Tutorials & How-Tos
Backup Workflows: Never Lose a Photo Again
The backup-photos and files workflows from ClawFlows automate what you keep forgetting to do. Here's how to set them up and run them on a schedule.
The backup-photos and files workflows from ClawFlows automate what you keep forgetting to do. Here's how to set them up and run them on a schedule.
There are two kinds of people: those who back up their photos, and those who are about to learn a painful lesson. The gap between them isn't knowledge or discipline — it's friction. Manual backups require remembering, planning, and doing. The human brain is bad at all three when the reward is invisible.
ClawFlows solves this the right way: automation that runs itself. The backup-photos workflow and its cousins in the Files & Backup category take the friction out of the problem and make backups something that just happens in the background.
Most people's backup situation is one of:
The backup-photos workflow gets you most of the way to category 5 without the setup overhead.
When you invoke backup-photos, the workflow:
The first run can take a while (it's copying everything). Subsequent runs are incremental and usually finish in minutes.
Under the hood, backup-photos uses rsync (or a similar tool) for the copy. What makes the workflow different is everything around the copy — the destination checks, the verification, the reporting, the scheduling integration. Pure rsync is a tool. backup-photos is a routine.
Out of the box:
You can also configure multiple destinations for a proper 3-2-1 backup: one local, one network, one cloud. The workflow handles all three in sequence or parallel.
The whole point is that you don't run it manually. Set it up to run on a schedule and forget about it.
macOS: Use launchd to trigger the workflow nightly. Linux: Use cron or a systemd timer. Windows: Use Task Scheduler.
Configuration examples live in the nikilster/clawflows README. The workflow runs silently when everything works and only alerts you when something fails.
backup-photos is the flagship, but the Files & Backup category has more.
Moves projects you haven't touched in X months to cold storage. Frees up fast SSD space and gives you peace of mind that the project isn't gone — just archived. I run this quarterly.
Not strictly a backup, but related. Sorts files from your Downloads folder into categories (documents, images, installers, archives) and trashes anything older than a configurable age. The combination of this + backup-photos is remarkably effective at keeping a Mac clean.
Copies your shell, editor, and app configuration files to a Git repo or backup destination. Essential if you've ever set up a new machine and spent three days getting your dotfiles back.
For Obsidian, Logseq, or similar plain-text note systems. Copies your vault to a backup destination with verification. If your notes are your second brain, this is a critical workflow.
Here's the minimal sequence to get backup-photos running:
backup-photos once, manually, to verify it worksTotal time: about 15 minutes. Ongoing effort: zero.
Copying files is easy. Verifying they copied correctly is harder. Bit rot, partial writes, disk errors — silent corruption happens more often than people realize.
backup-photos verifies by hashing source and destination after the copy. If there's a mismatch, the workflow flags it and retries the affected files. This is the difference between "I have a backup" and "I have a backup I can actually restore from."
Backups and security go together. After you set up backup-photos, run the workflows in Security Audit Workflows for Solo Devs to make sure the rest of your digital footprint is healthy. Good hygiene includes both "I have copies" and "nothing malicious has compromised the originals."
The workflow aborts with a clear error, doesn't partially copy. You clear space and re-run.
Yes, with configuration. Apple Photos libraries have a specific structure the workflow can read. For Lightroom, you point it at the catalog directory and the photo storage location.
Yes. If your destination supports encryption (S3 with SSE, Backblaze B2 encryption, or an encrypted disk image locally), the workflow respects it. For cloud destinations, encryption at rest is standard.
For a 200GB photo library, incremental runs typically complete in under a minute if nothing has changed, and a few minutes if you imported a day of new photos. The speed depends more on your destination than the workflow.
It's a complement. Time Machine is great for full-system backups, but it doesn't verify and doesn't handle cloud destinations well. Run both — Time Machine for the OS, backup-photos for your irreplaceable media.
The backup you don't run is worthless. backup-photos is the cheapest way to make sure you're running one — install, configure, schedule, done. Your future self (and your photos) will thank you.
Explore all 113 workflows at aiskill.market/workflows or submit your own.
Comprehensive Claude Code enhancement plugin with 27.9K+ GitHub stars. Includes TDD, systematic debugging, brainstorming, and plan-driven development workflows.
Massive collection of 148+ commands and 54 specialized agents for Claude Code. Covers development workflows, code review, testing, deployment, and team collaboration.
Workflow design specialist who maps complete workflow trees for every system, user journey, and agent interaction — covering happy paths, all branch conditions, failure modes, recovery paths, handoff
Weekly date night ideas based on your budget, mood, and what's nearby