Offsite backup to Azure

Your storage account, not ours

There is no FastLoupe cloud, and this add-on does not create one. You make a storage account in your own Azure subscription, create a container in it, and paste the connection string and the container name into Library ▾ → Sync ▸ → Azure Blob Storage sync…. From then on FastLoupe uploads copies of your originals there.

The storage relationship is between you and Microsoft: the price, the region, the redundancy, the retention and the invoice. Azure bills you directly. Oddbrd hosts no storage, receives no copies and resells nothing.

The setup dialog has a Test connection button, and it turns Azure's answers into plain language instead of a status code — a key that is wrong or expired, an account or container that is not there. A destination whose details do not work stays unconfigured and is skipped, rather than failing a pass every night.

The key is stored encrypted

The connection string is held through the operating system's own protected store — DPAPI on Windows, the Keychain on macOS — and only the encrypted form is written into FastLoupe's settings file. Diagnostics and crash files deliberately exclude it, and it is never sent to us. The privacy policy says the same thing in the place that is binding.

Choose what goes

A destination holds the whole catalogue by default, and that is the right default. It is the wrong only option for a 500 GB library on a metered connection, or for a container that is only ever meant to hold the portfolio. So each destination has a scope with three parts: albums, keywords, and a minimum rating.

Within one list, any tick matches. Across the three lists, all of them must match. That rule is printed on the dialog rather than left to be guessed, because both readings are reasonable and only one of them is what people mean. Albums and keywords include whatever sits underneath them.

One deliberate exception: Sync selected now ignores the scope completely. A hand-picked selection is you overriding the setting, and answering nothing to do to send these five would be the worst possible behaviour.

Narrowing the scope deletes nothing

Photos that fall outside the scope stop being uploaded. Copies already at the destination stay exactly where they are until you review them — because I ticked a box and my backup shrank is precisely the fear this feature invites.

Library ▾ → Sync ▸ → Prune remote… is that review. It lists everything at the destination that is no longer in scope or no longer in the catalogue, with each file's album and keyword context, its size, and the total — or size not recorded, because an unknown total is not a small one. Nothing is deleted until you press the delete button, and that button is never the focused one.

It deletes at the destination only; the photographs on your computer are never touched. Each file is handled on its own, so one refusal does not stop the run and a partial prune leaves accurate state. A file whose name at the far end cannot be established for certain is listed as unprunable, with the reason — guessing there deletes a stranger's photograph.

How the uploads behave

A paid add-on, and how to try it first

Offsite backup is not part of the base purchase. It is a paid add-on, and it unlocks inside the application.

Before you decide, Library ▾ → Sync ▸ → Try free for 14 days… starts a free trial of every paid add-on. You start it deliberately, the dialog tells you the date it ends, and the trial is recorded only on this computer — nothing about it is sent anywhere.

When the trial ends, or if the add-on is locked for any other reason, uploading pauses and the app says so in as many words: the destination is still set up, nothing at either end has been deleted, and unlocking the add-on starts the uploads again. Everything else in FastLoupe carries on working exactly as before.