How to Back Up Google Photos to an External Hard Drive (2026)

Updated 26 September 2026.

You can back up Google Photos to an external hard drive, and the official way to get your whole library is Google Takeout. There’s no app that syncs Google Photos to a drive anymore: the tools that did it through Google’s API stopped working in 2025. Here’s the method that works, how to do it on a PC, a Mac or a NAS, how to keep the backup up to date, and how to check that everything actually arrived.

The short version

1. Plug in the external hard drive and check it’s formatted exFAT (Mac and Windows) or NTFS (Windows only), not FAT32.
2. Go to Google Takeout with only Google Photos selected.
3. Choose .zip and an archive size, then Create export.
4. Wait for Google’s email. For a large library that can be hours or days.
5. Download every archive, then unzip them onto the external drive.
6. Check what arrived before you delete anything, anywhere.

The rest of this page is the detail behind each step, and what to do when a step goes wrong.

Which method backs up all of Google Photos?

method	whole library?	originals?	dates and places	keeps itself up to date
Google Takeout	yes	yes	in .json files next to each photo	no, unless you schedule it (below)
Takeout, scheduled exports (new in June 2026)	yes, then only what’s new	yes	same	every two months, for a year
Download from photos.google.com	only what you select, or one album at a time	yes	in the file, when the photo had them	no
Takeout → Google Drive → sync to a NAS	yes	yes	in .json files	no, and it needs Drive space as big as the export
Browser tools that walk photos.google.com (Snapback, gphotos-export)	yes, one photo at a time	yes	in the file, when the photo had them	some re-run to pick up new photos; unofficial, and they break when Google changes the website
rclone	no: since 31 March 2025 only photos rclone uploaded itself	—	—	—
Synology Cloud Sync	no: it syncs Google Drive, not Google Photos	—	—	—
Homewend (free, open source)	yes, through Takeout, with one click	yes	in .json files, as Google sent them	not yet: you press the button again

For a whole library, the official route is Takeout, and everything below uses it.

How to back up Google Photos to an external hard drive with Takeout

1. Prepare the drive

Check two things before you start.

• Space. The export can be much bigger than the number Google Photos shows you. When I did mine, the app said 12.5 GB and the export was 344 GB. Photos uploaded in “High quality” before June 2021 don’t count toward your storage, but they’re all in the export. Plan for more space than you think.
• Format. FAT32, which many USB sticks and older drives still use, can’t hold a file bigger than 4 GB. A long video will fail to copy. Use exFAT to move the drive between Mac and Windows, or NTFS if it only lives on Windows.

2. Create the export

Open Takeout with Google Photos preselected. You can leave “All photo albums included” as it is.

• Frequency: “Export once” for a one-off backup. For a backup that updates itself, see “Keep it up to date” below.
• File type: .zip opens with a double click on Windows and Mac. .tgz is fine on Mac and Linux.
• File size: 1 GB to 50 GB. Smaller archives mean more files but less to redo when a download breaks. On a shaky connection, go small.

Then Create export. Google emails you when it’s ready. It can take hours, or days for a big library, and there’s nothing to do in the meantime.

3. Download every archive

A large library comes as many files. Mine was 159 archives of 2 GB. Download them all into one folder, on the external drive if your computer’s own disk is small.

If a download stops, restart that archive. Keep a note of which ones finished: with a hundred files named takeout-…-001.zip, -002.zip and so on, it’s easy to lose track.

4. Unzip onto the drive

Unzip every archive into the same destination folder. Each one opens into a Takeout/Google Photos/ folder; let them merge. You’ll get:

Takeout/
  Google Photos/
    Photos from 2019/
    Photos from 2020/
    Holiday 2023/        ← your albums
    ...

Next to almost every photo there’s a .json file with the same name. Keep them. That’s where the date the photo was taken, the location and the description are. Many photos have that information inside the file too, but not all of them. If you want the dates written back into the files and everything in one folder by date, that’s what Google Photos Takeout Helper does.

You’ll also see the same photo in “Photos from 2020” and in an album folder. That’s normal: Takeout puts a copy in each place.

5. Keep the zips until you’ve checked

Don’t delete the archives yet. If something went wrong while unzipping, they’re the only way back short of a new export.

Back up Google Photos to your PC or laptop

The steps are the same on a Windows PC or laptop. Two things change:

• Where you download. Laptops often have small disks. Save the archives straight to the external drive, or download a batch, unzip it onto the drive, and delete that batch from the laptop before the next one.
• Unzipping. Right-click → Extract All works. For dozens of archives, 7-Zip is faster: select them all, Extract Here.

If you only need a few albums on your computer, not a backup, open the album on photos.google.com, click the three dots and Download all. You get a zip of that album. It doesn’t scale to a whole library.

Back up Google Photos to a USB drive

Same steps. Watch the format: most USB sticks come as FAT32, and any video over 4 GB won’t fit. Reformat to exFAT first. That erases the stick.

