its progress reporting).

Fortunately, we were docked at the DC Wharf and they had high-speed public wifi which I could use as long as I put the laptop on our balcony – I was able to complete the repair while we were in DC.

Today, though, the download has stopped again; rebooting hasn’t helped, and I can’t figure out what the hangup is. My iPad shows all of the photos I’ve taken. I’m very confused.