Watermelon Backup: Backup iPhone Photos to Your Storage

I’m the developer of Watermelon Backup.

iPhone Photos take up most of the storage for me. I do have an iCloud plan, but after a few heart-stopping moments, I decided not to enable iCloud Photos and to manage my photos myself.

I had a Synology DS216play for years, and setting it up was not too difficult for me. But over time, the poor hardware became more and more slower.

Last 2 years, I bought a new device and started using unRAID to store all my photos and videos, and use a more powerful Mac mini to drive Immich and manage unRAID photo folder via External Library feature. Immich mobile is great, but it cannot backup photos directly to unRAID.

So I needed an app that could backup the photos from my iPhone while keeping the original files and metadata, without reducing image quality or removing EXIF data. Ideally, it should support background backups, not be tied to a specific brand or cloud service, perform well, and preferably be open source.

Eventually, I realized I probably needed to build the app myself. That’s how Watermelon Backup started.

Watermelon Backup tries to offer all of these things together:

The code is open source, which I hope can reduce some concerns about the privacy of your photos and videos.
It supports multiple storage nodes. A node can be an external drive, SMB share, WebDAV server, S3-compatible bucket, or SFTP server.
Carefully design and implement in code, not a toy project.
No Subscriptions.

Wish you like my product and waiting for your reply.

Watermelon Backup tries to offer all of these things together:

The code is open source, which I hope can reduce some concerns about the privacy of your photos and videos.
It supports multiple storage nodes. A node can be an external drive, SMB share, WebDAV server, S3-compatible bucket, or SFTP server.
Carefully design and implement in code, not a toy project.
No Subscriptions.

Wish you like my product and waiting for your reply.