You already have a private gallery, it’s called your library.
You can back it up the exact same way you (hopefully) back up your saves, since you should never reply solely on an outside entity to preserve your data. I keep 3 copies of my sims files when I backup: one elsewhere on my computer, one on a portable storage device and one in a Google drive reserved solely for this purpose. If there’s a system failure in one backup location, it’s not going to affect the others.
Just save the tray folder along with your saves folder and you can easily restore it if your computer dies or something.
That said, I would not mind the option of being able to mark certain pieces private or friends only so I could have a friend preview something before it goes out publicly on the gallery, but it should not be just a way of getting out of doing personal backups.
What @Slytherclaw72 said. Unfortunately, the gallery is intended as a sharing tool rather than a backup tool. I doubt people are even reading your description, as the assumption is that people put things on the gallery to download.
I would recommend copying your saves and tray folders to a service like Dropbox or OneDrive. If you do this nightly it can serve as a backup if you lose your hard drive.
As for sharing with your boyfriend: The names of the files are, sadly, very cryptic but perhaps you could sort by date and put the files timestamped to what you just finished in a folder you share with your boyfriend, and they can import them into their game from there.
I hope that helps.
The people are reading my descriptions. When i write them aways have someone that writes something like "idc and i'll download anyway", people don't have the minimum respect to anything. And about if the gallery is intended as a sharing tool rather than a backup tool, ok, but if they just put a "do you want your creation to be private or public?" (a button/option) they can also make this a sharing tool, how? letting the user choose if they want to share with only friends, with everyone, by link or something like that, it would be way more organized and it wouldn't exist the stolen/disrespect problem that exists when random people that you don't know download a more personal creation that you ask them to not to download and they disrespect anyway.
So, you told @kaze_____90 that it wouldn't cost much for a big company for them to create a backup service for your library. I work for a non-gaming software company, so let's take a look.
Bearing in mind that garbage in, garbage out, I'll guestimate. I'm not a builder but I do download things off the gallery and occasionally build, so I'll use the size of my tray folder as an average. LilSimsie, James Turner, and Deligracy would use more and lots of users would use less and I don't have the information to do better. My tray folder is 101 MB and lots of people reading this might be laughing maniacally but again, I don't have an average.
According to this article, the Sims for has 33 million players. With my crummy average, that's 3,333,000,000 MB, or 3,254,882.8125 GB.
They would probably use existing cloud storage rather than creating a data farm just to hold user backups. Cloud storage is priced by the GB. I'm assuming you want the fast storage rather than the slow storage, so let's look at that. For cloud provider #1 (last time I mentioned names my post was edited as being "commercial") that's $74,862 a month. For cloud provider #2, that's $488,000 a month, wow. Also that provider looks at read/write operations as part of their pricing and based on this info from EA which shows 11.3 million gallery uploads (or 941,666 per month average) and 201 million gallery downloads (or 16,750,000), more than their standard 100,000 write operations per month. Luckily that only adds a measley $16.56, but it does speak to not getting slower storage. Let's not waste our time on slow storage, shall we?
This doesn't include developer time to probably rewrite the gallery from the ground up to add security. This would distract them from adding features to the base game and creating DLC. Again, I have no visibility into this, but just for kicks and based on an article I googled saying 7 is the perfect team size (garbage in, garbage out) and this Glassdoor page saying that Maxis developers make $108,000-117,000 a year (low confidence, garbage in garbage out) that comes to $757,519 a year, or $63,126 a month.
So low end estimate: $63,126 + $74,862 = $137,988 a month. To start. Eventually they wouldn't need as many developers, but this also doesn't account for gallery usage over time. Would people build more if they knew Maxis was backing up their builds for them?
(Building a data farm would be an even larger proposition, as they would have to purchase a site to house all the storage and hardware for all the storage and people to repair broken hardware and... there's a reason people are using cloud services.)
So in short: You can expect Maxis to spend $137,988 a month to back up your builds for you, or you could back up your PC. There are a wide variety of backup providers, some of which back up your entire documents folder to the cloud, some of which create exact snapshots of your hard drive so you can restore if your hard drive fails (my personal favorite), and I'm sure someone will edit my post as being "commercial" if I link one (I'm not bitter!), but... back up your PC.
No, really. Back up your PC. Not for the Sims, but for everything on your hard drive. Back up your computer.
As i said in another reply, "Your Library" is not a private gallery, it's not linked to the internet or to the EA account, i recommend reading my others replys so that i don't need to write all that again.
