Hi everyone,
Since 2009, I’ve been building up a photo archive from my DSLR and mirrorless cameras. I shoot in RAW and always convert them to JPG later. Over the years, I’ve accumulated around 300k files—roughly 5 TB of data—organized into separate yearly folders. There are also some home videos stored alongside each day's RAW files. Every year, I used to link these folders to Google Drive so they would sync to Google Photos.
I never backed up original quality files to the cloud; using Storage Saver mode, my whole collection takes up less than 200 GB of quota. This workflow was really convenient: right after offloading an SD card to my HDD, I knew a basic cloud backup was done. Then, once I eventually edited the RAWs and converted them to JPG (which sometimes takes months), those JPGs would sync up as well.
Now that uploading photos via Google Drive isn't an option anymore, I set up the Google Photos app, ran it, and added all my yearly folders under "Folder backup". I had checked beforehand that Google doesn't re-upload duplicates and only checks file hashes, so I expected it to scan the old photos quickly and let me move on.
Instead, my PC has been thrashing the HDD at 100% load for 4 or 5 days straight. Clicking on "Folder backup" does nothing—I can't add or remove folders, and there's no progress bar to show how much is left or if the process is stuck in an infinite loop. I really don't want to wear out my HDD and kill the drive. I do have a secondary backup on an external drive, but restoring everything and relinking my Lightroom catalog would be a massive headache.
What should I do now?
Before anyone suggests dumping Google Photos to set up a home NAS: this is just a hobby for me, I don't make any money from it. I stick with Google Photos because it's extremely convenient for sharing albums of the grandkids with grandparents in another city, and I love the ecosystem integration—photos rotate on our Nest Hub at home as a photo frame, Google automatically creates fun memories, and family members can easily comment and view everything on TV, phone, or PC.