Back up Google Photos to a Mac

Same export. Double-click each zip and Archive Utility unpacks it next to the archive. To merge them, drag the contents of each Takeout folder into one.

Two Mac things:

• If the external drive came formatted for Windows (NTFS), macOS can read it but not write to it. Use exFAT.
• The .json files and “Photos from …” folders look messy in Finder. They’re supposed to.

If you’d rather have the photos inside Apple Photos, Takeout can also transfer straight to iCloud Photos. That’s a different job from a backup on a drive you own.

Back up Google Photos to a NAS (Synology, UGREEN, QNAP, ASUSTOR)

There’s no NAS app that pulls your full Google Photos library. Synology’s Cloud Sync connects to Google Drive, not Google Photos, and the two have been separate since July 2019: nothing you add to Photos shows up in Drive.

Two ways that work:

1. Export, then copy. Do the Takeout steps on a computer and copy the result to a shared folder on the NAS. Simple, and it works on any brand.
2. Takeout to Drive, Drive to the NAS. In Takeout, choose “Add to Drive” as the delivery method. The archives land in your Google Drive, and the NAS pulls them with its Drive sync (Cloud Sync on Synology). The catch: you need free Drive space as big as the export, for as long as it takes to sync. Rich DeMuro did it this way with 3 TB and 88 archives of 50 GB, and wrote that his first attempt on a UGREEN NAS gave him sync problems and duplicates.

Once the files are on the NAS, Synology Photos, QNAP’s QuMagie or Immich can index them. The .json metadata matters here too: Immich’s immich-go reads it directly from the Takeout zips.

Keep it up to date

A Takeout backup is a snapshot. The day after, it’s already missing your new photos.

Since June 2026, Takeout has scheduled exports for Google Photos: the first export is complete, then every two months you get a new export with only what was added or edited since the last one, for up to a year. Pick “Export every 2 months for 1 year” in the Frequency step. Google was still rolling it out in June, so it may not show in every account yet.

It still isn’t automatic in the sense people mean. Every two months there’s a new email, new archives to download and unzip onto the drive, and after a year you set it up again.

There’s no official way to sync Google Photos to a PC or a drive continuously. Google’s old “Backup and Sync” app could sync a Google Photos folder down from Drive, but that folder went away in July 2019. Its replacement, Google Drive for desktop, only uploads photos to Google.

Check that everything arrived

This is the part no guide covers, and it’s the question the comments under every one of them ask.

What you can check:

• Every archive is there. The archive names are numbered. A gap in the numbers is a missing archive.
• Every archive opens. An archive that won’t unzip, or that turns out to be a few KB, is a failed download. Download it again.
• Takeout’s own count. In the last archive there’s a file called archive_browser.html. Open it in a browser: it lists what Google put in the export. Mine said 104,547 files. That counts files, not photos: the .json files and the album copies are in it too, so it won’t match what Google Photos shows you.
• Spot checks. Pick a few albums and a few years you know well and compare them with photos.google.com.

What nobody can check from outside: whether everything in your account made it into the export. Google doesn’t publish a count of your library that you can compare against.

The first three checks are the ones I couldn’t keep up with across 159 archives, so Homewend does them for every file: it reads the list Google puts in the export and checks each file on your disk against it, and tells you which ones didn’t arrive. What it can’t see is the same as for you: photos Google left out of the export.

What no longer works

If you found an older guide, these are the methods it may still recommend:

• rclone. Its own documentation says: “From March 31, 2025 rclone can only download photos it uploaded.” Google removed the permissions that let apps read your whole library.
• gphotos-sync. Archived on GitHub, for the same reason.
• Synology Cloud Sync for Google Photos. It syncs Google Drive; Google Photos hasn’t appeared in Drive since 2019.
• Backup and Sync / Drive for desktop. Since 2019 they upload photos to Google; they don’t bring them down.

FAQ

Can you back up Google Photos to an external hard drive? Yes. Export with Google Takeout, then download and unzip the archives onto the drive. It’s the official method that gets the whole library.

What’s the best way to back up Google Photos to an external hard drive? Takeout with scheduled exports, if your account has them: one full export, then only the new photos every two months. Otherwise a one-off Takeout export, repeated when you want to refresh the backup.

Does Google Takeout delete my photos from Google Photos? No. It makes a copy. Nothing changes in your account.

Does the backup keep dates and locations? Yes, but many of them are in the .json file next to each photo, not inside the photo. Keep the .json files, or use a tool like Google Photos Takeout Helper to write the dates back into the files.

How long does it take? Google prepares the export in hours to days, depending on the size of the library. Then the download takes as long as your connection needs for a few hundred GB.

Can I back up Google Photos without Takeout? Officially, only in pieces: downloading albums or selections from photos.google.com. Unofficial browser tools walk the whole library one photo at a time; they work until Google changes the website.

Can I back up Google Photos to my computer automatically? Not continuously. The closest is Takeout’s scheduled exports, every two months for a year, which you still download by hand.

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