How long does it take to download 2TB of iCloud Photos? My Hard drive broke. After buying a new one, I had to download my iCloud Photo Library from Apple (to have a local copy of all my Photos). To see the progress, I wrote a small Shell script that monitored the file size and regularly wrote it into a csv. To Launch this shell script, I nested it in an Automator App. To not run this App manually, I wrote a small menu bar app, AutoRun, that would open my Automator App every hour. This is the result:
It took about 40 days to download my photos. I have a Gigabit Fibre optical connection. If I had a direct connection to Apple, it could have taken 4,5 hours.