How to Make Sure You Never Lose Your Photographs

Most articles about backing up your files talk about hard drives and storage capacity. That is not really the subject.

The subject is the photograph of your mother in the kitchen. The video where a grandchild is learning to walk. The letters you wrote and kept. Things that cannot be bought again at any price, sitting on a device that will eventually stop working.

Because that is the uncomfortable part. Every phone and every computer fails in the end. Some last ten years and some fail on a Tuesday with no warning at all. There is no way to know which one you have.

The good news is that protecting all of it is far simpler than the articles suggest.

The rule, in plain words

Anything that exists in only one place is not safe.

That is the whole principle. Not three copies on two kinds of media with one stored elsewhere — just this: if there is only one copy, it can disappear.

Everything below is about getting a second copy of the things you would grieve over.

Start with your phone, because that is where the photographs are

For most people now, nearly every picture taken in the last ten years lives on a phone.

Both kinds of phone can copy your photographs automatically to the company’s storage as you take them. On an iPhone this is iCloud. On an Android phone it is Google Photos. Once it is switched on, it runs by itself overnight while the phone charges, and you never think about it again. Since this account now holds years of photos, it is worth having the phone-code step turned on for it too.

Two things to know.

The free amount of storage is small, and most people eventually fill it. When that happens the phone starts showing a message, the backup quietly stops, and people ignore the message for months. It costs a couple of dollars a month to have enough room. That is one of the best few dollars you will ever spend.

And it is worth actually checking that it is working, rather than assuming. Ask a family member to look at the settings with you and confirm the date of the last backup. People discover their backups stopped a year ago at precisely the worst moment.

Then the computer

If you keep files or scanned photographs on a computer, buy an external drive. They are inexpensive now and they plug into a socket on the side.

Both kinds of computer have backup software already built in and included — Time Machine on a Mac, File History on Windows. You plug the drive in, switch the feature on once, and leave the drive connected. It copies quietly in the background from then on.

This is a genuinely good job for a family member who wants to help but does not know what to offer. It takes twenty minutes and it is the kind of thing they will be glad they did.

The copy that is not in your house

A fire, a flood, or a burglary takes the computer and the drive sitting next to it in the same moment.

This is why the phone-to-cloud backup above matters so much: it is automatically somewhere else. If you also keep an external drive, consider a second one that lives at a son or daughter’s house, swapped occasionally.

That is more effort than most households will sustain, and that is fine. If you do one thing, do the automatic phone backup.

The step people forget: print the ones that matter

This is not technical advice, but it may be the most valuable line here.

Choose thirty or forty photographs that genuinely matter — the ones you would want your family to have — and have them printed. Put them in an album, and write on the back of each one who is in it and roughly when.

Printed photographs survive things that no technology survives. They do not need a password, an account, or a working device. And the names on the back will matter enormously to somebody in twenty years who is looking at a face they do not recognise.

Every family has a box of unlabelled photographs of strangers who were relatives. Do not leave one.

Check it once a year

Backups fail silently. That is their worst quality.

So once a year — pick a date you will remember, a birthday works — do one small test. Open the backup and see whether you can find a photograph from last month. That is all. Five minutes, once a year, and you will never be surprised.

If you have already lost something

Do not immediately buy new software or call a number that appears in a search result promising recovery. That corner of the internet is full of people who will take your money and deliver nothing — the panic of losing your photos is exactly the kind of feeling scammers count on.

Stop using the device and ask a family member first. Photographs are often still recoverable from the phone company’s storage, from an old computer, or from messages you sent to relatives years ago. Quite a lot gets recovered simply by asking around the family for what they were sent at the time.

The short version

Switch on the automatic backup on your phone, and pay the small amount for enough storage.

Ask a family member to set up an external drive for the computer, once.

Print the forty photographs that matter and write on the back of them.

That is a real, complete answer, and it takes one afternoon. The alternative is trusting that a device that will certainly fail is going to fail after you have got around to it.