Hard drives fail. Phones get dropped in the bath. Laptops get stolen. None of that is a catastrophe if the photos exist somewhere else. All of it is a catastrophe if they do not.
The rule worth remembering: 3–2–1
Professionals use a simple formula, and it works just as well at home:
- 3 copies of anything you care about
- on 2 different types of storage
- with 1 of them somewhere else entirely
In practice, for most families: the photos on your phone, an automatic cloud backup, and an external hard drive kept in a drawer. That is three copies, two types, one off-site-ish. It is not complicated, and it is enough.
The uncomfortable bit about cloud photo services
iCloud Photos and Google Photos are sync services, and sync is not backup. If you delete a photo on your phone, it deletes from the cloud too. If your account is compromised, or you accidentally clear an album, the change propagates everywhere within seconds. That is exactly what sync is designed to do.
Sync protects you brilliantly from a lost phone. It protects you not at all from your own mistake. So: use it, but do not let it be your only copy.
Setting it up, once
On an iPhone
Settings → your name → iCloud → Photos → turn on. The free 5GB will not be enough for a real photo library; the paid tiers are inexpensive. Then, separately, plug the phone into a computer occasionally and copy the photos off. That is your second copy.
On Android
Google Photos → profile picture → Photos settings → Backup → turn on. Same caveats.
The external drive
Buy a USB drive. Copy your photos folder onto it. Do it once a quarter and put a reminder in your calendar. Unglamorous, but it is the copy that saves you when everything else has gone wrong.
What about the photos on a laptop that has already died?
Do not panic and do not keep switching it on and off. In most cases the drive is fine and only the machine around it has failed — and we can recover the data. Our workshop handles everything up to micro-soldering and component-level fault finding, so kit does not have to be sent away to a third party.
Bring it to us. The sooner it stops being powered on, the better the odds.
If it is a business, not a shoebox of photos
The same principles, with much higher stakes — see cloud backup and disaster recovery.
Photos stuck on a laptop that will not start?
Do not keep switching it on. Bring it to our workshop in Radstock — in most cases the drive is fine and the data is recoverable.
Apollo Technology, 1–2 Ludlow Court, Frome Road, Radstock, BA3 3FX. Open weekdays 8.30am–5pm. Call 01761 347198.