How to back up iCloud to Immich (the missing half)
If you have moved your photos to Immich, or you are about to, there are two gaps nobody warns you about: Immich's iOS app cannot reliably pull new photos in the background, and Immich itself tells you not to trust it as your only copy. Here is how to close both.
Immich is a superb self-hosted photo library, but on iPhone iOS throttles its background upload, and its own docs say it is not a backup. The clean fix is to mirror from iCloud itself, which already has everything, into Immich, continuously.
The two gaps in a self-hosted Immich setup
Gap 1: iOS won't let the app keep up
Immich's single biggest iPhone frustration is background sync. iOS aggressively limits what third-party apps do in the background, so new photos sit on your phone until you remember to open the Immich app. Your archive is always a little behind reality, and the one time you actually needed it current, it was not.
Gap 2: Immich tells you not to rely on it alone
Immich's own documentation is refreshingly honest about this: it is under heavy active development and you should not use it as the only place your photos and videos live.
In effect, Immich's docs warn users not to treat it as their sole backup. It is a library and a viewer, and a very good one, but it is not a backup strategy by itself.See the warning in the Immich documentation.
That honesty is a feature, not a bug. It just means you still need a second, independent copy behind Immich.
The clean fix: mirror from iCloud, not the phone
The trick is to stop relying on the phone app and mirror from iCloud itself. iCloud already captures every photo continuously, at the operating-system level, the moment you take it. If you mirror from iCloud into Immich, you inherit that completeness: nothing waits for an app to wake up.
This is exactly the gap micloud fills. It runs on a Mac signed into your iCloud and streams your library into your own Immich, continuously, one-way, encrypted with a key only you hold. Immich's biggest weakness, background sync, is micloud's default.
How the pieces fit
- iCloud captures your photos continuously.
- micloud is the pipe that mirrors iCloud into your storage, in real time.
- Immich is your own beautiful, searchable photo library, kept complete and current.
- Nextcloud (optional) does the same for your files.
The result is a whole-account, always-current, sovereign copy. Immich becomes the front end to a library that is genuinely yours and genuinely complete.
What about files, not just photos?
micloud is not photos-only. It mirrors your whole iCloud, files, calendars, contacts, notes, bookmarks and more, into open, self-hostable homes, with photos going to Immich and files to Nextcloud. It is the managed, done-for-you option for the people the self-hosting community keeps rescuing.
Fill your Immich from iCloud, automatically
micloud mirrors your entire iCloud into your own Immich and Nextcloud, in real time, one-way, encrypted to your key. Run it yourself for free, or have us do it for you.
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